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Let’s stop calling them “soft skills” — and call them “real skills” instead

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Let’s stop calling them “soft skills” — and call them “real skills” instead

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Let’s stop calling them “soft skills” — and call them “real skills” instead

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What separates thriving organizations from struggling ones? Author and thinker Seth Godin explains that it’s all about soft skills.

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Evaluating Evidence: Primary Materials and the Lifelong Value of the Humanities (A Conversation with Professor Joanne B. Freeman) | Readex

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Evaluating Evidence: Primary Materials and the Lifelong Value of the Humanities (A Conversation with Professor Joanne B. Freeman) | Readex

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Joanne B. Freeman, Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University, is a leading expert on early American politics and culture. In this video, the newest in our Scholars Speak series, Freeman describes the essential role that primary source materials have played in her own research. She also discusses the lasting benefits of studying the humanities.

The author of the award-winning Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic and The Essential Hamilton, Freeman is particularly well known for her expertise in dirty, nasty politics. Her most recent book, The Field of Blood: Congressional Violence and the Road to Civil War was a New York Times notable book of 2018, one of Smithsonian's top ten history books of 2018, and a finalist for the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize. A co-host of the popular American history podcast BackStory, her online course, "The American Revolution," has been viewed in homes and classrooms around the world.

For more information about Readex newspaper databases, please contact Readex Marketing.

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Evaluating Evidence: Primary Materials and the Lifelong Value of the Humanities (A Conversation with Professor Joanne B. Freeman)

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Joanne B. Freeman, Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University, is a leading expert on early American politics and culture. In this video, the newest in our Scholars Speak series, Freeman describes the essential role that primary source materials have played in her own research.

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Baltimore Fishbowl » Baltimore Police Training Now Includes History Lessons

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Baltimore Fishbowl » Baltimore Police Training Now Includes History Lessons

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In response to the unrest following the death of Freddie Gray, the Baltimore Police Department developed the "History of Baltimore Speaker Series," which held its first session on Tuesday.

The inaugural lecture, entitled "How did we get here?" explained Baltimore's different neighborhoods as the products of immigration trends, religious affiliations, and racist segregation laws, according to the Baltimore Sun 's Kevin Rector.

And it wasn't just trainees in attendance. Current officers and commanders were there as well. Rector reported that lecturer Elizabeth Nix was pleased how seriously Commissioner Kevin Davis took the presentation.

Hopefully this is just the beginning of a move toward a better police-community relationship.

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Baltimore Police Training Now Includes History Lessons

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In response to the unrest following the death of Freddie Gray, the Baltimore Police Department developed the "History of Baltimore Speaker Series," which held its first session on Tuesday. The inaugural lecture, entitled "How did we get here?" explained Baltimore's different neighborhoods as the products of immigration trends, religious affiliations, and racist segregation laws, according to the Baltimore Sun 's Kevin Rector.

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Finding hope in the humanities in these tumultuous times | University Affairs

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Finding hope in the humanities in these tumultuous times | University Affairs

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"We do not pretend that there is a singular answer or indivisible truth. Instead, we must embrace complexity."

Academics and public intellectuals have been launching high-level, philosophical defenses of the liberal arts for years, with seemingly little positive impact on public opinion. However, the political turmoil currently playing out on the international stage has been an unlikely boon for the humanities because it has drawn our attention - in the starkest terms possible - to the importance of close reading, critical thinking and ethical reasoning.

As a professor of medieval and renaissance literature, one of my biggest challenges is to help students find an access point into texts that are, at first glance, strange and unfamiliar. Since the 2016 U.S. election, however, I've noticed that students are increasingly searching for ways to understand the complex and disorienting world around them, and that the humanities in general - and literature in particular - offer an incredibly useful set of tools for gaining fresh insight into our new global reality.

When I teach medieval literature, we usually read Geoffrey Chaucer's The House of Fame, a 14th-century dream vision. In this dense allegorical poem, the narrator recounts how he falls asleep and dreams that he is transported to the House of Fame, where he watches petitioners ask the goddess Fame for everlasting renown.

In Chaucer's account, who becomes famous and why are completely arbitrary: those who do good works can be shamed while those who do evil deeds can gain renown, and those who do good but do not seek glory are exalted. Fame operates without pattern and without justification, a concept that we, in our (post) reality TV context, are uniquely situated to appreciate. When we discuss how fame operates in our contemporary cultural milieu, students are struck by the capricious nature of fame (and infamy) in the context of what goes viral or who breaks the internet. The concept remains the same even as the mode of dissemination changes.

This poem is even more relevant to our current political climate when Chaucer discusses the House of Rumour. This house is built out of twigs and sticks, and is easy to enter and leave. Sometimes a truth and a lie attempt simultaneously to exit but they get stuck in the same passageway; after arguing over which one has precedence, they mix together so that they can fit through the aperture, and truth and falsehood become sworn brother. They are then rerouted to Fame, who arbitrarily assigns each tiding a particular status for a particular duration, which is then trumpeted to the world.

Chaucer's poem has uncanny resonance in the light of our own political reality of "alternative facts" and "truthiness," of an American president who tweets about "fake news," and of an administration openly hostile to freedom of the press. Long before the current cast of characters strutting and fretting their hour upon this stage, Chaucer draws attention to the concept of truth as messy and complex and elusive, and calls upon us to think carefully and in nuanced ways about how we can possibly know things about the world around us.

Students inevitably express their despair that we are merely repeating the same tropes and struggling with the same problems Chaucer articulated 650 years earlier. If we haven't figured out the problem by now, they exclaim, aren't we doomed to repeat the same mistakes in perpetuity? However, what looks like despair from one perspective can be a source of hope from another vantage point.

In the humanities, we do not pretend that there is a singular answer or indivisible truth. Instead, we must embrace complexity - and all the discomfort and disorientation that this approach entails - in an attempt to move towards a truth that is more inclusive, more nuanced, and richer for the struggle. There are answers and truths, but they are found in the dynamic interplay between context and evidence and theory. Since these conditions are always changing, the answers must also always evolve.

Hillary Clinton, in a commencement address at Wellesley College in 1992, said: "Each new generation takes us into new territory. But while change is certain, progress is not. Change is a law of nature; progress is the challenge for both a life and society."

The tipping point between despair and hope lies in the ability to acknowledge, and even celebrate, that knowledge is messy. If we can teach our students to be comfortable with the difficulty of knowing - and become comfortable with it ourselves as scholars and teachers - then we can move forward with hope and a renewed commitment to close reading, critical thinking and ethical reasoning.

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Finding hope in the humanities in these tumultuous times | University Affairs

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"We do not pretend that there is a singular answer or indivisible truth. Instead, we must embrace complexity." Academics and public intellectuals have been launching high-level, philosophical defenses of the liberal arts for years, with seemingly little positive impact on public opinion.

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What Is College Good For? (Hint: More Than Just a Job) - The Chronicle of Higher Education

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What Is College Good For? (Hint: More Than Just a Job) - The Chronicle of Higher Education

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Carole Henaff for The Chronicle

Neither of my parents went to college. My father dropped out of high school in 1944 to join the Navy, and my mother took a job as a riveter following her graduation in 1949. They married, built a home, and raised two children. When my father passed away last December, he was mourned as a dedicated father, a caring husband, a talented machinist, and a decorated World War II veteran. At 87, my mother continues to live independently, volunteering 20-hours a week at a local medical center where she outpaces even the candy-stripers.

They have lived rich lives, and they did it without the benefit of higher education. Which puts me, a college administrator and education scholar, in a difficult position when I am confronted by the question: "What, exactly, is college good for?"

Colleges like the one where I work are fine with students being uncertain about their plans.

My mother had a very precise answer: "You need to go to college so that you can work with your head instead of your hands." And, for the most part, she had it right. Although it bothers me that I don't know how to use half of the tools in my parents' toolboxes, my professional life is intellectually satisfying and financially rewarding. My parents may have known little about the way college worked, but they certainly understood higher education's occupational advantages.

Even today, however, I am surprised by the assuredness of my mother's response. College was, for my parents, a mostly utilitarian enterprise. Never once did they suggest that enrolling would make me a better person or more conscientious or a harder worker. Why would they? They were all of these things, in abundance. Almost as an afterthought, my mother would tell my brother and me that college was where we would learn to be independent and live away from home, but even I knew you didn't need college for that.

Admiring my father's military service and heeding my mother's advice, I enrolled at a college that promised a job following graduation: the United States Air Force Academy. I had no business being there. I was academically unprepared, too young (I didn't turn 18 until well after basic training), and neither mature nor determined enough to remain. Still, the education was free (another reason I applied) and I wanted to serve my country. I stuck it out for two years.

When I withdrew, my parents were supportive but anxious. I had thrown away a no-cost higher education along with guaranteed employment. "What are you going to do?" they asked. At the time, I assumed they wanted to know where I intended to finish college. Only later did I understand that they were asking where I was planning to work.

I returned to college by transferring to George Washington University, where I enrolled in the secondary-school teacher-education program. The reason was pragmatic: to obtain my teaching credential - and have job prospects - following graduation. I remained a high-school teacher for a decade before pursuing a doctoral degree.

These experiences prompted me, several years ago, to begin writing a history of American higher education. The questions driving the project were deeply personal. If colleges exist primarily for occupational purposes, as my mother asserted, why do so many institutions claim otherwise? Was my parents' understanding of college simply wrong? Is higher education's professional orientation a relatively recent phenomenon? If, over time, occupational advancement wasn't the primary objective, what was?

At least part of the answer to these questions is that higher education's vocational purposes are longstanding. Bowdoin College (my home institution), for instance, currently prides itself on being a liberal-arts college that keeps professionalism at a distance. Consider, however, this claim made by the college's first president over 200 years ago: "That the inhabitants of this district may have of their own sons to fill the liberal professions among them, and particularly to instruct them in the principles and practice of our holy religion, is doubtless the object of this institution." According to the Rev. Joseph McKeen, Bowdoin College was established largely to prepare students for the ministry and the other "liberal professions," including law, medicine, and teaching.

Students, too, have long had occupational advancement in mind when going to college. Even in the early 19th century, when one of higher education's primary objectives was to prepare students for ministerial training, most knew that the ministry did not promise significant financial gain. Still, ministers enjoyed relatively high social status, permitting students of limited means to escape their potential future as landless hired hands, city laborers, or clerks. College was a vehicle for financial stability and social betterment.

In short, students have always used college to get ahead. Yet, my research also confirmed something that I first learned through personal experience. Although my mother was right, her understanding of higher education was incomplete. In addition to providing opportunities for enhancing career prospects, colleges and universities have historically encouraged students to expand their aspirations in the direction of serving the public good.

Not all institutions did so, of course, and not all students responded. Nevertheless, the archival record is replete with examples of students expressing concerns - some apprehensively, some confidently, but almost always intentionally - that they pursue self-improvement to become useful citizens.

Now that my son has completed his junior year of high school, I find myself agonizing over his future and what occupational advantages college will provide. I've become my parents as well as all of the other parents questioning the uses and value of college. Still, when my mother calls and conversation turns to her grandson, I am able to take some solace in the past.

"Does he know what he wants to do?" she inevitably asks. "No," I say, and tell her that in addition to not knowing what he wants to do, he isn't sure what he wants to study. I explain that he'll figure both out once he arrives at college and learns more about the choices available to him. I also remind her that colleges like the one where I work are fine with students being uncertain about their plans.

Then, I take a further step and describe how I hope he'll choose a college that encourages him to think seriously about more than his future occupation. I tell her that I hope he'll be admitted to one that expands his understanding of the world as well as his personal ambitions, one that equips him to live well while fostering an awareness of his responsibility to others.

The first time I spoke words like those to my mother over the phone, I was pretty sure I could sense her forehead crinkle. This was not the language that we use in my family to discuss, well, anything, never mind an increasingly costly higher education. Instead, I was startled by her response. "That would be good," she said. "I wish I had had that."

Charles Dorn is a professor of education and associate dean for academic affairs at Bowdoin College. His most recent book is For the Common Good: A New History of Higher Education in America (Cornell University Press, 2017).

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What Is College Good For? (Hint: More Than Just a Job)

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Neither of my parents went to college. My father dropped out of high school in 1944 to join the Navy, and my mother took a job as a riveter following her graduation in 1949. They married, built a home, and raised two children.

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How the Liberal Arts Lead to Success - The Atlantic

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How the Liberal Arts Lead to Success - The Atlantic

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Growing up in Southern California, Mai-Ling Garcia's grades were ragged; her long-term plans nonexistent. At age 20, she was living with her in-laws halfway between Los Angeles and the Mojave Desert, while her husband was stationed abroad. Tired of working subsistence jobs, she decided in 2001 to try a few classes at Mount San Jacinto community college.

Nobody pegged her for greatness at first. A psychology professor, Maria Lopez-Moreno recalls Garcia sitting in the midst of a lecture hall, fiddling constantly with a cream-colored scarf. Then something started to catch. After a spirited discussion about the basis for criminal behavior, Lopez-Moreno took this newcomer aside after class and asked: "Why are you here?"

Garcia blurted out a tangled story of marrying a Marine right after high school, seeing him head off to Iraq, and not knowing what to do next. Lopez-Moreno couldn't walk away. "I said to myself: 'Uh-oh. I've got to suggest something to her.'" At her professor's urging, Garcia applied for a place in Mt. San Jacinto's honors program-and began to thrive.

Nourished by smaller classes and motivated peers, Garcia earned straight-A grades for the first time. She emerged as a leader in diversity initiatives, too, drawing on her own multicultural heritage (Filipino and Irish). Shortly before graduation, she won admission to the University of California, Berkeley, campus, where she could pursue a bachelor's degree.

Today, Garcia is a leading digital strategist for the city of Oakland, California. Rather than rely on an M.B.A. or a technical major, she has capitalized on a seldom-appreciated liberal-arts discipline-sociology-to power her career forward. Now, she describes herself as a "bureaucratic ninja" who doesn't hide her stormy journey. Instead, she recognizes it as a valuable asset.

"I know what it's like to be too poor to own a computer," Garcia told me recently. "I'm the one in meetings who asks: 'Never mind how well this new app works on an iPhone. Will it run on an old, public-library computer, because that's the only way some of our residents will get to use it?'"

By its very name, the liberal-arts pathway is tinged with privilege. Blame this on Cicero, the ancient Roman orator, who championed the arts quae libero sunt dignae ( cerebral studies suited for freemen), as opposed to the practical, servile arts suited for lower-class tradespeople. Even today, liberal-arts majors in the humanities and social sciences often are portrayed as pursuing elitist specialties that only affluent, well-connected students can afford.

Look more closely, though, and this old stereotype is starting to crumble. In 2016, the National Association of Colleges and Employers surveyed 5,013 graduating seniors about their family backgrounds and academic paths. The students most likely to major in the humanities or social sciences-33.8 percent of them-were those who were the first generation in their family ever to have earned college degrees. By contrast, students whose parents or other forbears had completed college chose the humanities or social sciences 30.4 percent of the time.

Pursuing the liberal-arts track isn't a quick path to riches. First-job salaries tend to be lower than what's available with vocational degrees in fields such as nursing, accounting, or computer science. That's especially true for first-generation students, who aren't as likely to enjoy family-aided access to top employers. NACE found that first-generation students on average received post-graduation starting salaries of $43,320, about 12 percent below the pay packages being landed by peers with multiple generations of college experience.

Yet over time, liberal-arts graduates' earnings often surge, especially for students pursuing advanced degrees. History majors often become well-paid lawyers or judges after completing law degrees, a recent analysis by the Brookings Institution's Hamilton Project has found. Many philosophy majors put their analytical and argumentative skills to work on Wall Street. International-relations majors thrive as overseas executives for big corporations, and so on.

For college leaders, the liberal arts' appeal across the socioeconomic spectrum is both exciting and daunting. As Dan Porterfield, the president of Pennsylvania's Franklin and Marshall College, points out, first-generation students "may come to college thinking: 'I want to be a doctor. I want to help people.' Then they discover anthropology, earth sciences, and many other new fields. They start to fall in love with the idea of being a writer or an entrepreneur. They realize: 'I just didn't have a broad enough vision of how to be a difference maker in society.'"

A close look at the career trajectories of liberal-arts graduates highlights five factors-beyond traditional classroom academics-that can spur long-term success for anyone from a non-elite background. Strong support from a faculty mentor is a powerful early propellant. In a survey of about 1,000 college graduates, Richard Detweiler, president of the Great Lakes Colleges Association, found that students who sought out faculty mentors were nearly twice as likely to end up in leadership positions later in life.

Other positive factors include a commitment to keep learning after college; a willingness to move to major U.S. job hubs such as Seattle, Silicon Valley, or the greater Washington, D.C., area; and the audacity to dream big. Finally, students who enter college without well-connected relatives-the sorts who can tell you what classes to take or how to win a choice summer internship-benefit from programs designed to build up professional networks and social capital.

Among the groups offering career-readiness programs on campus is Braven, a nonprofit founded by Aimée Eubanks Davis, a former Teach for America executive. Making its debut in 2014, Braven already has reached about 1,000 students at Rutgers University-Newark in New Jersey and San Jose State University in California. Expansion into the Midwest is on tap. Braven mixes students majoring in the liberal arts and those pursuing vocational degrees in each cohort, the theory being that all can learn from one another.

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Why the Liberal Arts Aren't Just for the Elite

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Growing up in Southern California, Mai-Ling Garcia's grades were ragged; her long-term plans nonexistent. At age 20, she was living with her in-laws halfway between Los Angeles and the Mojave Desert, while her husband was stationed abroad. Tired of working subsistence jobs, she decided in 2001 to try a few classes at Mount San Jacinto community college.

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Holding On to What Makes Us Human - The Chronicle of Higher Education

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Holding On to What Makes Us Human - The Chronicle of Higher Education

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The Chronicle Review

Defending the humanities in a skills-obsessed university

Hadley Hooper for The Chronicle Review

A few years after I graduated from college, short on cash, short on space, and short on hope that I might ever again spend at least part of my days reading and writing and thinking, I made a decision that I have wished many times I could take back: I sold almost all of my textbooks.

The overpriced and understudied behemoth from "Intro to Econ" was easy to part with. And my well-used grammar and exercise books from French I and II? How useful could they be in our tiny apartment, on our tiny budget, with me staying home to take care of our tiny baby? In such straitened circumstances, I didn't need those books taking up room in my life; I needed whatever money they might bring.

But those were not the only books I culled from my little library. I gathered up Robert Lowell and Alice Walker, Edmund Spenser and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lucretius and Virginia Woolf, Lorraine Hansberry and Aristotle, Montaigne and Nietzsche, Flaubert, Boethius and Baudelaire, and many others besides - most of them authors I had never so much as heard of before I set foot on the Stanford campus.

For many reasons, college was a revelation. I had never bought books of my own before I went. Nor did I know that people wrote in the margins of any books other than their well-studied Bibles. In college, I proudly bought Norton critical editions and anthologies of fiction and poetry, Penguin Classics and mass-market paperbacks, and I wrote in them all. When pressed to choose between buying my books and, say, eating more than one meal a day for a few weeks, I chose the books.

