Math, Science, and the Humanities

Mark Slouka's recent article in Harper's Magazine, "Dehumanized: When math and science rule the school," poses several important questions: "What do we teach, and why?... What do our kids need to know today?" According to Slouka, "What is taught, at any given time, in any culture, is an expression of what that culture considers important... In our time, orthodoxy is economic." He continues, "Education in America today is almost exclusively about the GDP. It's about investing in our human capital... It's about ensuring the the United States does not fall from its privileged perch in the global economy." Further in the article, he asks another probing question: "Why is every Crisis in American Education cast as an economic threat and never a civic one?" He concludes that we have no "language" for it, no "civic indicators" of political vulnerability. Yet what could be more politically equivalent to runaway inflation or soaring unemployment than the fact that 2/3 of college graduates cannot read a text and draw rational inferences from it!

Slouka's argument contends that American education has a long-standing love affair with math and science - "so often are they spoken of in the same breath, they've begun to feel singular" - at the expense of the humanities. Why? Because "mathandscience" is everything we want: a solid return on capital investment, a proven route to success. The evidence is surely there: The American Competitiveness Initiative calls for $50 billion in research grants to math and science over the next 10 years; the federal government will pay the cost of finding 30,000 new math and science teachers; and the New York City Department of Education announced $15,000 in incentives to lure teachers in math and science to the city's schools.

I'm a born and bread "mathandscience" teacher, but I see his point, and it troubles me. Marcus Eure, an English teacher at Brewster High School in New York, contends, "we want our students to take into their interactions with others, into their readings, into their private thoughts, depth of experience and a willingness to be wrong. Only a study of the humanities provides that." He's not alone in his thinking. Harvard president and historian Drew Faust, Mellon Foundation president Don Randel, and former University of Chicago dean Danielle Allen, all fight for more humanities education - to "dislocate the complacent mind" - to teach students to challenge not only what they are being told, but how they are being told. At the end of the day, Eure reasons, "every aspect of life... hinges in some way on the ability to understand and empathize with others, to challenge one's beliefs, to strive for reason and clarity."

High school, and college for sure, should not have to be about choosing between "mathandscience" and the humanities. They have lived side by side for thousands of years, and will continue to. Critical thinking, problem solving, analytical reasoning - these are all part of the Scientific Method, yes - but they can also be applied to the humanities, to thinking about our own humanity. We can make hypotheses, design experiments, gather data, and form conclusions about the age of the Earth; no doubt we can get thousands of dollars to do so. But that grant money - the scholarship, fellowship, or college degree - won't translate into anything if you can't articulate and defend your arguments, if you can't dislocate your complacent mind.