HS LIBERAL ARTS

 
        I want to add two further observations about the liberal arts in our high schools, one bad, one good. First, the bad. I know the degree to which historicism has taken over so much of our collegiate academic analysis. Historicism is part of the reason why much of what goes on in college looks like a defense of cultural relativism. But a kind of pop-historicism has set up shop in our high schools, and while it looks like part of a liberal education, it actually is the antithesis of it. 

        The code phrase is “looking at things in their historical context.” I know that many of you have used these words, perhaps thinking this is what good teaching and learning does. It certainly sounds benign. And I can imagine a level on which it is benign. If our students read, say, Dante, by all means they should try to understand him as he understood himself and not make him what we would like him to be. Nor does it hurt to know that he lived in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, that he was seriously involved in politics, and that he had a spectacular command of theology, biblical interpretation, and church history. Yet even all this and much of the rest of what we know about him we will learn from reading what he wrote, not reading all we can find in Wikipedia about medieval Florence. (Indeed, much of what we know about his “time and place” we will learn from him rather than him from his time and place.) But, still, what's the problem? 

        I worry that by “contextualizing” everything, we don’t explain things; we explain them away. By contextualizing them, we immediately make them “other.” With this, we set up a barrier to learning from the men, women, and events of the past since we do not inhabit their universe. If what Dante wrote and did and thought, he wrote, did, and thought because he was a late-medieval Florentine—if we can only truly understand him by understanding how he was a product of, or reflected, his “time and place”—then he can teach us very little, since we do not inhabit his world. Thus, the writers and thinkers of the past become not teachers but curios.

John Agresto, The Death of Learning (223-224). Encounter Books. Kindle Edition.