"A few years after I graduated from college, I made a decision that I have wished many times I could take back: I sold almost all of my textbooks."

It had cost me dearly to acquire those volumes and make them my own; it cost me even more to let them go. Oh, I got a few dollars for my eclectic collection, and those few dollars made a difference at the time. But when I sold those books, I lost the record of my own history as a reader, as a learner - all the notes and exclamations and questions I had scrawled in the margins, the asterisks, the dog-ears, the passages underlined sometimes two or three times.

But all was not lost: I didn't sell all my books. Among the texts I kept were Augustine and Shakespeare, Dickens and Faulkner, Spoon River, Thomas Wyatt, Jane Austen and George Eliot and Thackeray so deft and droll, Zuni poetry and an anthology of Coyote tales from the native peoples of the Pacific Northwest, Dante and Cervantes and a few other stragglers besides.

One of those stragglers was the Spanish existentialist philosopher Miguel de Unamuno. Before I was an English major, I was a Spanish major, and I had been introduced to Unamuno in the Spanish lit survey at the end of my freshman year. Alas, the two-volume anthology we used in class, with its excerpt from Unamuno's beautiful Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho ( Life of Don Quijote and Sancho), was among the books I sold. But the stand-alone volume of Del sentimiento trágico de la vida ( The Tragic Sense of Life) - that book I kept.

Unamuno came to believe that dogmatic confidence in rationalism and airtight logical systems were a paltry philosophical response to the great crisis of human existence: the problem of death. Unamuno's existential anguish and his quest to find or fashion some hope in the face of the miserable fact of our mortality struck a chord with me. I might not have understood everything he was arguing - or arguing against - on my first read, but I understood the desperation of his inquiry. In the face of our inevitable annihilation, what do we do?

That question, that problem, has been much on my mind lately, particularly as it relates to the fate and future of the university as an institution or even as an idea. Policy makers and the public view the purpose of college as purely vocational, and see humanistic inquiry - the study of literature, the arts, history, anthropology, philosophy - as a waste of time and money.

In these circumstances, what do we do? Does it even matter?

Thinking of those questions, I was reminded of a passage in Unamuno where he quotes the French writer Etienne Pivert de Senancour - somewhat disapprovingly, as it turns out, a fact lost on me the first time I read the chapter. Here is the quote, and my best attempt at a translation of it:

L'homme est périssable. Il se peut; mais, périssons en resistant, et, si le neant nous est réservé, ne faisons pas que ce soit une justice.

Man is perishable. That may be. But let us perish resisting, and, if Nonexistence is what awaits us, let us not act in a way that would make our fate seem just.

Unamuno rejected Senancour's resignation that "le neant" - "Nonexistence" - was our collective fate. He would not surrender to nihilism. Still, Unamuno's own argument for faith - faith not as the opposite of doubt but rooted in doubt and flowing from doubt - was a means of doing precisely what Senancour urged: that is, to perish resisting. Reason, the pitiless actuary, assures us that we are destined to perish. Unamuno thought that even as we perish, humankind's sustained, spirited refusal to accept that fate is our collective testimony that some day yet to come would see reason proven wrong. Let us resist despair together, Unamuno's philosophy urged, and so perish not.

I sold my old books in a time of great financial distress and profound personal despair (the two were connected, as they often are). The paltry sum I received for them only deepened my sorrow and sense of loss. But at the time I didn't know what else to do. I did know, however, that no matter how much of my little library I had to give up for practical reasons, there remained a portion that under no circumstance would I willingly surrender. Somehow I knew that if I had let those last few books go, I would have gone right with them.

Instead, those books, the enduring foundation stones of my humanistic education, sustained me through some very lean years. But they were lovely years as well. And part of what turned those years' challenges into memories I now cherish was the enduring value of the books I kept - not the price they could command with a used book dealer, but the priceless wisdom they offered me each time I turned to them to catch a glimpse of the world beyond my own immediate circumstances and limited horizons.

Let us resist perishing. But if we must perish, let us perish resisting. This should be our credo as humanists in the 21st century. We must not concede to the actuarial ethos of the corporatized university that reduces all discussions of value to questions of profit and loss. Economic arguments for the value of a humanistic education will not save the humanities, and we should stop making them. The value of the humanities as the heart of a university education does not lie primarily in "transferrable skills" nor in the "critical thinking" that employers presumably want. Instead, a core education in the humanities gives students the intellectual space to grapple with questions of enduring importance. The value of knowing how humankind has tackled those questions and taking part in that endeavor can never be measured in dollars and cents alone.

Some might say that such an argument is elitist because it ignores current economic conditions: the skyrocketing costs of college, shouldered more and more by students and their families as policy makers slash public support for higher education. Students are under enormous pressure to get through college as quickly as they can and land a job. How elitist to insist that students spend time studying subjects that don't easily translate into financial gains.

"Economic arguments for the value of a humanistic education will not save the humanities, and we should stop making them."

But what could be more elitist than turning these subjects into luxury goods? What could be more elitist than deciding that first-generation or working-class students going to community colleges and state colleges don't need or deserve the same opportunities for intellectual growth and exploration available to privileged students at elite private universities? The assault on humanistic study as frivolous and impractical, the scorn heaped upon students who want to learn something more meaningful than the mastery of a vocational skill set that might be obsolete by the time they graduate college - these are the legacies of a profiteering corporatist ethos that is replacing possibility and creativity with conformity and austerity, turning hopeful young people into dutiful drones, compliant worker bees in the neoliberal economy.

But the value of what we study, of what we teach and what we learn, is that such learning can help keep the human spirit alive - alive and alert to possibilities that lie beyond our present horizons. That may not be what employers or state budget committees want to hear - and that is precisely why we need to deliver such a message. We must insist on the importance of sustaining other values besides the purely pecuniary. That is the ground upon which we must stand to defend the place of the humanities in higher education, to defend the opportunity for our students to grapple with ideas and questions of enduring value. If that ground at the very heart of the university is lost, whatever still remains will hardly be worth keeping, whether or not we ourselves are by some miracle still standing.

L.D. Burnett is an adjunct professor of history at Collin College. Her book, Canon Wars: The 1980s Western Civ Debates at Stanford and the Triumph of Neoliberalism in Higher Education, is forthcoming from the University of North Carolina Press. An earlier version of this piece appeared on the blog of the Society of U.S. Intellectual History.

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The Chronicle Review Defending the humanities in a skills-obsessed university A few years after I graduated from college, short on cash, short on space, and short on hope that I might ever again spend at least part of my days reading and writing and thinking, I made a decision that I have wished many times I could take back: I sold almost all of my textbooks.

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Can Poetry Change Your Life?  | The New Yorker

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Can Poetry Change Your Life?  | The New Yorker

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Why we are so defensive about the art form's value.

The first eight pages of Michael Robbins's new book, " Equipment for Living: On Poetry and Pop Music " (Simon & Schuster), make reference to Annie Dillard, Harold Bloom, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Elton John, Kenneth Burke, Geoffrey Hill, Kenneth Koch, Adam Phillips, Frank O'Hara, Emerson, Boethius, Nietzsche, Freud, and Miley Cyrus. The book is a collection of mostly previously published pieces, some on poetry, some on pop music, some on both, written, as the names suggest, in a critical style that could be called advanced pop.

Advanced-pop criticism would be criticism premised on the belief that you can talk about cultural goods loved uncritically by millions in terms originally developed to talk about cultural goods known mainly to an overeducated few. Advanced pop is Boethius and Springsteen, Artaud and the Ramones, and it yields sentences like "I assume that what Burke"-the literary theorist Kenneth Burke-"says about poetry applies, mutatis mutandis, to the songs of Def Leppard." It's erudite but caj, geeky and hip, alienated and savvy-on the inside of the outside. Another word for the attitude might be "Brooklyn," which is indeed where, as an author's bio unnecessarily informs us, Michael Robbins lives.

"Equipment for Living" is funny and smart. It does feel a few bricks shy of a tome. The first and last chapters perform the same work: they unpack, uneasily, the claim stated in the title, which is that poems and songs can make a difference. Most of the chapters are essay-reviews, ranging in length from very brief to brief. Robbins has a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, and an excellent discussion of rhyme in the work of Paul Muldoon is apparently adapted from his dissertation.

To fill things out, there is a twenty-eight-page "Playlist," consisting of staff-picks-type encomiums on the author's favorites, such as:

Skip James

"Devil Got My Woman" (1931)

Sometimes I think this song defines the limits of what is humanly possible. Sometimes I think it exceeds them.

And:

Wallace Stevens

"The Man with the Blue Guitar," Canto XXV (1937)

A rumpus, a rollick, a roll in the hay . . .

There's only one full-dress essay in the book, and it's much more heavy-duty than the rest. The subject is the poetry of Frederick Seidel, and the essay handles a familiar critical problem-the morality of bad taste, the Jeff Koons-Michel Houellebecq-Bret Easton Ellis problem-expertly if not entirely originally. The essay does include observations like "The death drive is figured here as the desire to literalize the trope of the subject's dispersal." When I hear the words "literalize the trope," I reach for my remote.

Hyperbole is an ever-present danger up there on the high-low tightrope. What helps the critic keep his or her balance is the acknowledgment that it is hyperbole, that there is a rhetoric of aesthetic experience-the experience of reading poems or listening to songs we're strongly attached to-that is always in excess of the actual content. If you're going to write about Skip James, it doesn't make sense to strive for a judicious appraisal. You want to record the temperature at its hottest. By now, a lot of writers have done this sort of thing with Skip James and other old bluesmen, a sacred category for serious pop critics ever since those musicians were "discovered" by rock-and-roll (that is, white) audiences, in the nineteen-sixties, but Robbins can do it with seventeenth-century lyrics as well.

You also need to concede that the experience cools fairly quickly, and Robbins is alert to that, too. " No one has ever changed his life because of a poem or song," he says in a chapter on metal, with reference to Blake, Milton, Rilke, William Empson, Peter Sloterdijk, Ozzy Osbourne, and Kant. "Changing your life is for Simone Weil or the Buddha. The rest of us need German poetry and Norwegian black metal because they provide the illusion that we are changing, or have changed, or will change, or even want to change our lives." I don't completely agree, but it's a wise caution.

Another advanced-pop premise is that everything is happening now. Springsteen and Dylan speak to our current condition, and so do Boethius and Sappho. The envelope may be postmarked 600 B.C.E., but when you open it there is a letter inside, and it's just for you. The responsible scholarly impulse is to historicize: those words were never intended for you, they signified something completely different in 600 B.C.E. than they do today, and so on. That's all true. But the text still has a sting. It's the news that stayed news. Robbins is more interested in the inarticulable or barely articulable sting than he is in reconstructing social relations in the Mediterranean gift economy. (I think you can do both, in fact, and that putting the "then" together with the "now" is the point of doing criticism.)

A writer with a playlist of culture heroes must also have a list of the undeserving, the fake, and the fallen, and Robbins does not disappoint us. He writes of the poet James Wright, "It is easy to feel that, if fetal alcohol syndrome could write poetry, it would write this poetry." He suggests that Robert Hass "has made a career out of flattering middlebrow sensibilities with cheap mystery." Of Charles Simic: "If the worst are full of passionate intensity, Simic would seem to be in the clear."

He calls Simon and Garfunkel's "The Sound of Silence" "wimpy crap." He says that Patti Smith's memoir "Just Kids" is "highly acclaimed despite her apparent belief that serious writing is principally a matter of avoiding contractions." His reaction to Neil Young's memoir is "It's depressing to learn that one of your heroes writes like a composition student aiming for the earnest tone of a public service announcement."

The Jedi master of this mode of criticism-its presiding spirit, really-is Pauline Kael, the subject of an admiring chapter in "Equipment for Living." Robbins calls her "the first tastemaker I trusted implicitly." A lot of Kael's criticism, like Robbins's, is buildups and takedowns, but that kind of criticism can get interesting when the writer has to figure out why something that should be good is not, or why something that has no right to be good actually might be.

I enjoyed almost all of "Equipment for Living," but I found Robbins most clever and entertaining when he is trying to make sense of what redeems bands like Journey and Def Leppard, or poets like Dylan Thomas and James Dickey. Those are artists who now seem obviously gassy or fatuous-"Like a mammoth wheel of Monterey Jack left in the sun" is Robbins's description of Journey's hit song "Only the Young." And he often decides that what redeems such works is that they once spoke to him, even if they don't anymore. "Every song you loved when you were young turns into 'Tintern Abbey,' " as he puts it.

"I cannot paint / What then I was," Wordsworth wrote in that poem, about revisiting the banks of the Wye as a grownup (only five years later, actually, but it's a poem). Robbins expresses the sentiment this way: "As I listen to 'Don't Stop Believin' ' today, once again, in the arena of my soul, how high the highest Bic lights the dark." You can't go back to being fifteen, but you can remember with respect and longing that time of life, a time when, as Georg Lukács once put it, "the fire that burns in the soul is of the same essential nature as the stars." Oh, no! Now I'm doing it!

"Listening to most rock and roll now involves remembering what it used to do for me that it can't anymore," Robbins says. And, in fact, a surprising amount of pop-music criticism is bottled nostalgia, owls that fly at dusk. In preparation for writing about "Equipment for Living," I got a copy of " Shake It Up " (Library of America), an anthology of fifty years of pop-music criticism, "from Elvis to Jay Z," edited by Jonathan Lethem and Kevin Dettmar. I figured I would dip into its pages and refresh my recollection of the field of play. Many hours later, I had to force myself to put the thing down.

A few of the essays in "Shake It Up" are advanced-pop criticism (e.g., the literary critic Richard Poirier on "Learning from the Beatles," in Partisan Review), but most are journalism, and the journalism beats the advanced-pop stuff cold. Partly this is because it was written for fans, so the writers could ignore the English department and other highbrow police. Partly it's because pop-music journalism arose out of the intersection of early rock-and-roll magazines like Rolling Stone and Crawdaddy, when they still had an alternative-press aura, and the New Journalism, with its promiscuous use of the first person, and that gave it a confessional tone and a voice that suggested that we're all on the same side in the struggle, whatever struggle it is.

But rock criticism does appear to be fixated on what has been lost. It's always beating back against the current. It seems that in the pop-music business the shelf life of authenticity is tragically short. Ellen Willis on Janis Joplin, Lester Bangs on Elvis Presley, Chuck Klosterman on Mötley Crüe, John Jeremiah Sullivan on Axl Rose, Eve Babitz on Jim Morrison, Geoffrey O'Brien on the Beatles: all those pieces are "Tintern Abbey"s, elegies for gifts that were squandered or misapplied or evanescent. O'Brien thinks it all began to go south for the Beatles after "Help!" And I used to think the Beatles were only worth listening to after "Help!"

But how are poems and pop songs "equipment for life"? Here the balance pole begins to wobble. "There is no limit to what a poem can't do," Robbins writes on one page; "poetry makes all sorts of things happen," he says on the next. Which is it? He doesn't want to give in to the fantasy that poems taught to and songs bought by millions of people are also subversive of the established order. But his own politics are Occupy-era politics, and he naturally wants to put his views together with his tastes. The teen-ager's enthusiasm for Def Leppard must in some way belong with the mature man's concerns about income inequality.

He has a couple of ideas about how this might work. One is that the very excess of the aesthetic experience, the fact that it evaporates so fast upon contact with daily life, is a reminder of how impoverished daily life is. It seems that capitalism is to blame here. When capitalism is dead, Robbins suggests, we might not need poetry anymore.

O.K., that's one idea. His other idea is that the key to the real-world effectiveness of poems and songs is "form." The invocation of form is awkward, for the same reason that advanced-pop criticism itself is inherently awkward, which is that most popular music, and especially popular music categorized as rock, is magnificently and unambiguously hostile to everything associated with the word "school." And form is a very academic concept. It's the shell in the game teachers play to hide content.

The phrase "equipment for living" is taken from Kenneth Burke, who also wrote that form is "a public matter that symbolically enrolls us with allies who will share the burdens with us." Robbins likes this. I think it means that the experience of poems and songs is shared with other people, even if often implicitly, and so it can be a means of achieving solidarity. Form "grounds us in a community," Robbins says.

This might be a little wishful. Reading poems is normally a solitary pastime, and so is a lot of music listening, except at concerts, where the emotions aren't really your own. In any case, form cuts no political ice. The Rolling Stones' "You Can't Always Get What You Want," once an anthem of antiwar protesters, is played at Trump rallies. I assume it instills feelings of solidarity among his supporters.

With aesthetic experience in general, after a certain age, the effects are probably as much a product of what you bring to it as what you get from it. "Records are useful equipment for living, provided you don't expect more from them than they contain," Robbins says. This is an echo of Dylan-"Songs are songs," Dylan once said; "I don't believe in expecting too much out of any one thing"-and it seems about right.

But what, in the end, do we get from poems and songs? "Aesthetic life is a sphere of self-directed activity whose external ramifications, despite periodic utopian exuberances, are minimal at best," Robbins concludes (somewhat contradicting his "community" theory). Is this so? Are we past the days when people wrote poetry and read it for encouragement and guidance, the days when poetry was not merely a "self-directed activity" but was writing about something?

It certainly was once. On August 4, 1914, Great Britain declared war on Germany. On August 5th, the first war poem appeared in the London Times -"The Vigil," by Henry Newbolt. By the end of the year, at least two anthologies of war poetry were out, "Poems of the Great War" and "Songs and Sonnets for England in War Time." Many would follow. Around the time the fighting ended, four years later, more than two thousand British and Irish writers had written poems about the war.

We might assume that the First World War inspired a lot of poems because that's how people expressed themselves in the age of print, and that people express themselves differently today because the media are different. But we would assume wrong. Donald Trump was elected President on November 8, 2016. A poem about his election, "You're Dead, America," by Danez Smith, appeared on BuzzFeed on November 9th.

A few days later, hundreds showed up in Washington Square Park for a pop-up poetry reading sponsored by the Academy of American Poets and the Web site Brain Pickings. Three days after the Inauguration, the Times columnist Nicholas Kristof announced a Donald Trump Poetry Contest. He got about two thousand submissions. Several anthologies with anti-Trump poems have already come out, including, in May, " Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poems Now " (Knopf), edited by Amit Majmudar, who was one of the winners in Kristof's contest.

Every crisis is an opportunity for poetry, even in the twenty-first century. There are anthologies of 9/11 poems and anthologies of Iraq War poems. There are climate-change poems, income-inequality poems, and Black Lives Matter poems. Claudia Rankine's " Citizen: An American Lyric," a book-length poem about race, identity, and the imagination, has sold almost two hundred thousand copies since it was published, in 2014. After the terrorist attacks in Paris on November 13, 2015, hundreds of thousands read "It is not Paris we should pray for," posted on social media by the Indian poet Karuna Ezara Parikh. When the going gets stressful, the stressed want poems.

So why are people who write about poetry so defensive? Robbins gives the appearance of a man straining to come up with a rationale for bothering to read and write poems at all. And he's an optimist. In " The Hatred of Poetry " (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), published last year, Ben Lerner argues that poems simply can't do what people want them to do-create timeless moments, or express individual experiences with universal appeal, or create a sense of communal identity, or overturn existing social mores, or articulate "a measure of value beyond money." All they can do is expose the impossibility of achieving any of these things by writing a poem. Of course people who don't read poetry hate it, he says; it's not doing what they mistakenly believe it's supposed to do. But poets hate it, too. Poetry is a paradigm example of human inadequacy.

