How Do We Make The Humanities Relevant?

Okay, you've heard  the cliché that internet is revolutionary and how everyone's life has changed, blah blah.

The internet is a Catch 22.  Information can easy disseminate, but its  horrendously huge size overloads the typical surfer.  Sometimes I read webpage after webpage, only to realize I don't remember anything.

So far the humanities was built from mostly rich or high status people.  Most academic work require similar professionals who painstakingly evaluate the thoughts another human being.

People arguing against the humanities say the results of this process are irrelevant to the present.  It's old, snobby, and too high-brow for the average person.  Who has time to go the library to borrow paper when you can download?  Humanities journals cost thousands of dollars to subscribe annually, Netflix is only $8 dollars a month.

Those in history who had access to this material were either filthy rich, or cloistered within a scholarly community.

People are more willing to fund STEM related degrees because STEM can demonstrate it's relevance to society.  A person with a STEM degree can quantify and solve society's utilitarian problems.

But modern culture is insufficient to satisfy the present moral needs of the individual.  It can't express death because its still progressing forward.  The general public wants a predictable sitcom.  Harry Potter needs children.

Unlike a blogpost or a movie, the humanities wants to express human beings before they disappear.  I don't literally mean an act of death, but all the humanities subjects recognize that the human must die.  Documenting material accounts for their existence.

Sadly modern academia fortresses the wealth of the humanities away from the general public.   Physical libraries only hold books that it assumes a certain number will read.  Public education only wants to follow standardized tests and government curricula, students don't have time to learn.

How Do We Make The Humanities Relevant?

I don't think a large, accessible, open source institution exists yet, but the internet might be the start to an answer.

Institutions that traditionally hold knowledge are slowly eroding in legitimacy. Resources like the links on UnCollege are building communities that study without professional instruction.  Of course, internet self-study isn't the silver bullet.  It can't provide the instant reaction of another human being.

I dream that 10-20 years from now traditional public education as we know it will disappear. We'll have so much Youtube videos that any person interested in any subject can watch a lecture.  We would completely erase the neurotic need to subdivide students by age, and again by subject, and then again by grades.  Active students create their own projects, choose their own mentors/communities, work with their own style.  Because isn't that what happens when they leave school anyways?

I end by repeating this open ended question:

How Do We Make The Humanities Relevant?
Comment to conversate!

"Educational"

"I don't want to do that, it's too educational."

The English languages uses the word "educational" as an adjective, describing something that has a quality related to education.  But how did it have a derogatory connotation?

"Learning" is more innate.  An individual arrives at a realization.  "Education" appropriates knowledge from  institution or external entity.  The former is active, while the latter is passive.

I've recently been reading this excellent blog about homeschooling by Penelope Trunk.  Here are a few brief points about her views on educating kids:

1.  Kids can more efficiently teach themselves how to learn if you give them room to be self-motivated.

2. Kids in public schools are taught to passively regurgitate information for a standardized test, not solve complex problems in society.

3.  The structure of the public school system is too rigid to allow for kids to learn for themselves.

4.  The subjects taught in public school education are mostly useless to the real world.

5.  The social environment in public schools is about competing with young immature children, while the working world requires collaboration with adults.

I had to unlearn habits that were enforced from public education.  Education was something you did at school, completely separate from our personal lives.  Public education discourages you from allowing your self-motivation to fully explore the complexity of learning.  You can only learn in a given amount of time and test from an arbitrary outline.

Maybe that's why people don't spend time reading.  It's not that we lack the ability, but somehow we think learning takes place in a finite amount of time.  After graduating, the time to educate ourselves is "gone."  All we only look forward to work, retirement, then death.

I'm still wondering after leaving college whether I truly "educated" myself.  Outside the context of grades and a career, can we still "educate" ourselves?

Sometimes I wonder why I'm still studying Chinese after leaving college.  Then I remember this quote from Mencius.

學問之道無他, 求其放心而已矣

The way to learning requires nothing else, just search for what you let go of in your heart.

                                                     ---孟子  Mencius