MAD HATTER PAGE 26

 

 

      
    

  

DOUGLAS COLLEGE
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thanks to the invention of the blue silicon chip and the consequent multiplication
of computers, there is a rush amongst the young into computer programming. But even
as we talk who knows whether someone is not inventing the green chip which in five
years’ time will make both blue chips and their operators as outdated as the abacus?
Human technology designed to control the future has curiously enough made the future
less secure than ever.

In such a situation the person who has learned how to learn has the advantage.
He/she may not know what a job demands, but they can find out in a hurry. Going
back to the commercial importance of Latin grammar, what looks at first sight like
nonsense turns out. on further investigation to be common sense, for someone who has
mastered the intricacies of Latin syntax can deal with almost any complexity in
business systems. There is a myth abroad that to know anything you have to have a
course in it. But given an adequate library, two or three days, and the odd bit of
help a humanities graduate of any standing should be able to figure out most matters
of importance. In a recent study conducted in Bell Telephone in the United States,
employees were evaluated in terms of their suitability for promotion to middle
Management positions. Amongst university graduates, 46% of the humanities graduates
were suitable as compared to 31% of business school graduates and only 26% of the
engineers.

The real danger to the employment of their graduates comes when universities fail
to teach the humanities well. When rigorous and unpleasant standards are relaxed
by providing easy courses where students are passed on the basis of their being alive -
it is sometimes difficult to decide this in the absence of brain activity, where
thanks to multiple choice exams history students believe that the cause of the second
World War is either (c) or all of the above, where college graduates are unable to
write a coherent paragraph, then students are indeed ill-prepared for the labour
market. Like bad money driving out good money, so bad degrees discredit good ones.
But the case rests; a good humanities degree is not a bad preparation for a career.
However, the case for the humanities is more important than the question of
employment important though that may be. The task of the Humanities is to struggle
against our culture's reduction of education to skill and technique, to show that
human life is more than problem solving, to face the unwilling with Socrates’ dictum
that the unexamined life is not worth living. In other words, the purpose of the
humanities is to introduce students to something of what has been said by great
figures in the past in the pursuit of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. The danger that
faces our world is that too many people know how to do things without an awareness
of why they should or should not be done. An old Alsation professor of mine who had
suffered at the hands of the Nazis once remarked to us, "Nous vivons dans l'age du
barbare savant" and indeed the technically competent barbarian may be the end of all
of us. Jf this sounds like the ramblings of an academic caught in his own rhetoric,
perhaps one should remember the engineers and doctors who helped out in gassing
millions during Hitler's regime.

Now there is no certainty that the systematic study of Plato, Aristotle, The

Bible, Thomas Aquinas, Locke et al would necessarily have a beneficial effect on all
students; we live in a world resistant to attempts to reduce it to absolute

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