In " Why Poetry? " (Ecco), out this summer, Matthew Zapruder defines a poet as a writer who is prepared "to reject all other purposes, in favor of the possibilities of language freed from utility." Where people who are puzzled by poetry go wrong, he thinks, is in expecting poems to say something straightforward about life, to be useful. Poems are really about language-ultimately, about the impossibility of fixed meanings.

Lerner and Zapruder are successful mid-career poets. (So is Robbins, who has brought out two collections with Penguin.) Lerner is also well known for his novels, " Leaving the Atocha Station" and " 10:04." Zapruder has published four collections of poetry and was the editor of the Times Magazine poetry page. We can add to their books David Orr's " Beautiful and Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry," which came out in 2011. The title states the problem. "I can't tell you why you should bother to read poems, or to write them," Orr concludes. "I can only say that if you do choose to give your attention to poetry, as against all other things you might turn to instead, that choice can be meaningful." Not the most robust commendation-and Orr is the poetry critic of the Times Book Review.

How can it be the case that poems are ineffectual and self-absorbed ephemera when the Presidential election produced a Trump bump in the poetry world, when hundreds of people submit poems to a newspaper contest, when dozens of poetry anthologies are in print, and when a book-length poem sells two hundred thousand copies, a number reached by very few works of prose? What would count for writers like Lerner and Zapruder as a meaningful poem, or a poem that made a difference? It is almost as though a poem that actually communicated something to someone could not be a real poem. There seems to be a disconnect between the practice and the theory. Where did that come from?

Probably it's as old as writing. What has long been presumed to be the earliest writing, the Sumerian tablets, comprises administrative records. But if people could write down factual stuff they could also write down made-up stuff, and there must have soon developed an account of the difference. That account would have explained how made-up stuff needs to be read differently from factual stuff, why made-up stuff has effects on us that factual stuff does not, and what sort of practical work, if any, fiction might be doing in our lives.

This distinction between fiction and nonfiction, whenever it dates from, but certainly, in the West, since Plato, has produced a heap of abstractions, and those abstractions are what I think these writers are getting hung up on. "Fiction" and "nonfiction" are made to operate as oppositely charged magnets attracting incompatible values. Nonfiction is logical; fiction is associative. Nonfiction is literal and truthful, fiction figurative and imaginary. Nonfiction is objective and communicates, but fiction is subjective and expresses. Fiction is supposed to represent not literal truth but a mysterious entity called "emotional truth." Indeterminacy and obscurity are out of place in nonfiction but acceptable in fiction.

In this opposition, poetry sits at the extreme end, the mode of writing least like nonfiction. The consequence is a kind of inside-out justification for poems in which poetry beats nonfiction at its own game by refusing to play it. "He nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth," Sir Philip Sidney famously wrote of the poet in " The Defense of Poesie," and his is the model formulation. ("I have more just cause to make a pitiful defense of poor Poetry, which from almost the highest estimation of learning, is fallen to be the laughing stock of children," Sidney began the "Defense." It was posthumously published in 1595, around the time Shakespeare wrote "A Midsummer Night's Dream," and the year before Edmund Spenser published a large portion of "The Faerie Queene." That was a pretty big disconnect.)

So Lerner offers conundrums like poetry's "usefulness depends on its lack of practical utility," and Zapruder describes a poem as "making meaning by failing to fully make meaning." With poems, Zapruder says, "we get to a truth that is beyond our ability to articulate when we are attempting to 'use' language to convey our ideas or stories." Poetry isn't true, in the ordinary sense, but apparently that makes it truthier.

Do readers really need these distinctions? Ancient-world readers of Homer must have known how much of the Odyssey was fanciful and how much of it was true, and in what sense. Their notion of what mattered was undoubtedly different from ours, but we, too, can read the Odyssey for what it tells us-about social relations in the Mediterranean gift economy, for example.

The distinction between the fictional and the nonfictional is much blurrier in practice than it is in theory. Lerner says that we expect too much from poetry. That's right, and we expect too much from nonfiction, too. Virtually all writing is parts literal and parts figural, parts "critical" and parts "creative." And its ability to effect change in people's personal or political lives has nothing to do with its degree of "fictionality."

One of Lerner's chief examples of misplaced expectations for poetry is what he calls "nostalgia for a poetry that could supposedly reconcile the individual and the social, and so transform millions of individuals into an authentic People." He says that this kind of poetry never existed. To which there is a one-word response: Dante. The Divine Comedy is a first-person poem about a man who suffers a crisis ("I found myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost"), which he resolves by undertaking an imaginary journey that he pretends has been made possible by the soul of a dead woman he loved. That poem, written in the vernacular in the fourteenth century, is still at the heart of national identity in Italy. As the Iliad and the Odyssey were for ancient Greece, and as the Aeneid was for Rome.

Lerner, to be fair, is mainly concerned with lyric poetry (another unstable category: is "The Waste Land" a lyric?). He argues that "there are no good examples of 'superb lyric poems' that at once 'have something to say' utterly specific to a poet's 'experience' and can speak for all." "Utterly" and "all" make for a narrow window-nothing is utterly one kind of thing, and no one speaks for all-but, even leaving aside the many lyric poets who, because of their bodies of work, became representative figures for a people or a nation, from Bashō to Yeats and Neruda, and even leaving aside the many lyric poets who were persecuted as threats to the regime, from Ovid to Anna Akhmatova and Joseph Brodsky, there are plenty of lyric poems that are "utterly" personal and yet speak for many. One of the founding documents of African and Caribbean anticolonialism, Aimé Césaire's "Notebook of a Return to the Native Land," is a lyric poem. So is Adrienne Rich's "Diving Into the Wreck," an inspirational text for the women's movement. It's weird to think that these works don't count.

All the poems in the anti-Trump collection "Resistance, Rebellion, Life" are lyrics, and many begin with a story that is utterly personal. Sharon Olds's "Immigration Anthem" starts with her hip operation and ends on Ellis Island before the golden door:

entering through it was a promise to leave it

open behind us.

Zapruder is more hospitable to poems with political ambitions, and he discusses several, including one of the most controversial poems of the twenty-first century, Amiri Baraka's "Somebody Blew Up America," on the attacks of September 11th. Zapruder calls the poem "glorious" and "problematic." But he thinks that what makes it a poem are the questions it raises and cannot answer, rather than any points it might seek to make. "We find genuine questions everywhere in poetry because they direct the language away from certainty and stasis," Zapruder explains. "In the best poems, often the poet does not know the answer." The less confident Baraka is about what he thinks, in other words, the more poetic his poem.

"Unlike other forms of writing, poetry takes as its primary task to insist and depend upon and celebrate the troubled relation of the word to what it represents," Zapruder claims. Some version of this notion-that, whatever the ostensible subject matter, poems are "about" language-has been current in English departments since the days of the New Criticism. Language is a profoundly mysterious technology, so constitutive of the human mind that we can only get glimpses, from inside the fishbowl of consciousness, of how it works. And the study of literary technique is a great way to explore the nature of language.

But here is the opening stanza of Frederick Seidel's poem in "Resistance, Rebellion, Life," called "Now":

And you could say we've been living in clover

From Walt Whitman to Barack Obama.

Now a dictatorship of vicious spineless slimes

We the people voted in has taken over.

Once we'd abolished slavery, we lived in clover,

From sea to shining sea, even in terrible times.

It's over.

"The troubled relation of the word to what it represents" is not what jumps out at me here.

The funny thing about the resistance all these writers put up to the idea that poems can change people's lives is that every one of them had his life changed by a poem. I did, too. When I was fourteen or fifteen, I found a copy of "Immortal Poems of the English Language" in a book closet in my school. It was a mass-market paperback, and the editor, Oscar Williams, had judged several of his own poems sufficiently deathless to merit inclusion. But he was an excellent anthologist, and I wore that book out. It changed my life. It made me want to become a writer.

Robbins, Lerner, and Zapruder all tell pretty much the identical story about themselves. One day, almost inadvertently, they read a poem, and suddenly they knew that they had to become writers. They did, and it changed their lives. Later, they all wrote books about poetry. I read those books, and it changed my life. You read this piece about those books. Maybe it will change your life. If it does, the change will be very, very tiny, but most change comes in increments. Don't expect too much out of any one thing. For although the world is hard, words matter. Rock beats scissors. It may take a while, but paper beats rock. At least we hope so.

I started out as a poet, too, but I eventually realized that whatever my poems were expressing, it wasn't me. They were too obsessed with looking like poems, I think-and sometimes they did, just poems that somebody else had written. I switched to nonfiction prose, and found, to my astonishment, that I could express myself much better by writing about things I had nothing to do with. (Maybe I shouldn't have been so surprised.)

But I got the same painful pleasure out of writing prose that I did out of writing poetry-the pleasure of trying to put the right words in the right order. And I took away from my experience with poetry something else. I understood that the reason people write poems is the reason people write. They have something to say. ♦

This article appears in other versions of the July 31, 2017, issue, with the headline "The Defense of Poetry."

Louis Menand has contributed to The New Yorker since 1991, and has been a staff writer since 2001.
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The first eight pages of Michael Robbins's new book, " Equipment for Living: On Poetry and Pop Music " (Simon & Schuster), make reference to Annie Dillard, Harold Bloom, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Elton John, Kenneth Burke, Geoffrey Hill, Kenneth Koch, Adam Phillips, Frank O'Hara, Emerson, Boethius, Nietzsche, Freud, and Miley Cyrus.

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Why We Need Liberal Arts In Technology's Age Of Distraction | Time.com

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Why We Need Liberal Arts In Technology's Age Of Distraction | Time.com

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If you talk to the engineers and dreamers in Silicon Valley, especially anyone over 35, they'll probably admit to being into science fiction. This genre of movies, comic books and novels was huge in the first half of the last century and remained strong through its second half, when most of today's engineers were born. That's not to say science fiction's allure has faded - if anything, the popularity of shows like Westworld and Stranger Things suggests we're as fascinated as ever - but to point out that it had a great influence on those creating today's technology.

I was born in the latter part of the last century, and like many of my geek friends, was into science fiction at all levels. We loved its heady futuristic ideas and reveled in its high-minded prophesies. But there is one theme in science fiction that always troubled me: when technology runs amok and subverts its creators. Usually when this happens, the story becomes a dramatic puzzle, whose solution involves the protagonists expending tons of creative energy in an effort to either destroy their mutinous creation or contain it. I had nightmares for months after I read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

I've been involved in dozens of technology projects, but I have to admit that seldom in our design or business discussions do we spend much time on the potential negative impact of our work on the world. Instead, we abide by an engineering mantra often embodied in the concept "We create it because we can." Indeed, in most cases we create technology because we see a need, or to solve a problem. But sometimes in hindsight it seems we wind up creating new ones.

I recently spent time with key execs in the security and cybersecurity space. Perhaps no other area in our digital world underlines the flip side of technological progress. IT execs tell me that security is now about 25% of their IT budget spend. Each day we hear of hackers targeting user identities, financial networks and power grids, and malware routinely targets PCs, laptops and smartphones, holding them hostage till users pay a ransom fee to recover their data.

When the folks at DARPA and other agencies blueprinted the Internet in the 1960s, the idea was to have a medium in which to share scientific data and other information quickly and on a global scale. But as the Internet has evolved, it's become the de facto medium for just about any type of communication, commercial transactions, and yes, hacking that impacts us for better and worse.

It's also been responsible for an unprecedented age of distraction. I was recently in New York and had to drive from northern New York City to the Elmira area on the state's freeways. For the first time, I saw signs that said "Next texting stop is 3 miles ahead. Don't text and drive." Most states have already outlawed texting while driving, and yet we hear almost weekly of traffic accidents cased by oblivious drivers tapping blithely on smartphones.

The level of distraction caused by technology (driving or no) is at an all-time high. While on vacation in Maui, Hawaii last month, I was stunned to see people pulling out their smartphones and checking them while walking around beautiful Lahaina and other areas of the island. The gravitational pull of these devices is ubiquitous. During a dinner with my wife, my son and his wife and our two granddaughters at a beachside restaurant, I caught all of us looking at our phones as we waited for our food, paying no heed to the gorgeous scenery right in front of us.

I don't believe Steve Jobs and Apple dreamed the iPhone or smartphones in general would engender this level of diversion. I don't think Mark Zuckerberg, when he created Facebook, foresaw how distracting and addictive Facebook would become. And I don't think Niantic, the creators of Pokémon Go, fully thought through the tectonic fantasy-reality collisions of their augmented reality app (shortly after its launch in early July 2016, two people playing the game walked off a cliff). My wife has had close encounters with trees and light posts herself while chasing down some of the game's secretive critters.

In a recent Harvard Business Review piece titled "Liberal Arts in the Data Age," author JM Olejarz writes about the importance of reconnecting a lateral, liberal arts mindset with the sort of rote engineering approach that can lead to myopic creativity. Today's engineers have been so focused on creating new technologies that their short term goals risk obscuring unintended longterm outcomes. While a few companies, say Intel, are forward-thinking enough to include ethics professionals on staff, they remain exceptions. At this point all tech companies serious about ethical grounding need to be hiring folks with backgrounds in areas like anthropology, psychology and philosophy.

I have no illusions about the cat being out of the bag (it's hence shacked up with YouTube), and as a parent and grandparent, admit I need to be more proactive about self-policing. My hope is that we can all move a little more in that direction, creating technology that is both impactful and thoughtful in its engagement with our lives and the world.
Tim Bajarin is recognized as one of the leading industry consultants, analysts and futurists, covering the field of personal computers and consumer technology. Mr. Bajarin is the President of Creative Strategies, Inc and has been with the company since 1981 where he has served as a consultant providing analysis to most of the leading hardware and software vendors in the industry.

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Why We Need the Liberal Arts in Technology's Age of Distraction

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If you talk to the engineers and dreamers in Silicon Valley, especially anyone over 35, they'll probably admit to being into science fiction. This genre of movies, comic books and novels was huge in the first half of the last century and remained strong through its second half, when most of today's engineers were born.

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Liberal Arts Majors Are the Future of the Tech Industry

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Liberal Arts Majors Are the Future of the Tech Industry

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College students who major in the humanities always get asked a certain question. They're asked it so often-and by so many people-that it should come printed on their diplomas. That question, posed by friends, career counselors, and family, is "What are you planning to do with your degree?" But it might as well be "What are the humanities good for?"

According to three new books, the answer is "Quite a lot." From Silicon Valley to the Pentagon, people are beginning to realize that to effectively tackle today's biggest social and technological challenges, we need to think critically about their human context-something humanities graduates happen to be well trained to do. Call it the revenge of the film, history, and philosophy nerds.

In The Fuzzy and the Techie, venture capitalist Scott Hartley takes aim at the "false dichotomy" between the humanities and computer science. Some tech industry leaders have proclaimed that studying anything besides the STEM fields is a mistake if you want a job in the digital economy. Here's a typical dictum, from Sun Microsystems cofounder Vinod Khosla: "Little of the material taught in Liberal Arts programs today is relevant to the future."

Hartley believes that this STEM-only mindset is all wrong. The main problem is that it encourages students to approach their education vocationally-to think just in terms of the jobs they're preparing for. But the barriers to entry for technical roles are dropping. Many tasks that once required specialized training can now be done with simple tools and the internet. For example, a novice programmer can get a project off the ground with chunks of code from GitHub and help from Stack Overflow.

If we want to prepare students to solve large-scale human problems, Hartley argues, we must push them to widen, not narrow, their education and interests. He ticks off a long list of successful tech leaders who hold degrees in the humanities. To mention just a few CEOs: Stewart Butterfield, Slack, philosophy; Jack Ma, Alibaba, English; Susan Wojcicki, YouTube, history and literature; Brian Chesky, Airbnb, fine arts. Of course, we need technical experts, Hartley says, but we also need people who grasp the whys and hows of human behavior.

What matters now is not the skills you have but how you think. Can you ask the right questions? Do you know what problem you're trying to solve in the first place? Hartley argues for a true "liberal arts" education-one that includes both hard sciences and "softer" subjects. A well-rounded learning experience, he says, opens people up to new opportunities and helps them develop products that respond to real human needs.

The human context is also the focus of Cents and Sensibility, by Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro, professors of the humanities and economics, respectively, at Northwestern University. They argue that when economic models fall short, they do so for want of human understanding. Economics tends to ignore three things: culture's effect on decision making, the usefulness of stories in explaining people's actions, and ethical considerations. People don't exist in a vacuum, and treating them as if they do is both reductive and potentially harmful.

Morson and Schapiro's solution is literature. They suggest that economists could gain wisdom from reading great novelists, who have a deeper insight into people than social scientists do. Whereas economists tend to treat people as abstractions, novelists dig into the specifics. To illustrate the point, Morson and Schapiro ask, When has a scientist's model or case study drawn a person as vividly as Tolstoy drew Anna Karenina?

Novels can also help us develop empathy. Stories, after all, steep us in characters' lives, forcing us to see the world as other people do. (Morson and Schapiro add that although many fields of study tell their practitioners to empathize, only literature offers practice in doing it.)

Sensemaking, by strategy consultant Christian Madsbjerg, picks up the thread from Morson and Schapiro and carries it back to Hartley. Madsbjerg argues that unless companies take pains to understand the human beings represented in their data sets, they risk losing touch with the markets they're serving. He says the deep cultural knowledge businesses need comes not from numbers-driven market research but from a humanities-driven study of texts, languages, and people.

Madsbjerg cites Lincoln, Ford's luxury brand, which just a few years ago lagged so far behind BMW and Mercedes that the company nearly killed it off. Executives knew that becoming competitive again would mean selling more cars outside the United States, especially in China, the next big luxury market. So they began to carefully examine how customers around the world experience, not just drive, cars. Over the course of a year, Lincoln representatives talked to customers about their daily lives and what "luxury" meant to them. They discovered that in many countries transportation isn't drivers' top priority: Cars are instead seen as social spaces or places to entertain business clients. Though well engineered, Lincolns needed to be reconceived to address the customers' human context. Subsequent design efforts have paid off: In 2016 sales in China tripled.

What these three books converge on is the idea that choosing a field of study is less important than finding ways to expand our thinking, an idea echoed by yet another set of new releases: A Practical Education, by business professor Randall Stross, and You Can Do Anything, by journalist George Anders. STEM students can care about human beings, just as English majors (including this one, who started college studying computer science) can investigate things scientifically. We should be careful not to let interdisciplinary jockeying make us cling to what we know best. Everything looks like a nail when you have a hammer, as the saying goes. Similarly, at how great a disadvantage might we put ourselves-and the world-if we force our minds to approach all problems the same way?

A version of this article appeared in the July-August 2017 issue (pp.144-145) of Harvard Business Review.

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Liberal Arts Majors Are the Future of the Tech Industry

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College students who major in the humanities always get asked a certain question. They're asked it so often-and by so many people-that it should come printed on their diplomas. That question, posed by friends, career counselors, and family, is "What are you planning to do with your degree?"

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Why We Need the Humanities Now More Than Ever

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Why We Need the Humanities Now More Than Ever

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The humanities call upon us to rediscover that cooperation across difference, and not competition, drives community, the nation and life itself.

There has never been a time when there was a greater need for the humanities. We can never have enough of the humanities, especially now.

When Prasanta Chakravarty recently wrote in The Wire that the "new seminaries of humanities studies ... act as a conduit to industry - now engaged in producing a horde of fideistic, supine, glossy work force," he puts it mildly at best. As neoliberalised spaces of learning set about questioning the 'purpose' and use value of a discipline that they say has fetishised intellectualism and commodified abstract thought while alienating the 'real' (the real, presumably being the 'glossy workforce' for the industry) and squeezing the humanities, then humanities in the university fight their rearguard action (the vanguard has moved into 'administration', such as it is).

There are two reasons why we need the humanities now more than ever:

Diminishing welfare and security nets (resulting from run-away privatisation, abolition of subsidies, benefits (like pensions) and protective laws) ensure that there are more precarious lives produced through disenfranchisement, displacement, silencing, massacres, more left out from the very category of the human and

The humanities are concerned with the excluded, the outsider.

In Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, Martha Nussbaum inventoried the constituents that make up the 'spirit of the humanities': "critical thought, daring imagination, empathetic understanding of human experiences of many different kinds, understanding the complexity of the world we live in". Empathetic understanding, acquired through critical thinking and close reading of the lives of other, different people, demands an attention and response to their vulnerabilities. Indeed, the spirit of the humanities, as it has been reinvented since the traditional humanists were exposed as racists and less enlightened than they presented themselves as, lies, perhaps, in the assumption that all humans are inherently vulnerable to lesser or greater degrees. This vulnerability depends on their emplaced embodiment - along axes of ability, gender, class, religion, sexual orientation, skin colour and so on. When examining the diversity of human experience, the new humanities examine those whose experiences are primarily of vulnerability and helplessness. When it looks at other - different - people, it teaches us to look at the excluded, through vulnerability.

The spirit of this new humanities stems from an intense awareness that humanist principles that might set the agenda for the rights regime in nascent nations need to guard against the erosion of the universalism (rights and equality for 'all') with which such nascent democracies have set out on the path of nationhood. In the embryonic stages of nation building - India is at this stage, perhaps - the recognition of vulnerability of large numbers of people is far more crucial to the rights regime than any construction of grand narratives of national pride, national identity or national progress. Such a humanities is concerned primarily with those who do not count within the nation and questions grand narratives that exclude segments of the already-vulnerable population from the ambit of the nation even as it enunciates universalising terms such as 'all Indians'.

Today's humanities are more than ever politico-philosophical projects grounded in differential living environments, unequal economies (of labour, sexuality, affect) and political disenfranchisement, aka democracy.

Democracy is constituted by different versions of the public and the public sphere. But when dominant classes, castes, elites and ideologies seek, and obtain, control over the public sphere, humanities initiate a distinctive public sphere that resists. Often termed the subaltern public sphere, this sphere is characterised by the social imaginaries of the oppressed: a 'precariat public sphere'. The 'precariat public sphere' is a public sphere made up of 'precarious lives', as Judith Butler has said. Here lives are lived in the shadow of displacement, starvation, social exclusion, unemployment and even massacres. The humanities are interested in this public sphere.

Literature (I take this to mean the humanities, no doubt to the chagrin of the others in the field), as Geoffrey Galt Harpham, former director of the National Endowment of the Humanities, said, is "a genre [that] seems especially committed to an exploration of outsiderhood". The humanities examine the process whereby nations construct outsiderhood by delimiting the 'public', especially when, technically, a country's constitution declares itself a democracy - and yet the ' demos' (public) is what is constantly left outside or, if inside, heavily monitored and regulated. When we read the lives of people unlike us (called 'characters' in literary studies) in literature classrooms, we read difference. Hence the parochial turn in literary research - reading only about one's own well-mined backyard is disturbing - not because of poor research quality (there is that, of course) but because of the insularity and closed-border 'expertise', the indifference to difference and the localised identity politics it enables and empowers.

The humanities value difference and call upon us to rediscover that cooperation across difference and not competition drives community, the nation and life itself. Nussbaum suggests that "human experiences of many different kinds" are central to the humanities. The humanities point out that we live in plural conditions, whether economic, political or cultural, in which personhood emerges. We coexist with life forms that we do not always choose to cohabit with, as Butler puts it. Culturally different people and communities are vulnerable in postcolonial contexts, where the narrative of belonging is often coded as a narrative of uniform, homogenised identities. Cultural differences produce vulnerability when these are treated as 'wrong' when they are simply different or when they are subsumed in the name of uniformity. Humanities introduce cultural differences into the very structure of teaching, learning and thinking, and introduce us to modes of reading that entails responding with respect to that difference: to see Igbo cultures as Igbo and not as lesser versions of European cultures, for instance. Cultures are similar - puberty, birthing, death, sex occur in all cultures, although their meanings vary for different cultures - but not identical in this scheme of things and the humanities emphasise what Holocaust scholar Michael Rothberg has called "differentiated similitude".

Amartya Sen, tracing the histories of dissenting thought in the subcontinent, notes how dialogue and exchanges were integral to the history of ideas, so that a difference of opinion or point of view was seen as a valuable contribution to the shaping of the intellectual universe. This plurality of thought, reflected in the best of humanities, accounts for radical/different/minoritarian thinking - Kabir, Ambedkar, Jyotirao Phule, Syed Ahmed Khan - in every era as well as conservative/traditional thinking. The debates in contemporary India around the demise of this plurality point the finger at the increasing monolithic and monologic interpretation of history, tradition, religion and the very idea of Indianness by the BJP. The BJP, in retaliation, underscores the long-standing dominance of Marxist interpretations of the same. But it is only within the humanities that both of these positions can be at least debated: from the Wahabis to Madanmohan Malviya, Ambedkar and Vinayak Savarkar.

For this debate to be even conceived of, the humanities need to be strengthened in universities. A university is a place where nothing is beyond question, not even the idea of a university or the idea of democracy, Jacques Derrida has said. This questioning is the province of the humanities, and the place of the humanities is the university where both democracy and the public sphere are forged.

Precarity as a condition of life is the subject of human rights studies, Derrida wrote, and the subject of

"the question of man, of what is proper to man, of human rights, of crimes against humanity ... must be in principle find its space of unconditional discussion and ... its legitimate space of research and reelaboration, [is] in the university and, within the university, above all, in the Humanities."

The humanities remain the last public space even within the public space of the university - and when the university shrinks in its public-ness, the last free space would, or should, still be the humanities.

This is an extract from a longer essay, 'The Postcolonial Humanities: A Manifesto', forthcoming in Rendezvous.

Pramod K. Nayar teaches at the University of Hyderabad.

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Why We Need the Humanities Now More Than Ever

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There has never been a time when there was a greater need for the humanities. We can never have enough of the humanities, especially now. When Prasanta Chakravarty recently wrote in The Wire that the "new seminaries of humanities studies ...

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Artists May Have Different Brains (More Grey Matter) Than the Rest of Us, According to a Recent Scientific Study | Open Culture

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Artists May Have Different Brains (More Grey Matter) Than the Rest of Us, According to a Recent Scientific Study | Open Culture

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Image Photo courtesy of the Laboratory of Neuro Imaging at UCLA.
Sometimes-as in the case of neuroscience-scientists and researchers seem to be saying several contradictory things at once. Yes, opposing claims can both be true, given different context and levels of description. But which is it, Neuroscientists? Do we have " neuroplasticity "-the ability to change our brains, and therefore our behavior? Or are we "hard-wired" to be a certain way by innate structures.

The debate long predates the field of neuroscience. It figured prominently in the work, for example, of John Locke and other early modern theorists of cognition-which is why Locke is best known as the theorist of tabula rasa. In " Some Thoughts Concerning Education," Locke mostly denies that we are able to change much at all in adulthood.

Personality, he reasoned, is determined not by biology, but in the "cradle" by "little, almost insensible impressions on our tender infancies." Such imprints "have very important and lasting consequences." Sorry, parents. Not only did your kid get wait-listed for that elite preschool, but their future will also be determined by millions of sights and sounds that happened around them before they could walk.

It's an extreme, and unscientific, contention, fascinating as it may be from a cultural standpoint. Now we have psychedelic-looking brain scans popping up in our news feeds all the time, promising to reveal the true origins of consciousness and personality. But the conclusions drawn from such research are tentative and often highly contested.

So what does science say about the eternally mysterious act of artistic creation? The abilities of artists have long seemed to us godlike, drawn from supernatural sources, or channeled from other dimensions. Many neuroscientists, you may not be surprised to hear, believe that such abilities reside in the brain. Moreover, some think that artists' brains are superior to those of mediocre ability.

Or at least that artists' brains have more gray and white matter than "right-brained" thinkers in the areas of "visual perception, spatial navigation and fine motor skills." So writes Katherine Brooks in a Huffington Post summary of " Drawing on the right side of the brain: A voxel-based morphometry analysis of observational drawing." The 2014 study, published at NeuroImage, involved a very small sampling of graduate students, 21 of whom were artists, 23 of whom were not. All 44 students were asked to complete drawing tasks, which were then scored and compared to images of their brain taken by a method called "voxel-based morphometry."

"The people who are better at drawing really seem to have more developed structures in regions of the brain that control for fine motor performance and what we call procedural memory," the study's lead author, Rebecca Chamberlain of Belgium's KU Leuven University, told the BBC. (Hear her segment on BBC Radio 4's Inside Science here.) Does this mean, as Artnet News claims in their quick take, that "artists' brains are more fully developed?"

It's a juicy headline, but the findings of this limited study, while "intriguing," are "far from conclusive." Nonetheless, it marks an important first step. "No studies" thus far, Chamberlain says, "have assessed the structural differences associated with representational skills in visual arts." Would a dozen such studies resolve questions about causality--nature or nurture? As usual, the truth probably lies somewhere in-between.

At Smithsonian, Randy Rieland quotes several critics of the neuroscience of art, which has previously focused on what happens in the brain when we look at a Van Gogh or read Jane Austen. The problem with such studies, writes Philip Ball at , is that they can lead to "creating criteria of right or wrong, either in the art itself or in individual reactions to it." But such criteria may already be predetermined by culturally-conditioned responses to art.

The science is fascinating and may lead to numerous discoveries. It does not, as the Creators Project writes hyperbolically, suggest that "artists actually are different creatures from everyone else on the planet." As University of California philosopher professor Alva Noe states succinctly, one problem with making sweeping generalizations about brains that view or create art is that "there can be nothing like a settled, once-and-for-all account of what art is."

Emerging fields of "neuroaesthetics" and "neurohumanities" may muddy the waters between quantitative and qualitative distinctions, and may not really answer questions about where art comes from and what it does to us. But then again, given enough time, they just might.
via The Creators Project Related Content: This Is Your Brain on Jane Austen: The Neuroscience of Reading Great Literature The Neuroscience of Drumming: Researchers Discover the Secrets of Drumming & The Human Brain The Neuroscience & Psychology of Procrastination, and How to Overcome It Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Artists May Have Different Brains (More Grey Matter) Than the Rest of Us, According to a Recent Scientific Study

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Image Photo courtesy of the Laboratory of Neuro Imaging at UCLA. Sometimes-as in the case of neuroscience-scientists and researchers seem to be saying several contradictory things at once. Yes, opposing claims can both be true, given different context and levels of description.

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Learning to read and write alters brain wiring within months, even for adults - The Washington Post

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Learning to read and write alters brain wiring within months, even for adults - The Washington Post

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Let's hear it for the written word. Learning to read can have profound effects on the wiring of the adult brain, even in regions that aren't usually associated with reading and writing.

That's what researchers found when they taught a group of illiterate adults in rural India to read and write.

Michael Skeide and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Science in Leipzig, Germany, wanted to study how culture changes the brain, so they focused on reading and writing. These cultural inventions have appeared only recently in our evolutionary history, so we haven't had a chance to evolve specific genes for such skills.

The team recruited 30 people whose average age was about 31. Twenty-one were taught to read and write the Devanagari script, which is used in Hindi and other Indian languages, over six months. Nine people weren't taught anything. All had their brains scanned before and after the six-month period.

By the end of the study, the team saw significant changes in the brains of the people who had learned to read and write. These individuals showed an increase in brain activity in the cortex, the outermost layer of the brain, which is involved in learning.

Learning to read also seemed to change brain regions that aren't typically involved in reading, writing or learning. In particular, two regions deep in the brain appeared more active after training: portions of the thalamus and the brainstem.

These two regions are known to coordinate information from our senses and our movement, among other things. In those who had learned to read, both areas made stronger connections to the part of the brain that processes vision. The most dramatic changes were seen in those people who progressed the most in their reading and writing skills.

The brainstem and thalamus are also known to control attention, so this may also be enhanced by learning to read and write.

"This clearly shows that reading, which involves important cognitive processes, also involves the development of important sensorimotor skills, namely the need to finely control eye movements to scan the text lines and to [move the eyes] onto most informative parts of text," said Gianluca Baldassarre of the Institute for Cognitive Sciences and Technologies in Rome.

Such changes are probably happening in children as they learn to read and write - possibly faster and more widely than was seen in the Indian adults - but no such studies have been done in children, says team member Falk Huettig of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands.

The findings might help shed light on dyslexia. In people with that condition, the structure and function of the thalamus can be different from what is typical. If the wiring of the thalamus can change with an intensive literacy course, it is possible that a lack of reading experience may explain these differences. The real cause of dyslexia may lie elsewhere, Huettig said.
- New Scientist

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Learning to read and write alters brain wiring within months, even for adults

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Let's hear it for the written word. Learning to read can have profound effects on the wiring of the adult brain, even in regions that aren't usually associated with reading and writing. That's what researchers found when they taught a group of illiterate adults in rural India to read and write.

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How the humanities can illuminate air travel incivilities (essay)

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How the humanities can illuminate air travel incivilities (essay)

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When I worked at an airport between 2001 and 2003, the airline that hired me gave out laudatory certificates to employees whenever passengers would report above-average customer service, or any other effort that had been noticed and appreciated. On the one hand, those medal-emblazoned posters were cheesy and brimmed with the type of hollow praise proffered to alienated workers. But on the other, they were well intentioned and meaningful: they reminded us that we were working together, with and for other human beings, on both sides of the counter (as well as above, at the corporate level).

I look at a couple of those certificates now, saved from many years ago, and I wonder if the airline still recognizes such little instances of harmony in the maelstrom of contemporary commercial flight. These days it can seem as though humanity has left the airport entirely, what with random fistfights breaking out, hapless passengers dragged off airplanes, racial epithets lobbed heatedly across seat backs, families humiliated for the most minor domestic incursions and so on. Our worst tendencies and habits come into full bloom during air travel. And people seem at once both surprised by and weirdly expectant of it. We roll our eyes at the latest viral video of violence in the aisles, and we turn the channel or swipe over to a new feed.

I've been trying for many years, and over the course of writing three books, to untangle the distinct knots of negativity that airports have become known for. Somehow, it is perfectly acceptable to hate airports, even as they are also supposed to represent the apex of modern progress and cosmopolitan coexistence. How did we get to this contradictory place? And what, if anything, can those of us in academe do to shed light on and possibly even improve matters?

While flying recently I flipped through the pages of Delta's in-flight magazine, Sky, and I noticed an article called "Higher Education in the Fast Lane" (May 2017). The piece surveyed a range of colleges and universities with expedited degree programs: "helping students get into the work force more quickly and efficiently." One ad for Georgia Institute of Technology's School of Building Construction showed a worker in a hard hat and caution vest, architectural plans rolled up under his arm and giant cranes in background. The picture is one of professionalism and focused labor, and serves as a synecdoche for orderly society at large. But if the building in the background happened to be an airport, then we would know that all this supposed orderliness would soon come to an end. Build a neat and tidy airport, and you invite pandemonium and civil breakdown.

When I tell people that I teach a college class about airports, they often assume I mean from a managerial or organizational standpoint: what makes them work and how they can be improved. Sometimes I get perplexed looks when I explain that my course is about representations of airports and how we communicate and think about airports. It's as though it never occurred to these people that airports and airplanes could have any other meaning or existence other than the status they seem indelibly to have: abject, ugly and plainly understood.

This isn't just a shortcoming on behalf of airports. It's also about the role of thinking and imagination in our everyday lives, and about basic standards of human interaction, respect and decency. This latter stuff makes what I'm talking about sound snobbish and stuffy, but I don't mean it that way. I mean it in the way that college instructors try, with great patience and care, to foster classroom environments of empathy, listening and dialogue. Seminars -- especially in the humanities -- have the ability to teach students to bracket initial judgments, appreciate differences and discuss complex, nuanced topics. They do precisely what we could use a lot more of these days, especially in airports and airliners.

But as evinced by the Sky magazine article, we're increasingly skimping on college -- and particularly the humanities. Foreign-language programs get squeezed to the minimum or cut outright because they are seen as too time intensive for today's overworked student. History, literature, philosophy, religious studies -- these disciplines are viewed as superfluous or get whittled down to some hotly debated, if barely accepted, "core curriculum." It is now commonplace to refer to college as too expensive and out of touch with "the real world." But are we really so proud of this real world we've devised as it comes through one of our proudest achievements -- air travel? Automobile prices go up and up, as do housing prices, not to mention medicine and health care -- and people complain about the cost of higher education?

In fact, not only air travel but also contemporary life at large need more, not fewer, people taking humanities courses -- adult learning that is dedicated to reflection, understanding across differences and respectful discourse. Of course, disagreement and disparities play out in college classrooms, too, thus inviting tensions between "safe spaces" and free speech, between self-certainty and the awareness of one's own epistemological horizons. Yet the thoughtful exercise of these soft skills is exactly what is lacking in the day-to-day grind of flight. And corporate policy and lawmaking are not going to usher such things into bustling transit nodes. Only people can do that, of their own volition and out of a collective commitment to shared humanistic values.

Such values must also be open and flexible, and they must operate irrespective of narrower value systems encoded in family, nationality, religion and so forth. Not that those other values must be jettisoned, but the heterogeneous nature of airspace requires a relentless openness along with excessive patience on all sides. Those qualities, too, can be practiced and honed in the college classroom.

And so a simple plan: if we want to work toward more civil and humane modes of air travel, we should also be willing to invest -- time, money and thought -- in the humanities. I've been talking here about higher education specifically, mainly because the lack of faith in humanities at the college level strikes me as a relevant analogue to the dearth of civility in airports. College and air travel are two concentrated places where what happens cannot help but reflect and reinforce broader patterns and trends. We may wish for quicker paths to college degrees, as well as fast and cheap travel by air, but are we willing to accept the consequences -- the attendant pressurized spaces and times? If not, we may want to think about the relationships between these realms, and how they are inescapably entwined.

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How the humanities can illuminate air travel incivilities (essay)

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When I worked at an airport between 2001 and 2003, the airline that hired me gave out laudatory certificates to employees whenever passengers would report above-average customer service, or any other effort that had been noticed and appreciated. On the one hand, those medal-emblazoned posters were cheesy and brimmed with the type of hollow praise proffered to alienated workers.

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Young Brazilian artist Sarmurr heals past abuse trauma through otherworldly creations - AFROPUNK

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Young Brazilian artist Sarmurr heals past abuse trauma through otherworldly creations - AFROPUNK

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As cliche as it sounds, pain is one of the most poignant sources of art, and for Brazilian multimedia artist Samuel Saboia, aka Sarmurr or Nympheshit, trauma is a part of what got him started. The Recife born, São Paulo based youngster is far beyond his years in wisdom, creative output, and quality, and each of his creative monikers attest to that.
Creativity as a means of survival is something all artists can relate to in some way or another and when reflecting Sarmurr said, "When I started my art it was my way to escape madness and every single suicidal thought that I had. Abuse is something really hard and as a black man and pastor's son it affected me so much that I was unable to speak about it. Art was my way of creating a new and safe zone to me, a place where I could breathe, where I could be free of that stigma, where I could fill the hole that it had made on me."
Using drawings, photography, video and music, Sarmurr's livelihood became insistent upon using art to buoy himself as well as express the thoughts and pain he'd endured. Support this talented artist on his journey towards healing, and show him some love viaFacebook and Instagram.

By T. McLendon, AFROPUNK Contributor

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Young Brazilian artist Sarmurr heals past abuse trauma through otherworldly creations

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As cliche as it sounds, pain is one of the most poignant sources of art, and for Brazilian multimedia artist Samuel Saboia, aka Sarmurr or Nympheshit, trauma is a part of what got him started. The Recife born, São Paulo based youngster is far beyond his years in wisdom, creative output, and quality, and each of his creative monikers attest to that.

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The art of learning: Why art history might be the most important subject you could study today - Salon.com

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The art of learning: Why art history might be the most important subject you could study today - Salon.com

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Want a more educated, less narrow-minded citizenry that can tell fake news from real? Make them take this class

We Americans tend to think of the British as infinitely more refined and cultivated than we are (despite the Brexit vote), but England almost eliminated art history as a field of study for high school students. This would have cut it off at the knees and crippled it as a field of study altogether, because in the UK, high school students must choose their study subject when applying to university - if they've had no art history in high school, they are unlikely to choose it at uni. But after much protest from the liberal intellectual establishment, art history was "saved" and will stay on British curricula. If the cultured British nearly did away with art history, then what hope have we Americans?

There has been much discussion of the advantages of humanities versus STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). Some Republican senators were pushing to reduce subsidies for humanities majors, and shift funding to STEM subjects that many feel are more immediately, practically useful. It is easy to see that Donald Trump could also be of this opinion, and so it is a genuine concern for those of us who recognize the value of the humanities.

This is not a movement to make the humanities disappear altogether, but it is essentially undercutting the perceived value of them, considering them a whimsy, a (possibly) fun pastime (if you're into that sort of thing), not something that helps the world or, and this is key, makes money or increases power. It's an echo of the Communist school system in the Soviet Union, where the State determined what the country needed, and assigned students to various fields of study and then professions, scooping up, for instance, the very best students and siphoning them off to be rocket scientists or chemical engineers.

John Berger, an art historian and television presenter who died on Jan. 2, was best known for his book and 1972 television series, both entitled "Ways of Seeing." He is the most overt of art historians who taught us how to see differently. That is about as good an argument as I can think of for why art history is an important field of study, and a good antidote to the narrow-minded, horse-blinder mentality that plagues many politicians and American citizens, and perhaps even certain presidents who need not be mentioned.

Part of Berger's argument is about how to see through mindsets different from our own, sympathetically and with the understanding that doing so reveals truths about what we see, and about ourselves. Sounds like the opposite of the attitude of the right-wing movements that some might call the contemporary scourge of the Western world. Berger also taught us how to unpack what we do see, to separate the wheat from the chaff, the truth from the fiction, and to uncloak hidden ideologies in visual images. For instance, the subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) way in which women are objectified by everything from Renaissance paintings to contemporary TV ads. This could not be more relevant today, with messages, overt and covert, presented in speeches, the television news, promotional videos, body language (during televised presidential debates, for instance) and more. Our culture is far more barraged by images than Berger's was in 1972, only heightening the relevance of his lessons (the main addition being that the images, these days, are moving and are consumed on laptops and phones).

A key point of his is that we look at art of a past period and culture too often through the lens of our own. This is understandable - it's hard to imagine how we would think in, say, third-century Rome or 17th-century Holland. But to force today's mentality and knowledge onto a historical period is, necessarily, to push a square peg through a round hole.

Take, for example, a lesson I teach my art history students, regardless of their age or background. When looking at pre-Modern art, avoid turning on the lights.

For many years, I taught a course for Brown University in Rome, called "Secrets and Symbols of Roman Art and Architecture." While popping into various churches in the city, we'd approach a chapel and there would inevitably be a box into which you could slip coins to turn on bright lights, to better see the art. My students seemed never to have considered that these 16th- and 17th-century paintings should not be seen with bright electric lights. Sure, it's easier to see with them, but they were not intended to be seen thus, centuries before the invention of the lightbulb. They are dark and murky, crisscrossed or engulfed by shadows: that was how they were meant to be seen. The only illumination would come from natural sunlight (usually limited in chapels), and perhaps a candle held aloft by a member of the clergy or the family of the patron of the work. This is the natural habitat for Caravaggio's shadowy canvases, for instance.

The science of optics played a role in Berger's "ways of seeing," despite the fact that he is speaking about art. I cannot think of any discipline more inherently interdisciplinary than art history. Through the context of artworks, we study history, anthropology, sociology, war and politics, biography, literature, theology and critical interpretation, to name a few of the theoretical angles. But we also look at optics (for instance, in analyzing single-vanishing-point perspective), chemistry (how paint was prepared), neuroscience (what happens in the brain when it encounters art), geometry (why some works, based on triangular composition, feel more harmonious), physics and engineering (how Brunelleschi's dome stays up), and much more. It is a great subject for those who can't decide what to study. But it is particularly strong in opening one's mind up to alternative viewpoints.

Psychotherapists Dr. Albert and Lea Mrgole underscore the importance of learning how to learn, that key tool that comes with studying the humanities. "Relevant to each area of work is the ability to acquire knowledge throughout life, attitude to learning and knowledge, which requires an awareness that knowledge changes fast and its development needs to be followed. This means that we need certain traits and skills: adaptability and plasticity, flexibility, curiosity, mobility, creativity, independent thinking."

That is not to say that you won't develop these faculties if you study STEM subjects. But humanities subjects are built upon them - this is why a liberal arts education has been considered the finest one can have for nearly a century. This teaches you not the specifics of how to manipulate X to produce Y, but how to teach yourself how to do whatever you need to do in the future. This might be manipulating X to produce Y, or it might be adapting to having to manipulate X and Z to produce Y, or to have the flexibility and imagination to think of an entirely new way to produce Y, or to realize that Y needn't be produced at all.

For art history, a comfort in a variety of disciplines is necessary. As Nobel Prize-winner Dr. Eric Kandel, a neuroscientist, told me, the biggest breakthroughs in any field come from those approaching from a different discipline, from outsiders: "This is true in all areas. It's good to have an outside perspective. . . . Within a field, the focus can be very narrow, so it's good to have some fresh insight." It is uncommon to find interdisciplinary thought encouraged in the STEM subjects, the hard science fields. You don't often get a mathematician told to approach a problem from a chemist's perspective, or an industrial engineer looking to molecular biology to reach a new solution.

Art history aside, humanities (when taught well) teaches students how to learn. How to teach themselves, to think outside the box, to accept and appreciate different perspectives. Appreciation for, and tolerance of, different cultures is part and parcel of this. Restricted, drilled-in viewpoints rarely produce anything fruitful or new; they just keep treading the same wheel and, worse, can produce intolerance. As an employer, it's not enough to have an army of rote peons who think the same way - you need those who dream, as well. Without studying the humanities, we encourage robotic, repetitive behaviors, systems, ways of thought. Our ways of seeing are limited. Our civilization becomes homogenized in its practice and concepts. And the arts are the highest achievement of a civilization for which basic needs are met. Without the humanities, our civilization narrows and becomes less civilized. Without the arts, the zenith of what civilization is capable is decapitated.

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The art of learning: Why art history might be the most important subject you could study today

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We Americans tend to think of the British as infinitely more refined and cultivated than we are (despite the Brexit vote), but England almost eliminated art history as a field of study for high school students.

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Obama’s Secret to Surviving the White House Years: Books - The New York Times

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Obama’s Secret to Surviving the White House Years: Books - The New York Times

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[ Read a transcript of the interview with Barack Obama ]

The writings of Lincoln, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi and Nelson Mandela, Mr. Obama found, were "particularly helpful" when "what you wanted was a sense of solidarity," adding "during very difficult moments, this job can be very isolating." "So sometimes you have to sort of hop across history to find folks who have been similarly feeling isolated, and that's been useful." There is a handwritten copy of the Gettysburg Address in the Lincoln Bedroom, and sometimes, in the evening, Mr. Obama says, he would wander over from his home office to read it.

Like Lincoln, Mr. Obama taught himself how to write, and for him, too, words became a way to define himself, and to communicate his ideas and ideals to the world. In fact, there is a clear, shining line connecting Lincoln and King, and President Obama. In speeches like the ones delivered in Charleston and Selma, he has followed in their footsteps, putting his mastery of language in the service of a sweeping historical vision, which, like theirs, situates our current struggles with race and injustice in a historical continuum that traces how far we've come and how far we have yet to go. It's a vision of America as an unfinished project - a continuing, more-than-two-century journey to make the promises of the Declaration of Independence real for everyone - rooted both in Scripture and the possibility of redemption, and a more existential belief that we can continually remake ourselves. And it's a vision shared by the civil rights movement, which overcame obstacle after obstacle, and persevered in the face of daunting odds.

Mr. Obama's long view of history and the optimism (combined with a stirring reminder of the hard work required by democracy) that he articulated in his farewell speech last week are part of a hard-won faith, grounded in his reading, in his knowledge of history (and its unexpected zigs and zags), and his embrace of artists like Shakespeare who saw the human situation entire: its follies, cruelties and mad blunders, but also its resilience, decencies and acts of grace. The playwright's tragedies, he says, have been "foundational for me in understanding how certain patterns repeat themselves and play themselves out between human beings."

Context in Presidential Biographies

Presidential biographies also provided context, countering the tendency to think "that whatever's going on right now is uniquely disastrous or amazing or difficult," he said. "It just serves you well to think about Roosevelt trying to navigate through World War II."

Even books initially picked up as escape reading like the Hugo Award-winning apocalyptic sci-fi epic " The Three-Body Problem " by the Chinese writer Liu Cixin, he said, could unexpectedly put things in perspective: "The scope of it was immense. So that was fun to read, partly because my day-to-day problems with Congress seem fairly petty - not something to worry about. Aliens are about to invade!"

In his searching 1995 book "Dreams From My Father," Mr. Obama recalls how reading was a crucial tool in sorting out what he believed, dating back to his teenage years, when he immersed himself in works by Baldwin, Ellison, Hughes, Wright, DuBois and Malcolm X in an effort "to raise myself to be a black man in America." Later, during his last two years in college, he spent a focused period of deep self-reflection and study, methodically reading philosophers from St. Augustine to Nietzsche, Emerson to Sartre to Niebuhr, to strip down and test his own beliefs.

To this day, reading has remained an essential part of his daily life. He recently gave his daughter Malia a Kindle filled with books he wanted to share with her (including "One Hundred Years of Solitude," "The Golden Notebook" and "The Woman Warrior"). And most every night in the White House, he would read for an hour or so late at night - reading that was deep and ecumenical, ranging from contemporary literary fiction (the last novel he read was Colson Whitehead's " The Underground Railroad") to classic novels to groundbreaking works of nonfiction like Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking, Fast and Slow" and Elizabeth Kolbert's " The Sixth Extinction."

Such books were a way for the president to shift mental gears from the briefs and policy papers he studied during the day, a way "to get out of my own head," a way to escape the White House bubble. Some novels helped him to better "imagine what's going on in the lives of people" across the country - for instance, he found that Marilynne Robinson's novels connected him emotionally to the people he was meeting in Iowa during the 2008 campaign, and to his own grandparents, who were from the Midwest, and the small town values of hard work and honesty and humility.

Other novels served as a kind of foil - something to argue with. V. S. Naipaul's novel "A Bend in the River," Mr. Obama recalls, "starts with the line 'The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.' And I always think about that line and I think about his novels when I'm thinking about the hardness of the world sometimes, particularly in foreign policy, and I resist and fight against sometimes that very cynical, more realistic view of the world. And yet, there are times where it feels as if that may be true."

Writing was key to his thinking process, too: a tool for sorting through "a lot of crosscurrents in my own life - race, class, family. And I genuinely believe that it was part of the way in which I was able to integrate all these pieces of myself into something relatively whole."

A Writer of Short Stories

Mr. Obama taught himself to write as a young man by keeping a journal and writing short stories when he was a community organizer in Chicago - working on them after he came home from work and drawing upon the stories of the people he met. Many of the tales were about older people, and were informed by a sense of disappointment and loss: "There is not a lot of Jack Kerouac open-road, young kid on the make discovering stuff," he says. "It's more melancholy and reflective."

That experience underscored the power of empathy. An outsider himself - with a father from Kenya, who left when he was 2, and a mother from Kansas, who took him to live for a time in Indonesia - he could relate to many of the people he met in the churches and streets of Chicago, who felt dislocated by change and isolation, and he took to heart his boss's observation that "the thing that brings people together to share the courage to take action on behalf of their lives is not just that they care about the same issues, it's that they have shared stories."

This lesson would become a cornerstone of the president's vision of an America where shared concerns - simple dreams of a decent job, a secure future for one's children - might bridge differences and divisions. After all, many people saw their own stories in his - an American story, as he said in his keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention possible "in no other country on Earth."

In today's polarized environment, where the internet has let people increasingly retreat to their own silos (talking only to like-minded folks, who amplify their certainties and biases), the president sees novels and other art (like the musical "Hamilton") as providing a kind of bridge that might span usual divides and "a reminder of the truths under the surface of what we argue about every day."

He points out, for instance, that the fiction of Junot Díaz and Jhumpa Lahiri speaks "to a very particular contemporary immigration experience," but at the same time tell stories about "longing for this better place but also feeling displaced" - a theme central to much of American literature, and not unlike books by Philip Roth and Saul Bellow that are "steeped with this sense of being an outsider, longing to get in, not sure what you're giving up."

Mr. Obama entered office as a writer, and he will soon return to a private life as a writer, planning to work on his memoirs, which will draw on journals he's kept in the White House ("but not with the sort of discipline that I would have hoped for"). He has a writer's sensibility - an ability to be in the moment while standing apart as an observer, a novelist's eye and ear for detail, and a precise but elastic voice capable of moving easily between the lyrical and the vernacular and the profound.

He had lunch last week with five novelists he admires - Dave Eggers, Mr. Whitehead, Zadie Smith, Mr. Díaz and Barbara Kingsolver. He not only talked with them about the political and media landscape, but also talked shop, asking how their book tours were going and remarking that he likes to write first drafts, long hand, on yellow legal pads.

Mr. Obama says he is hoping to eventually use his presidential center website "to widen the audience for good books" - something he's already done with regular lists of book recommendations - and then encourage a public "conversation about books."

"At a time," he says, "when so much of our politics is trying to manage this clash of cultures brought about by globalization and technology and migration, the role of stories to unify - as opposed to divide, to engage rather than to marginalize - is more important than ever."

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Obama's Secret to Surviving the White House Years: Books

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Read a transcript of the interview with Barack Obama ] The writings of Lincoln, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi and Nelson Mandela, Mr. Obama found, were "particularly helpful" when "what you wanted was a sense of solidarity," adding "during very difficult moments, this job can be very isolating."

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How Diversity Makes Us Smarter - Scientific American

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How Diversity Makes Us Smarter - Scientific American

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The first thing to acknowledge about diversity is that it can be difficult. In the U.S., where the dialogue of inclusion is relatively advanced, even the mention of the word "diversity" can lead to anxiety and conflict. Supreme Court justices disagree on the virtues of diversity and the means for achieving it. Corporations spend billions of dollars to attract and manage diversity both internally and externally, yet they still face discrimination lawsuits, and the leadership ranks of the business world remain predominantly white and male.

It is reasonable to ask what good diversity does us. Diversity of expertise confers benefits that are obvious-you would not think of building a new car without engineers, designers and quality-control experts-but what about social diversity? What good comes from diversity of race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation? Research has shown that social diversity in a group can cause discomfort, rougher interactions, a lack of trust, greater perceived interpersonal conflict, lower communication, less cohesion, more concern about disrespect, and other problems. So what is the upside?

The fact is that if you want to build teams or organizations capable of innovating, you need diversity. Diversity enhances creativity. It encourages the search for novel information and perspectives, leading to better decision-making and problem-solving. Diversity can improve the bottom line of companies and lead to unfettered discoveries and breakthrough innovations. Even simply being exposed to diversity can change the way you think. This is not just wishful thinking: it is the conclusion I draw from decades of research from organizational scientists, psychologists, sociologists, economists and demographers.

Information and Innovation

The key to understanding the positive influence of diversity is the concept of informational diversity. When people are brought together to solve problems in groups, they bring different information, opinions and perspectives. This makes obvious sense when we talk about diversity of disciplinary backgrounds-think again of the interdisciplinary team building a car. The same logic applies to social diversity. People who are different from one another in race, gender and other dimensions bring unique information and experiences to bear on the task at hand. A male and a female engineer might have perspectives as different from each other as an engineer and a physicist-and that is a good thing.

Research on large, innovative organizations has shown repeatedly that this is the case. For example, business professors Cristian Dezsö of the University of Maryland and David Gaddis Ross of the University of Florida studied the effect of gender diversity on the top firms in Standard & Poor's Composite 1500 list, a group designed to reflect the overall U.S. equity market. First, they examined the size and gender composition of firms' top management teams from 1992 through 2006. Then they looked at the financial performance of the firms. In their words, they found that, on average, "female representation in top management leads to an increase of $42 million in firm value." They also measured the firms' "innovation intensity" through the ratio of research and development expenses to assets. They found that companies that prioritized innovation saw greater financial gains when women were part of the top leadership ranks.

Racial diversity can deliver the same kinds of benefits. In a study conducted in 2003, Orlando Richard, now at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and his colleagues surveyed executives at 177 national banks in the U.S., then put together a database comparing financial performance, racial diversity and the emphasis the bank presidents put on innovation. For innovation-focused banks, increases in racial diversity were clearly related to enhanced financial performance.

Evidence for the benefits of diversity can be found well beyond the U.S. In August 2012 a team of researchers at the Credit Suisse Research Institute issued a report in which they examined 2,360 companies globally from 2005 to 2011, looking for a relation between gender diversity on corporate management boards and financial performance. Sure enough, the researchers found that companies with one or more women on the board delivered higher average returns on equity, lower gearing (that is, net debt to equity) and better average growth.

How Diversity Provokes Thought

Large data-set studies have an obvious limitation: they can show only that diversity is correlated with better performance, not that it causes better performance. Research on racial diversity in small groups, however, makes it possible to draw some causal conclusions. Again, the findings are clear: for groups that value innovation and new ideas, diversity helps.

In 2006 Margaret Neale of Stanford University, Gregory Northcraft of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and I set out to examine the impact of racial diversity on small decision-making groups in an experiment where sharing information was a requirement for success. Our subjects were undergraduate students taking business courses at the University of Illinois. We put together three-person groups-some consisting of all white members, others with two white members and one nonwhite member-and had them perform a murder mystery exercise. We made sure that all group members shared a common set of information, but we also gave each member important clues that only he or she knew. To find out who committed the murder, the group members would have to share all the information they collectively possessed during discussion. The groups with racial diversity significantly outperformed the groups with no racial diversity. Being with similar others leads us to think we all hold the same information and share the same perspective. This perspective, which stopped the all-white groups from effectively processing the information, is what hinders creativity and innovation.

Other researchers have found similar results. In 2004 Anthony Lising Antonio, a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, collaborated with five colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles, and other institutions to examine the influence of racial and opinion composition in small group discussions. More than 350 students from three universities participated in the study. Group members were asked to discuss a prevailing social issue (either child labor practices or the death penalty) for 15 minutes. The researchers wrote dissenting opinions and had both Black and white members deliver them to their groups. When a Black person presented a dissenting perspective to a group of white people, the perspective was perceived as more novel and led to broader thinking and consideration of alternatives than when a white person introduced that same dissenting perspective. The lesson: when we hear dissent from someone who is different from us, it provokes more thought than when it comes from someone who looks like us.

This effect is not limited to race. For example, in 2013 professors of management Denise Lewin Loyd of the University of Illinois, Cynthia Wang of Northwestern University, Robert B. Lount, Jr., of the Ohio State University and I asked 186 people whether they identified as a Democrat or a Republican, then had them read a murder mystery and decide who they thought committed the crime. Next, we asked the subjects to prepare for a meeting with another group member by writing an essay communicating their perspective. More important, in all cases, we told the participants that their partner disagreed with their opinion but that they would need to come to an agreement with the other person. Everyone was told to prepare to convince their meeting partner to come around to their side; half of the subjects, however, were told to prepare to make their case to a member of the opposing political party, and half were told to make their case to a member of their own party.

The result: Democrats who were told that a fellow Democrat disagreed with them prepared less well for the discussion than Democrats who were told that a Republican disagreed with them. Republicans showed the same pattern. When disagreement comes from a socially different person, we are prompted to work harder. Diversity jolts us into cognitive action in ways that homogeneity simply does not.

For this reason, diversity appears to lead to higher-quality scientific research. In 2014 Richard Freeman, an economics professor at Harvard University and director of the Science and Engineering Workforce Project at the National Bureau of Economic Research, along with Wei Huang, then a Harvard economics Ph.D. candidate, examined the ethnic identity of the authors of 1.5 million scientific papers written between 1985 and 2008 using Thomson Reuters's Web of Science, a comprehensive database of published research. They found that papers written by diverse groups receive more citations and have higher impact factors than papers written by people from the same ethnic group. Moreover, they found that stronger papers are associated with greater numbers of not only references but also author addresses-geographical diversity is a reflection of more intellectual diversity.

The Power of Anticipation

Diversity is not only about bringing different perspectives to the table. Simply adding social diversity to a group makes people believe that differences of perspective might exist among them, and that belief makes people change their behavior.

Members of a homogeneous group rest somewhat assured that they will agree with one another, understand one another's perspectives and beliefs, and be able to easily come to a consensus. But when members of a group notice that they are socially different from one another, they change their expectations. They anticipate differences of opinion and perspective. They assume they will need to work harder to come to a consensus. This logic helps to explain both the upside and the downside of social diversity: people work harder in diverse environments both cognitively and socially. They might not like it, but the hard work can lead to better outcomes.

In a 2006 study of jury decision-making, social psychologist Samuel Sommers of Tufts University found that racially diverse groups exchanged a wider range of information during deliberation about a sexual assault case than all-white groups did. In collaboration with judges and jury administrators in a Michigan courtroom, Sommers conducted mock jury trials with a group of real selected jurors. Although the participants knew the mock jury was a court-sponsored experiment, they did not know that the true purpose of the research was to study the impact of racial diversity on jury decision-making.

Sommers composed the six-person juries with either all white jurors or four white and two Black jurors. As you might expect, the diverse juries were better at considering case facts, made fewer errors recalling relevant information and displayed a greater openness to discussing the role of race in the case. These improvements did not necessarily happen because the Black jurors brought new information to the group-they happened because white jurors changed their behavior in the presence of the Black jurors. In the presence of diversity, they were more diligent and open-minded.

Group Exercise

Consider the following scenario: You are writing up a section of a paper for presentation at an upcoming conference. You are anticipating some disagreement and potential difficulty communicating because your collaborator is American and you are Chinese. Because of one social distinction, you may focus on other differences between yourself and that person, such as their culture, upbringing and experiences-differences that you would not expect from another Chinese collaborator. How do you prepare for the meeting? In all likelihood, you will work harder on explaining your rationale and anticipating alternatives than you would have otherwise.

This is how diversity works: by promoting hard work and creativity; by encouraging the consideration of alternatives even before any interpersonal interaction takes place. The pain associated with diversity can be thought of as the pain of exercise. You have to push yourself to grow your muscles. The pain, as the old saw goes, produces the gain. In just the same way, we need diversity-in teams, organizations and society as a whole-if we are to change, grow and innovate.

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Being around people who are different from us makes us more creative, more diligent and harder-working

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Transcript: President Obama on What Books Mean to Him - The New York Times

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Transcript: President Obama on What Books Mean to Him - The New York Times

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Part of what was interesting was me pulling back books that I thought were really powerful, but that might not surface when she goes to college.
Have you had a chance to discuss them with her? What made you want to become a writer?
I've had the chance to discuss some. And she's interested in being a filmmaker, so storytelling is of great interest to her. She had just read "A Moveable Feast." I hadn't included that, and she was just captivated by the idea that Hemingway described his goal of writing one true thing every day.

I loved reading when I was a kid, partly because I was traveling so much, and there were times where I'd be displaced, I'd be the outsider. When I first moved to Indonesia, I'm this big, dark-skinned kid that kind of stood out. And then when I moved back from Indonesia to Hawaii, I had the manners and habits probably of an Indonesian kid.
I think all of us did.
And so the idea of having these worlds that were portable, that were yours, that you could enter into, was appealing to me. And then I became a teenager and wasn't reading that much other than what was assigned in school, and playing basketball and chasing girls, and imbibing things that weren't very healthy.
T hat period in New York, where you were intensely reading.
Yeah. And then I think rediscovered writing and reading and thinking in my first or second year of college and used that as a way to rebuild myself, a process I write about in "Dreams From My Father."

I was hermetic - it really is true. I had one plate, one towel, and I'd buy clothes from thrift shops. And I was very intense, and sort of humorless. But it reintroduced me to the power of words as a way to figure out who you are and what you think, and what you believe, and what's important, and to sort through and interpret this swirl of events that is happening around you every minute.
What were your short stories like?
And so even though by the time I graduated I knew I wanted to be involved in public policy, or I had these vague notions of organizing, the idea of continuing to write and tell stories as part of that was valuable to me. And so I would come home from work, and I would write in my journal or write a story or two.

The great thing was that it was useful in my organizing work. Because when I got there, the guy who had hired me said that the thing that brings people together to have the courage to take action on behalf of their lives is not just that they care about the same issue, it's that they have shared stories. And he told me that if you learn how to listen to people's stories and can find what's sacred in other people's stories, then you'll be able to forge a relationship that lasts.

But my interest in public service and politics then merged with the idea of storytelling.

It's interesting, when I read them, a lot of them had to do with older people.
Was writing partly a way to figure out your identity? Has that continued to be so in the presidency?
I think part of the reason was because I was working in communities with people who were significantly older than me. We were going into churches, and probably the average age of these folks was 55, 60. A lot of them had scratched and clawed their way into the middle class, but just barely. They were seeing the communities in which they had invested their hopes and dreams and raised their kids starting to decay - steel mills had closed, and there had been a lot of racial turnover in these communities. And so there was also this sense of loss and disappointment.
But you keep some form of a journal?
And so a bunch of the short stories I wrote had to do with that sense, that atmosphere. One story is about an old black pastor who seems to be about to lose his church, his lease is running out and he's got this loyal woman deacon who is trying to buck him up. Another is about an elderly couple - a white couple in L.A., - and he's like in advertising, wrote jingles. And he's just retired and has gotten cranky. And his wife is trying to convince him that his life is not over.
How has the speechwriting and being at the center of history and dealing with crises affected you as a writer?
So when I think back on what's interesting to me, there is not a lot of Jack Kerouac, open-road, young kid on the make discovering stuff. It's more melancholy and reflective.

Yes, I think so. For me, particularly at that time, writing was the way I sorted through a lot of crosscurrents in my life - race, class, family. And I genuinely believe that it was part of the way in which I was able to integrate all these pieces of myself into something relatively whole.

People now remark on this notion of me being very cool, or composed. And what is true is that I generally have a pretty good sense of place and who I am, and what's important to me. And I trace a lot of that back to that process of writing.

Not as much as I would have liked. I just didn't have time.
A re there examples of It's what you said in your farewell address about Atticus Finch, where you said people are so isolated in their little bubbles. F iction can leap - specific novels or writers W hat are some of those books? ? It's really about the fate of the universe.
I've kept some, but not with the sort of discipline that I would have hoped for. The main writing that I've done during the presidency has been my speeches, the ones at least that were important to me.

I'm not sure yet. I'll have to see when I start writing the next book. Some of the craft of writing a good speech is identical to any other good writing: Is that word necessary? Is it the right word? Is there a rhythm to it that feels good? How does it sound aloud?
I loved that structure.
I actually think that one of the useful things about speechwriting is reminding yourself that the original words are spoken, and that there is a sound, a feel to words that, even if you're reading silently, transmits itself.
I like those structures where you actually see Have there been certain books that have been touchstones for you in these eight years? different points of view. Is that sort of comforting?
So in that sense, I think there will be some consistency.

But this is part of why it was important to pick up the occasional novel during the presidency, because most of my reading every day was briefing books and memos and proposals. And so working that very analytical side of the brain all the time sometimes meant you lost track of not just the poetry of fiction, but also the depth of fiction.
I've read that Lincoln loved Shakespeare his whole life, but when he was dealing with the Civil War, reading the I s there some poem or any Have you read a lot of presidential biographies? writing or author that you would turn to I watched some of the civil-rights-movement documentary mini-series "Eyes on the Prize" after the election. , say, Y ou do see how far we've come, and in the space of my lifetime. What books would you recommend at this moment in time, that captures this sense of turmoil? after the mass killings in Newtown, Conn., or during the financial crisis? history plays helped give him solace and perspective. We're bombarded with information. Technology is moving so rapidly.
Fiction was useful as a reminder of the truths under the surface of what we argue about every day and was a way of seeing and hearing the voices, the multitudes of this country.

Well, the last novel I read was Colson Whitehead's "The Underground Railroad." And the reminder of the ways in which the pain of slavery transmits itself across generations, not just in overt ways, but how it changes minds and hearts.

It bridges them. I struck up a friendship with [the novelist] Marilynne Robinson, who has become a good friend. And we've become sort of pen pals. I started reading her in Iowa, where "Gilead" and some of her best novels are set. And I loved her writing in part because I saw those people every day. And the interior life she was describing that connected them - the people I was shaking hands with and making speeches to - it connected them with my grandparents, who were from Kansas and ended up journeying all the way to Hawaii, but whose foundation had been set in a very similar setting.
I know you like Junot Díaz's and Jhumpa Lahiri's books, and they speak to immigration or the American Dream.
And so I think that I found myself better able to imagine what's going on in the lives of people throughout my presidency because of not just a specific novel but the act of reading fiction. It exercises those muscles, and I think that has been helpful.

And then there's been the occasion where I just want to get out of my own head. [Laughter] Sometimes you read fiction just because you want to be someplace else.

It's interesting, the stuff I read just to escape ends up being a mix of things - some science fiction. For a while, there was a three-volume science-fiction novel, the "Three-Body Problem" series -

- which was just wildly imaginative, really interesting. It wasn't so much sort of character studies as it was just this sweeping -

Exactly. The scope of it was immense. So that was fun to read, partly because my day-to-day problems with Congress seem fairly petty - not something to worry about. Aliens are about to invade. [Laughter]

There were books that would blend, I think, really good writing with thriller genres. I mean, I thought "Gone Girl" was a well-constructed, well-written book.

Yeah, and it was really well executed. And a similar structure, that I thought was a really powerful novel: "Fates and Furies," by Lauren Groff.

Which I have to do for this job, too. [Laughter]

I would say Shakespeare continues to be a touchstone. Like most teenagers in high school, when we were assigned, I don't know, "The Tempest" or something, I thought, 'My God, this is boring.' And I took this wonderful Shakespeare class in college where I just started to read the tragedies and dig into them. And that, I think, is foundational for me in understanding how certain patterns repeat themselves and play themselves out between human beings.

It gives me a sense of perspective. I think Toni Morrison's writings - particularly "Song of Solomon" is a book I think of when I imagine people going through hardship. That it's not just pain, but there's joy and glory and mystery.

I think that there are writers who I don't necessarily agree with in terms of their politics, but whose writings are sort of a baseline for how to think about certain things - V. S. Naipaul, for example. His "A Bend in the River," which starts with the line, "The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it." And I always think about that line, and I think about his novels when I'm thinking about the hardness of the world sometimes, particularly in foreign policy, and I resist and fight against sometimes that very cynical, more realistic view of the world. And yet, there are times where it feels as if that may be true.

So in that sense, I'm using writing like that as a foil or something to debate against.

Lincoln's own writings do that. He is a very fine writer.

I'd put the Second Inaugural up against any piece of American writing - as good as anything. One of the great treats of being president is, in the Lincoln Bedroom, there's a copy of the Gettysburg Address handwritten by him, one of five copies he did for charity. And there have been times in the evening when I'd just walk over, because it's right next to my office, my home office, and I just read it.

And perspective is exactly what is wanted. At a time when events move so quickly and so much information is transmitted, the ability to slow down and get perspective, along with the ability to get in somebody else's shoes - those two things have been invaluable to me. Whether they've made me a better president, I can't say. But what I can say is that they have allowed me to sort of maintain my balance during the course of eight years, because this is a place that comes at you hard and fast and doesn't let up.

I think that during those periods, Lincoln's writings, King's writings, Gandhi's writings, Mandela's writings - I found those particularly helpful, because what you wanted was a sense of solidarity. During very difficult moments, this job can be very isolating. So sometimes you have to hop across history to find folks who have been similarly feeling isolated. Churchill's a good writer. And I loved reading Teddy Roosevelt's writing. He's this big, outsize character.

The biographies have been useful, because I do think that there's a tendency, understandable, to think that whatever's going on right now is uniquely disastrous or amazing or difficult. And it just serves you well to think about Roosevelt trying to navigate World War II or Lincoln trying to figure out whether he's going to fire [George B.] McClellan when Rebel troops are 20, 30, 40 miles away.

It was useful.

And that's why seeing my daughters now picking up books that I read 30 years ago or 40 years ago is gratifying, because I want them to have perspective - not for purposes of complacency, but rather to give them confidence that people with a sense of determination and courage and pluck can reshape things. It's empowering for them.

I should probably ask you or some people who have had time to catch up on reading. I'll confess that since the election, I've been busier than I expected. So one of the things I'm really looking forward to is to dig into a whole bunch of literature.

But one of the things I'm confident about is that, out of this moment, there are a whole bunch of writers, a lot of them young, who are probably writing the book I need to read. [Laughter] They're ahead of me right now. And so in my post-presidency, in addition to training the next generation of leaders to work on issues like climate change or gun violence or criminal justice reform, my hope is to link them up with their peers who see fiction or nonfiction as an important part of that process.

When so much of our politics is trying to manage this clash of cultures brought about by globalization and technology and migration, the role of stories to unify - as opposed to divide, to engage rather than to marginalize - is more important than ever.

There's something particular about quieting yourself and having a sustained stretch of time that is different from music or television or even the greatest movies.

And part of what we're all having to deal with right now is just a lot of information overload and a lack of time to process things. So we make quick judgments and assign stereotypes to things, block certain things out, because our brain is just trying to get through the day.

Look, I don't worry about the survival of the novel. We're a storytelling species.

I think that what one of the jobs of political leaders going forward is, is to tell a better story about what binds us together as a people. And America is unique in having to stitch together all these disparate elements - we're not one race, we're not one tribe, folks didn't all arrive here at the same time.

What holds us together is an idea, and it's a story about who we are and what's important to us. And I want to make sure that we continue that.

I think Lahiri's books, I think Díaz's books, do speak to a very particular contemporary immigration experience. But also this combination of - that I think is universal - longing for this better place, but also feeling displaced and looking backwards at the same time. I think in that sense, their novels are directly connected to a lot of American literature.

Some of the great books by Jewish authors like Philip Roth or Saul Bellow, they are steeped with this sense of being an outsider, longing to get in, not sure what you're giving up - what you're willing to give up and what you're not willing to give up. So that particular aspect of American fiction I think is still of great relevance today.

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Transcript: President Obama on What Books Mean to Him

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Part of what was interesting was me pulling back books that I thought were really powerful, but that might not surface when she goes to college. Have you had a chance to discuss them with her? What made you want to become a writer? I've had the chance to discuss some.

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79 books Barack Obama recommended during his Presidency | The Independent

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79 books Barack Obama recommended during his Presidency | The Independent

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Throughout his time in the White Office, President Barack Obama has recommended hundreds of books.

For the last two years, for instance, Obama has shared with the world his recommended summer reading, leading to bookstores selling out of his chosen novels across America.

With the Democrat leaving the Oval Office within the week, we look back at some of the books Obama recommended over the last eight years.

Summer reads - In 2015 and 2016, Obama recommended various books to sit back and read while enjoying the sunshine, ranging from sci-fi to a portrait of Alexander Hamilton's life.

1. Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life, William Finnegan

2. H Is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald

3. The Girl on the Train, Paula Hawkins

4. Seveneves, Neal Stephenson

5. The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead

6. All That Is, James Salter

7. All The Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr

8. The Sixth Extinction, Elizabeth Kolbert

9. The Lowland, Jhumpa Lahiri

10. Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates

11. Washington: A Life, Ron Chernow

Favourite books (according to Facebook) - On his social media account, Obama - who whoever set up his Facebook page - lists numerous classic books along, including the Bible.

12. Song Of Solomon, Toni Morrison

13. Moby Dick, Herman Melville

14. 'Shakespeare's Tragedies'

15. Parting the Waters, Taylor Branch

16. Gilead, Marylinne Robinson

17. Self-Reliance, Ralph Waldo Emerson

18. The Bible

19. Lincoln's Collected Writings

Favourite books (according to The New York Times) - In an email to the NYT, Obama added a few more classics to his favourite books list.

20. Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois

21. Self-Reliance, Ralph Waldo Emerson

23. Gandhi's autobiography

24. All the King's Men, Robert Penn Warren

25. Best and the Brightest, David Halberstam

26. The Federalist, Alexander Hamilton

27. Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith

28. Cancer Ward, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

29/30. The Power and the Glory and The Quiet American, Graham Greene

31. Working, Studs Terkel

For his daughters - While speaking to the Times, Obama listed the books he suggested his 18-year-old daughter read

32. The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer

33. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez

34. The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing

35. The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston

From independent bookstores - The NYT were once again on hand when Obama visited an independent bookstore and picked 17 novels, some of which were listed by the publication.

36. Redwall series, Brian Jacques

37. Junie B. Jones series, Barbara Park

38. Brown Girl Dreaming, Jacqueline Woodson

39. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad

40. All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr

41. Nora Webster, Colm Toibin

42. The Laughing Monsters, Denis Johnson

43. Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth and Faith in the New China, Evan Osnos

44. Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, Dr. Atul Gawande

45. Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms, Katherine Rundell

46. The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Richard Flanagan.

Favourite books (again) - When visiting the public library in Washington's Anacostia neighbourhood, Obama spoke to young students about some of his favourites from childhood.

47. The Hardy Boys series, Edward Stratemeyer

48. Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson

49. Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck

50. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

51. Where the Wild Things Are, Maurice Sendak

Other favourites - back in 2009, the year he officially became President, Obama also listed numerous favourite books. A comprehensive piece in The Telegraph also lists numerous other additions to the favourites list.

52. Team of Rivals, Doris Kearns Goodwin

53. The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing

54. Various writings of Reinhold Niebuhr

55. Lush Life, Richard Prince

56. Philosophy & Literature, Peter S Thompson

57. Collected Poems, Derek Walcott

58. Cutting for Stone, Abraham Verghese

59. To the End of the Land, David Grossman

60. Lessons in Disaster, Gordon Goldstein

61. The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, Edmund Morris

62. John Adams, David McCullough

63. Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison

64. Plainsong, Kent Haruf

65. The Way Home, George Pelecanos

66. Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution, Thomas L Friedman

67. What Is the What, Dave Eggers

68. Netherland, Joseph O'Neill

69. Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet, Jeffrey D. Sachs

70. Defining Moment: FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope, Jonathan Alte

71. FDR, Jean Edward Smith

72. Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, Steve Coll

73. Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age, Larry Bartels

74. Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, Doris Kearns Goodwin

75. Fates and Furies, Lauren Goff

76. Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling

77. Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, Salman Rushdie

78. Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn

79. The Three-Body Problem, Liu Cixin

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The 79 books Barack Obama recommended during his Presidency

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Throughout his time in the White Office, President Barack Obama has recommended hundreds of books. For the last two years, for instance, Obama has shared with the world his recommended summer reading, leading to bookstores selling out of his chosen novels across America.

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Storywalks promote literacy, fitness | www.timesrecord.com | The Times Record

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Storywalks promote literacy, fitness | www.timesrecord.com | The Times Record

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Storywalks promote literacy, fitness

BRUNSWICK

As you walk along the playground fence at Harriet Beecher Stowe Elementary School in Brunswick, you'll find signs made of sheet aluminum which display pictures and passages of a story. Follow the signs, follow the story - just like turning the pages of a book.

Harriet Beecher Stowe Elementary is coming off a successful Storywalk competition where 30 fifth graders wrote stories about pictures provided by professional artists from storyword.com. One winner got his story printed upon storyboards along the playground perimeter this past fall. Now the school is looking ahead to additional Storywalks in 2017 and beyond. Teachers are excited because Storywalks promote both literacy and fitness in children.

"Through the years we had built up an indoor walking course at the school, and then an outdoor course," said physical education teacher Lynn D'Agostino, who coordinates the walking courses and the Storywalk through the Brunswick School's 5-2-1-0 initiative partnership with Mid Coast Hospital. "I wondered how we could get literacy involved, and when 5-2-1-0 gave us a bunch of scenarios, the idea of a Storywalk was present in almost all of them. So I recruited some people who are really talented and want to do the right thing for kids, and we got started."

D'Agostino worked with librarian Sarah Sherril and speech pathologist Jessica Pelletier to organize the Storywalk contest, and then last spring the kids stepped up to the plate and wrote stories. Then-fifth grader Noah Gilbert won the contest, and his story "Take a Walk with Me in Nature" was printed on storyboards and installed along the perimeter of the school playground.

The contest was a success, and now the three teachers are putting their heads together for future Storywalks.

"To sustain the success we've had here, I think to keep building off of what is already here is the way to go," said D'Agostino. "The next step is to put a Storywalk on our indoor walking course."

Sherril recently purchased the book "Going On a Bear Hunt," which will be installed into the indoor walking course in the school gym.

"We haven't put our heads together into the next Storywalk with the student authors yet, but that's something we'll do soon," said D'Agostino.

With the success Gilbert - who is now a sixth grader at Brunswick Junior High - saw with his Storywalk offering, kids at Harriet Beecher Stowe are now more geared toward literature, D'Agostino said.

"Noah got to read his story to the whole fifth grade last fall, and the kids were asking all of these powerful questions afterward," said D'Agostino. "He had some pretty poignant answers. He is a real inspiration to them."

Gilbert said that he "hadn't written much before this," but thought that since "the Storywalk was going to be outside to just kind of write something that goes along with nature."

Gilbert said he imagined the weeklong canoe trip on the St. Croix River that he and his family embark on every summer as he wrote his story.

"My advice for kids who want to write is to just look around you, see what's near you," Gilbert said. "Think of an idea, the theme of your story, and just go from there."

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BRUNSWICK As you walk along the playground fence at Harriet Beecher Stowe Elementary School in Brunswick, you’ll find signs made of sheet aluminum which display pictures and passages of a story. Follow the signs, follow the story - just like turning the pages of a book.

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Anaïs Nin on How Reading Awakens Us from the Slumber of Almost-Living – Brain Pickings

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Anaïs Nin on How Reading Awakens Us from the Slumber of Almost-Living – Brain Pickings

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Galileo believed that books are our only means of having superhuman powers. For Carl Sagan, a book was "proof that humans are capable of working magic." Proust considered the end of a book's wisdom the beginning of our own. For Mary Oliver, books did nothing less than save her life. The social function of great literature, the poet Denise Levertov insisted, is "to awaken sleepers by other means than shock."

The transcendent mechanism of the awakening that books furnish in us is what Anaïs Nin (February 21, 1903-January 14, 1977) explores in a beautiful entry from The Diary of Anaïs Nin: Vol. 1 (public library).

A generation after Kafka wrote to his best friend that "a book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us," 28-year-old Nin writes in December of 1931:

You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book ( Lady Chatterley, for instance), or you take a trip, or you talk with [someone], and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death.

With a thankful eye to D.H. Lawrence - whose writing, she believed, first awakened her in this fashion and whom, in a gesture of gratitude, she made the subject of her first book - Nin adds:

Some never awaken. They are like the people who go to sleep in the snow and never awaken. But I am not in danger because my home, my garden, my beautiful life do not lull me. I am aware of being in a beautiful prison, from which I can only escape by writing.

Complement this particular portion of the wholly numinous The Diary of Anaïs Nin: Vol. 1 with Nin on why emotional excess is essential for writing, the creative benefits of keeping a diary, the elusive nature of joy, and how to truly unplug during vacation, then revisit Neil Gaiman on why we read, Rebecca Solnit on the life-saving power of books, and James Baldwin on how reading changed his destiny.

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Anaïs Nin on How Reading Awakens Us from the Slumber of Almost-Living

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Galileo believed that books are our only means of having superhuman powers. For Carl Sagan, a book was "proof that humans are capable of working magic." Proust considered the end of a book's wisdom the beginning of our own. For Mary Oliver, books did nothing less than save her life.

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The Persistent Perks of Speaking Latin – EIDOLON

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The Persistent Perks of Speaking Latin – EIDOLON

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Between a bes and a dodrans of my time goes to learning and helping others learn and teach Latin. Our main goals are to be able to read Latin texts; to interact with the products, practices, and perspectives of Latin-using people; and to reap some of the cognitive benefits of knowing multiple languages. I have found that speaking Latin plays a natural and effective part in all these pursuits. I'm far from the first to report this, even in the last decade (see this, this, this, this, and this [pp. 8ff]), but the recognized perks are piling up so high that their explorations should, too.

If you share any of the goals I listed, speaking Latin is a pretty normal thing to do, and not as scary or as hard to start as you might think. It could even make your life easier.

I say this with full knowledge that, for some, the biggest obstacle to speaking Latin is fear. This is true to such a degree that, at the Rusticationeswhere colleagues and I aim to provide "the safest introduction to spoken Latin on the planet," we have developed entire sessions and staff roles devoted to helping participants tame the terror. I can assure you that, whatever the fear - fear of making mistakes, fear of tactless correction, fear of sounding silly, fear of being exposed to yourself or others as a fraudulent Latinist, fear of reimagining your curriculum, fear of overwhelming your students, fear of not being able to express yourself - there is a long-lived, large, and swelling community of people with all sorts of experiences, all sorts of personalities, and all sorts of shared concerns eager to make the Latin-speaking journey together. Pretty much all of us began this adventure as adults, many deep into our careers, with far fewer opportunities for speaking Latin than there are today.

The most common reason people give for overcoming their fear and choosing to speak Latin is that they want to read Latin better. While the link may not be obvious, and reading comfortably comes largely from reading constantly, we should be surprised to find a deft reader who had not had a habit of interacting with others in the language.

When I say "read," I don't mean deciphering a text by accessing explicit knowledge about words, forms, syntax, and style. I mean "read" the way people normally use the term: seeing a sequence of words and simultaneously sensing the unfurling plot or point. Deciphering texts by means of conscious knowledge can yield meaning and pleasure, but the difference between this experience and implicit, real-time understanding is something like the difference between getting a joke only after it is explained and getting the joke right when it is told. (Some people get so fast at deciphering texts that they appear to be reading. This is cool, but still not like getting the joke when it is told. It's more like having the joke explained to you super-fast.)

Not everyone wants to read Latin the way I'm talking about. The chair of classics at a prestigious school recently told me that it would be tragic for a person to understand Latin in real time, because this would deprive the reader of the boons to mind and character of painstakingly piecing together the meaning. That seems to me like not wanting people to get a joke on the grounds that it would deny them the chance to figure out why it is funny.

But more and more Latinists I work with, at all levels, voice dismay at the fact that they can pick up an English, French, Dutch, or Polish text and understand and enjoy it on sight, but cannot do so with the language they teach and most love. For them and their students, the goal is reading Latin-as-Latin, in real time. This does not preclude analysis - on the contrary, it forms the foundation, along with cultural and other background knowledge, for doing more with a text: relishing its artistry, arguing about it, translating it, or relating it to other texts.

How do we get there? In other words, how do our brains change to be more like the brains of people who process the language intuitively? This matters a lot, because trying to read a language without our brains having undergone such a change is to be in conflict with ourselves: we are trying to do something with a brain that has not been fitted for that thing.

For my students and me, speaking Latin supplies four natural solutions.

1. Latin interaction has turned out to be the most efficient way, by far, to let my novice and intermediate students encounter the vast volume of level-appropriate Latin input required for growing a mental representation of the language. (I wrote about the need for such input, a point of agreement among otherwise disparate researchers, in " Teaching Latin to Humans.") This alone would convince me of the value of speaking Latin, but there's more.

2. The healthy human brain is in its element when dealing with speech - even for people who don't consider themselves auditory learners. Hearing and speaking a language are primary mental acts, in the sense that the human brain has parts and processes dedicated to them. Speech thus differs from reading, a relative newcomer among human activities that needs to conscript several brain processes focused on other things, such as spatial recognition, in order to link marks on a page or screen with meaning. This is not an argument against reading, whose complexity is part of what makes it gloriously human. But to bypass the speech processes so integrated with human biology and so central to human experience is, at best, to give up a potent teaching tool. At worst, it frustrates the very brains we often claim to be training.

What's more, the brain areas and activities we depend on for reading include ones associated with aspects of speech, such as phonological processing. What happens when a brain attempting to read Horace or Hildegard summons these parts and processes and gets no answer, because the oral-aural core of language has been ignored?

3. Regular interaction in Latin softens the distinction between easy and hard grammar and, with it, the thud of "advanced grammar." There really is no such thing as advanced grammar. There is only language one has met enough, in meaningful enough ways, for it to feel normal, and language one has not. Are gerunds and gerundives and jussive subjunctives and indirect questions really that much harder to process than personal pronouns? Not if you hear every day, "est tempus scribendi," "nunc est legendum," "quaeso finem faciatis," and "quis scit quota hora sit?" A fear clause isn't some sneaky switcheroo. It's just how you tell someone what you're afraid of. Sequence of tenses isn't a minefield of moods. It's just what emerges when you say what you mean.

Some syntax is supposedly so sticky that it can't be learned until late in a course or textbook. Unfortunately, this makes it the syntax to which students have had the least exposure before meeting the texts it is supposed to help them understand! There is no way around this if we limit ourselves to explicit instruction. We can't teach everything at once, and we can't constantly review. Infusing everyday interactions with a wide range of Latin phrases and usage is a practical and efficient strategy.

4. There is a big difference between taking occasional advantage of an already known language and treating Latin as though it makes sense only in terms of another language. Many students - and, alarmingly, many teachers - seem to think that Latin words mean English words, or that Latin constructions mean English ones. There's nothing wrong with using another language to illuminate a Latin word or an obscure passage. I often use English for this purpose. But the English serves only to approximate meaning, not create it; the Latin means something already. Speaking Latin makes this real and normal for participants in the conversation.

As my students and I interact in Latin, we build both brains and a community for which the expression of thought in Latin means something in real time. When my students read, they see preserved on a page what they already understand as sound. Do they meet new words and literary modes of expression? Yes, and these can be grand encounters. Do they need help with tricky texts? Of course. As in general literacy development, though, their Latin literacy starts as the recognition on a page of language that they would also understand as speech, and continues, in more artificial literary registers, as an affair with words, word-relationships, and styles that adorn or redeploy a language that students are already used to engaging on its own terms.

What I am describing is not cold, contextless symbol-processing. It gives life to our experience of the products, practices, and perspectives of the Romans and of those who have thought and written in Latin since. Yes, we learn about baths and brothels, slaves and circuses, weddings and wars - often in Latin. But regular input and interaction in Latin take us farther, tweaking our brains to be literally more like a Roman's.

I don't want to share Caesar's attitudes. But I do want to sense as suddenly as possible what he says of a druid, a traitor, or a moose. I don't covet Ovid's mind or life. But I want to crumble at nec iam pater. I don't wish Heloise's pain on anyone. But I want to squat in the soul that squeezed out

Deum testem invoco, si me Augustus universo praesidens mundo matrimonii honore dignaretur, totumque mihi orbem confirmaret in perpetuo possidendum, carius mihi et dignius videretur tua dici meretrix quam illius imperatrix.

As God is my witness, if Augustus himself, master of the whole world, did me the honor of marriage and established the entire globe as my eternal possession, it would still seem dearer and more proper to me to be called your whore than his empress. (Heloise to Abelard, Ep. 2)

Even when it's not plunged into a literary sea, a Latinized mind can, I think, deepen one's understanding of, even empathy for, the people of other times and places.

Academic articles on the cognitive payoff of communicating in multiple languages abound. The reported benefits include heightened empathy, along with above-average ability to handle ambiguity, find multiple solutions to problems, toggle between tasks, pay attention, remember things, employ high-order reason, and, indeed, defy old age. Though the outcomes are sometimes sensationalized, we risk nothing by supposing them, as they are byproducts of communication in another language, germinating in cerebral soil we were going to water anyway.

For me, these benefits largely subsume, if not supersede, one I used to single out: logical thinking honed by grammatical analysis. My students think logically and analyze grammatically, but I've come to consider such analysis less and less definitive of a course in language and literature, and the desired results less and less contingent on grammatical analysis.

The way grammar is presented and organized in textbooks and reference works is not the way it seems to be represented in the heads of people who know a language. This has two major implications. First, even virtuosic knowledge of grammar as arrayed in textbooks does not cause the changes in the brain required to read Latin in the sense considered in this article, though it may help one explain aspects of Latin texts to oneself or others. This is something most present-day Latin teachers and learners, including some of the most respected of our time, have confirmed through experience.

The second implication is that we should be cautious about touting the benefits of training in discrete grammar points, or training in translation that relies on such points, as benefits of learning the Latin language. In fact, they are potential benefits of a particular way of organizing and analyzing data sets that happen to have been generated from Latin texts. Similar treatment of other data might yield similar benefits to mind or character, but the notion persists, partly because it can be deployed as a justification for studying Latin at all, and partly because it allows us to claim that we are killing two birds with one stone, training the brain while helping people read the classics.

I am no longer comfortable making this claim for grammatical analysis, because the type of brain-training being asserted comes not from actually learning Latin, but from a certain way of thinking about Latin - and that way of thinking about Latin has not proven generally successful in helping people read whatever Latin they wish to read. I would rather promote the ability to process Latin as Latin, with side effects linked to bilingualism, which overlap with the benefits claimed for grammatical analysis and are just as attractive.

Does this mean I never teach grammatical generalizations or terminology? Not at all. My own linguistic glee can be contagious, and can give learners yet another way to relish the language. Coupled with meaningful text or speech, a generalization can cue a click for this or that student - in some magical moments, for several at once. Conscious knowledge can help resolve ambiguities in texts above one's reading level. Comparative grammar helps address the Connections and Comparisons goals in many programs. I am careful, though, not to fall for or foster the idea that "not grasping the grammar in the textbook" is the same thing as, or even very similar to, "not being good at Latin."

There are plenty of objections to speaking Latin. I've answered a dozen here, including the concerns that speaking Latin is not the goal of our courses, that we might model mistakes for students, that some take Latin precisely to avoid speaking another language, and - wait for it - that speaking Latin is too fun. Often, though, what stands in the way of a would-be speaker is neither outright objection nor the fears catalogued earlier, but dread of what it might take to get good enough.

The sweat and tears by which Latinists have earned their chops could fill the Euxine Sea. We don't need another onus. And yet I see teachers brimming with vim at conferences and online (e.g., here, here, and here), craving ways to stretch themselves and serve their students. So I'm not suggesting that people do something instead of nothing; I'm claiming that training and habits that include hearing and speaking Latin provide some of the highest returns on investment.

In fact, I think teachers' lives would be easier and more enjoyable if much of the time and effort spent seeking yet another way to spin the supine were spent instead interacting in Latin and im bibing w isely chosen Latin texts- something pretty much all Latin teachers claim to want to do and want their students to do. Teachers could comfortably sprinkle their speech with supines and more, and would have a far deeper and broader knowledge of Latin literature, both of which would multiply their ability to help learners internalize the language and to select texts suited to students' interests and proficiencies.

Is the journey long? Yes, but it's less a marathon than a walkathon: every stride extends goodness. And this one winds through some of the best scenery there is, with some of the best company there can be.

While speaking Latin accords with and capitalizes on the nature of the brain, language, and reading in powerful ways, it is not a panacea. It is not even a method. It can serve a variety of approaches, and its success depends on a variety of factors, including the tasks with which it is combined, the supply of Extensive Reading, the trust between teacher and students and between students and each other, whether it amounts to oral drills or rises to actual communication, and the content of such communication.

Every bit helps, though, and you may find that, the more you and your students communicate in Latin, the more pedagogical problems dissolve. I've mentioned how we shed the weight of advanced grammar. Organic review happens as we use situationally appropriate language. Communicating in Latin vitalizes our classroom culture in ways that merit their own article. And the capacity of any healthy human brain to build a mental representation of a language under suitable circumstances means that students previously considered "bad at Latin" - by their teachers or themselves - can succeed at all levels. Besides advancing educational equity, the resulting rise in enrollment calms another fear that is too real for many Latinists: the reduction of their programs.

Fortunately, there is solid institutional support for negotiating meaning and investigating culture in Latin, and it's not that hard anymore to start or continue speaking Latin or to make it part of your classes on a small or large scale, even if you don't speak as comfortably as you'd like. Also, because reading, viewing, and listening to purposefully selected content (including many well-cached gems) can play a major role in boosting your proficiency, you can get a lot better at speaking Latin without even getting out of bed.

But I think you'll find a lot worth getting out of bed for.

Justin Slocum Bailey is a linguist by training, a learner by temperament, and a teacher by trade. When he's not reading something for the thirtieth time or combing the planet for new content in his languages, he operates Indwelling Language, a collection of resources and habits for boosting joy and success in language learning and teaching. He tweets languagy tips and tidbits as @IndwellingLang.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the views of the Paideia Institute.

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The Persistent Perks of Speaking Latin - EIDOLON

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Between a bes and a dodrans of my time goes to learning and helping others learn and teach Latin. Our main goals are to be able to read Latin texts; to interact with the products, practices, and perspectives of Latin-using people; and to reap some of the cognitive benefits of knowing multiple languages.

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Why Studying the Humanities Is So Vital in the Information Age - The Atlantic

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Why Studying the Humanities Is So Vital in the Information Age - The Atlantic

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In an era fixated with science, technology, and data, the humanities are in decline. They're more vital than ever.

Asmaa Waguih / Reuters

Earlier this month, the Washington Post journalist Jeff Guo wrote a detailed account of how he'd managed to maximize the efficiency of his cultural consumption. "I have a habit that horrifies most people," he wrote. "I watch television and films in fast forward ... the time savings are enormous. Four episodes of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt fit into an hour. An entire season of Game of Thrones goes down on the bus ride from D.C. to New York."

Guo's method, which he admits has ruined his ability to watch TV and movies in real time, encapsulates how technology has allowed many people to accelerate the pace of their daily routines. But is faster always better when it comes to art? In a conversation at the Aspen Ideas Festival, co-sponsored by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic, Drew Gilpin Faust, the president of Harvard University, and the cultural critic Leon Wieseltier agreed that true study and appreciation of the humanities is rooted in slowness-in the kind of deliberate education that can be accrued over a lifetime. While this can seem almost antithetical at times to the pace of modern life, and as subjects like art, philosophy, and literature face steep declines in enrollment at academic institutions in the U.S., both argued that studying the humanities is vital for the ways in which it teaches us how to be human.

The statistics Faust cited paint a fairly grim portrait of the humanities' declining prestige. At the end of World War II, 11 percent of students nationwide chose to major in the humanities. In the 1960s, this figure rose to 17 percent, but now it stands at around 6 percent. Students are increasingly drawn to vocational majors in subjects like business, medicine, science, and education. "What we need to do is recognize the limitations of that mentality," Wieseltier said. "The purpose of the humanities is not primarily utilitarian, it is not primarily to get a job ... The purpose of the humanities is to cultivate the individual, cultivate the citizen."

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Studying the Humanities Is Vital in the Information Age

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In an era fixated with science, technology, and data, the humanities are in decline. They're more vital than ever. Earlier this month, the Washington Post journalist Jeff Guo wrote a detailed account of how he'd managed to maximize the efficiency of his cultural consumption. "I have a habit that horrifies most people," he wrote.

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Classics in the Time of Intolerance – EIDOLON

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Classics in the Time of Intolerance – EIDOLON

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E(i)ditorial - January 2017

Eidolon hosted an informal roundtable, jointly run by Johanna Hanink and myself, entitled "What Does Classics Mean Right Now?" at this month's annual meeting of the Society for Classical Studies in Toronto. It felt undeniably odd and portentous to discuss that question with a group of mostly American classicists in Canada just a few weeks before Donald Trump was officially inaugurated as President of the United States.

News in recent days - of 6 journalists charged with felonies for covering inauguration unrest, social media accounts of government agencies shut down for sharing scientific facts about climate change, plans to defund the National Endowment for the Humanities  - has confirmed that this is a dangerous time for scholars who want to speak out against the administration and its supporters.

That's why it's more important than ever to support and amplify the voices of those who do speak out.

A few classicists told me in Toronto that they wanted to write about issues of race or gender in the ancient world and today for Eidolon, but that seeing my own experiences with online abuse had made them wary. I understand that feeling completely. Many people in our discipline are too professionally vulnerable to be able to publicly voice their political views. Tenure-track professors, adjunct faculty, and graduate students are rightly afraid that any hint of controversy could derail their careers. Others aren't in an emotional place where they feel they can weather a tidal wave of hatred and verbal violence.

There are many reasons why someone might feel unable to speak out, but still want to help fight the misappropriation of the classical tradition to bolster far-right ideologies of exclusion and intolerance. These are some of the best suggestions that came out of Eidolon 's informal roundtable:

Support our colleagues who teach at the high school level. The future of the discipline of Classics is in their hands, and much of the work of bringing Latin to socioeconomically diverse populations falls to them. Get involved with the ACL or Junior Classical League. Write textbooks (even informal ones) targeted at high school students - preferably ones that don't use example sentences with lazy slaves.

The discussion about how to articulate the value of the humanities - especially to first-generation college students - has been going on for some time now. But in our "post-truth" world, the ability to think and to analyze evidence is desperately needed. And the ancient world can be a safe medium in which to think about moral and ethical issues that affect us today. Teach those transferable skills - but also be prepared to advise students on career paths outside of academia.

If you're so inclined, engage in public Classics. Pitch op-eds to online broad-interest publications. Take part in debates about Classics on social media.

Even if you don't want to write for the public, consider teaching public-facing Classics material in your courses. If you teach Thucydides, consider assigning your students one of the multitude of articles applying Thucydidean ideas to contemporary politics and asking them to critique it. Help train the next generation of public classicists to think more deeply about the place of Classics in the world.

Are you in a position to use institutional resources to help protect those who speak out? I've discovered that it is difficult to overstate how vital institutional and administrative support is when you receive abuse and threats. Consider whether, and how, you can help.

Support is even more crucially needed to support our colleagues who are being discriminated against by the administration. This past weekend, faculty from NYU law school intervened when Narges Bayani, a PhD candidate at NYU's Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, was detained at JFK. Bayani was released on Sunday. If you're in a position to provide legal counsel, raise funds, or protest at airports, consider doing so.

Work to make our discipline more inclusive and accessible. Classics as a discipline is still, as one SCS attendee noted, overwhelmingly white, and a recent study supports that observation and suggests that our discipline is the least racially diverse of all humanities disciplines. That's alarming. Also alarming is the fact that this year's SCS meeting was plagued by a host of accessibility issues. The location of the conference in Canada meant that several classicists were unable to attend because of documentation problems, and the spread of the conference over two separate hotels made some panels and receptions inaccessible to those with mobility concerns. And the Women's Classical Caucus has raised concerns that there is no ombudsperson to whom anyone who is harassed or assaulted at a conference might report their experiences. As we work to support vulnerable members of our society at large, we must also be aware of how we're working to support our own colleagues.

Join the Classics and Social Justice group, which is doing amazing work bringing Classics to veterans, the incarcerated, and victims of sexual assault.

These ideas are just a start, and if you have other suggestions please share them in the responses below or on Eidolon 's Facebook page. As always, we welcome all civil and respectful attempts to engage - but since our goal is to have a valuable and productive discussion, we will be monitoring and moderating those comments more aggressively than usual.

In January, Eidolon published six articles:

Eric Adler argued that institutional elitism is still rife at major Classics conferences in On Classism in Classics
Johanna Hanink addressed the need to be mindful and considerate in the after-hours parts of the SCS in To Toronto wyth Love?
Nandini Pandey analyzed echoes of the Aeneid's underworld in the first season of HBO's science fiction drama Westworld in Vergil in Westworld Jessica Wright shared her experience with the challenges of teaching Latin in a prison in Latin Behind Bars
Randall Souza looked into the morality arguments used to justify gambling restrictions in the ancient and modern world in Slot-Shaming
Justin Slocum Bailey explained why learning to speak Latin can help you learn to read it better in The Persistent Perks of Speaking Latin

We also announced our second annual essay contest for high school Latin students. Submissions are due by March 1, 2017.

Donna Zuckerbergis the Editor-in-Chief of Eidolon. She received her PhD in Classics from Princeton and teaches for Stanford Continuing Studies and the Paideia Institute. Her book Not All Dead White Men, a study of the reception of Classics in Red Pill communities, is under contract with Harvard University Press. Read more of her work here.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the views of the Paideia Institute.

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Classics in the Time of Intolerance - EIDOLON

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E(i)ditorial - January 2017 Eidolon hosted an informal roundtable, jointly run by Johanna Hanink and myself, entitled "What Does Classics Mean Right Now?" at this month's annual meeting of the Society for Classical Studies in Toronto.

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Fortress America: What We Can — And Can't — Learn From History : NPR

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Fortress America: What We Can — And Can't — Learn From History : NPR

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President Donald Trump's decision to temporarily ban immigrants from seven Muslim-majority countries and refugees from across the globe has set off a firestorm of protest. In airports and city streets across the U.S. and beyond, people turned out by the thousands over the weekend to protest the action.

In tense times, we often turn to history to understand events such as these. While we can and should learn from the past to inform our present, scholars say this process can be fraught with psychological peril. We're often inclined to draw lessons from history that suit our preconceived notions.

In recent days, many people have reached for the story of the SS St. Louis. It's a story you may be familiar with: In 1939, a ship full of Jewish refugees was turned away when it reached the shores of Cuba and then the United States.

This week we speak with historian Deborah Lipstadt, a professor of religion at Emory University. She researches the Holocaust and the global response to Jewish refugees. Lipstadt gives us a vivid portrait of the voyage and its aftermath - and cautions about making simple parallels to crises today.
Hidden Brain is hosted by Shankar Vedantam and produced by Maggie Penman, Jennifer Schmidt, Rhaina Cohen, and Renee Klahr. Our intern is Chloe Connelly, and our supervising producer is Tara Boyle. You can follow us on Twitter @hiddenbrain, and listen for Hidden Brain stories each week on your local public radio station.

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Fortress America: What We Can - And Can't - Learn From History

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President Donald Trump's decision to temporarily ban immigrants from seven Muslim-majority countries and refugees from across the globe has set off a firestorm of protest. In airports and city streets across the U.S. and beyond, people turned out by the thousands over the weekend to protest the action.

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One Judge’s Order For Hate Crime Committers: Read More Books | HuffPost

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One Judge’s Order For Hate Crime Committers: Read More Books | HuffPost

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Earlier this week, WUSA9, a local news site in Ashburn, Virginia, reported that a group of teenage boys was given an "unusual sentence" after spray-painting a historically black school with racist and anti-Semitic language and symbols.

Judge Alex Rueda ― who has librarians in her family ― saw the act as a "teachable moment," and assigned the young men book and movie reports in lieu of community service or jail time. They will also have to do a research paper on swastikas and attend a Holocaust Museum with their parents.

The assigned films include "Twelve Years a Slave" and "Lincoln"; the books include The Handmaid's Tale, The Bluest Eye, To Kill a Mockingbird and Native Son.

Newer classics including Adam Johnson's The Orphan Master's Son and Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad, the latter of which won last year's National Book Award, were featured on the list, too.

After last year's presidential election, there was a spike in hate crimes nationwide, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. There's been a 42 percent increase in anti-Muslim groups since 2014, and a 14 percent increase in the total number of hate groups since the same year. Due to these increases, the American Library Association has started tracking hate crimes in libraries, including those situated in schools.

But precisely how these crimes will be adjudicated is another matter. Studies do show that people who read books are more empathetic, but whether that's causation or merely correlation is tough to control for. Regardless, versing teens in works by writers of color and women writers can only better their understanding of the world.

Every Friday, HuffPost's Culture Shift newsletter helps you figure out which books you should read, art you should check out, movies you should watch and music should listen to. Sign up here.

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One Judge's Order For Hate Crime Committers: Read More Books

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Earlier this week, WUSA9, a local news site in Ashburn, Virginia, reported that a group of teenage boys was given an "unusual sentence" after spray-painting a historically black school with racist and anti-Semitic language and symbols.

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English Majors Prepared To Do Anything - Hartford Courant

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English Majors Prepared To Do Anything - Hartford Courant

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College students have always worried about the Big Talk they might need to have with their parents.

In 1847, a student at the University of Pennsylvania might have had to explain to his parents that he joined one of the literary societies, which, on the eve of the Civil War, debated the role of slavery while pistols lay on the lectern.

In the 1960s, college students were worried about their parents discovering they were having sex.

In the 1970s, college students worried that we'd have to tell our parents that not only that were we having sex, but that we were having it with people of a different color, or from a different background or of the same sex.

You know what the Big Talk is for today's students? You know what they're afraid to reveal to their parental units? The current topic for the Big Talk is telling their parents that they're going to major in the humanities.

Apparently what people are really terrified of is that their kid is going to end up in the humanities. They think that an English major, for example, is not specialized enough; they think English is something everybody can do.

One of my students said his father asked, "How is an English major going to help you? You already speak the language?"

That's as narrow as thinking that anybody could major in biology because you already have a body, or major in math because you know how to count. It's not a valid argument, and English majors would know that, because we know how to make - or counter - an argument.

Although practical experience and the direct application of knowledge are the result of any good education, they're not necessarily what is most significant about it.

The importance of a good education, especially one heavy in the humanities, is about being able to survey, understand and either strengthen or dismantle the apparatus that underlies our civilization, culture and society.

Only a sense of context informed by history, the ability to understand competing philosophies and an intellectual curiosity can permit us to confront unexamined systemic injustice, manufactured falsehoods and the electing of a meme into a position of enormous political power. Not that I'm bitter.

Taking a lot of selfies doesn't mean you live an examined life, and you'll remember hearing that "an unexamined life is not worth living." That line isn't from Stephen Colbert or Lady Gaga by the way; it's Socrates via Plato.

We're in danger of losing our hold on a shared culture because we no longer have a shared basis of knowledge or basis to assess what has actual value. For example, just because you get a lot of re-tweets doesn't mean your ideas are original, judicious or accurate.

One of the most interesting new presences on Twitter is called "@HalfanOnioninaBag," which is exactly what its name indicates. It was created only to garner more Twitter followers than Donald Trump and, in its brief life, it has amassed 768,000 of them.

One terrific aspect of a humanities education is that is allows you to distinguish irony, satire and humor from what is serious. You can distinguish a fraudcast from a broadcast.

Is language important enough to deserve study? Why don't we just listen to what people mean behind the words?

Because how we envision the world depends on how we construct our description of it. Language makes you see things in a certain way - and once you've seen it that way, you can't unsee it. Words can be as irrevocable as an action. They can cut as deeply as a surgeon's scalpel.

So what can you do with an English major? The quick answer is: Anything you please. English majors, who know how to read carefully, think critically, write brilliantly, argue convincingly and speak with wit, panache and a vocabulary wide enough to include the word "panache" are in leadership positions in every field.

Whether in government, academics, business, technology, medicine, the law, teaching, writing or the fine arts, graduates who hold bachelor's degrees in English have the erudition, confidence and skills to organize and articulate the world's most interesting and vital ideas. You can write this down: Our future depends on them.
Gina Barreca is an English professor at UConn and author of "If You Lean In, Will Men Just Look Down Your Blouse?" and eight other books. She can be reached at ginabarreca.com.

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College students have always worried about the Big Talk they might need to have with their parents. In 1847, a student at the University of Pennsylvania might have had to explain to his parents that he joined one of the literary societies, which, on the eve of the Civil War, debated the role of slavery while pistols lay on the lectern.

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Great Literature Is Surprisingly Arithmetic - Scientific American

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Great Literature Is Surprisingly Arithmetic - Scientific American

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Advertisement

A good book evokes a variety of emotions as you read. Turns out, though, that almost all novels and plays provide one of only six "emotional experiences" from beginning to end-a rags-to-riches exuberance, say, or a rise and fall of hope ( below, top). Researchers at the University of Vermont graphed the happiness and sadness of words that occurred across the pages of more than 1,300 fiction works to reveal the emotional arcs and discovered relatively few variations.

A different study coordinated by Poland's Institute of Nuclear Physics found that sentence lengths in books frequently form a fractal pattern-a set of objects that repeat on a small and large scale, the way small, triangular leaflets make up larger, triangular leaves that make up a larger, triangular palm frond ( below, bottom).

Why analyze the mathematics of literature? Vermont applied mathematician Andrew J. Reagan notes that "tons of data" from the Human Genome Project "taught us so much more about genes than we knew before. Maybe data can teach us more about stories, too."

This article was originally published with the title "Novel Math"

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN ONLINE

For an appraisal of novels about science, go to ScientificAmerican.com/feb2017/graphic-science

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

Mark Fischetti

Mark Fischetti is a senior editor at Scientific American, overseeing coverage of energy and the environment.

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Great Literature Is Surprisingly Arithmetic

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A good book evokes a variety of emotions as you read. Turns out, though, that almost all novels and plays provide one of only six "emotional experiences" from beginning to end-a rags-to-riches exuberance, say, or a rise and fall of hope ( below, top).

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Society needs humanities majors | The Seattle Times

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Society needs humanities majors | The Seattle Times

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The importance of a good education, especially one heavy in the humanities, is about being able to survey, understand and either strengthen or dismantle the apparatus that underlies our civilization, culture and society.

Share story

College students have always worried about the Big Talk they might need to have with their parents.

In 1847, a student at the University of Pennsylvania might have had to explain to his parents that he joined one of the literary societies, which, on the eve of the Civil War, debated the role of slavery while pistols lay on the lectern.

In the 1960s, college students were worried about their parents discovering they were having sex.

In the 1970s, college students worried that we'd have to tell our parents that not only were we having sex, but that we were having it with people of a different color, or from a different background or of the same sex.

You know what the Big Talk is for today's students? You know what they're afraid to reveal to their parental units? The current topic for the Big Talk is telling their parents that they're going to major in the humanities.

Apparently what people are really terrified of is that their kid is going to end up in the humanities. They think that an English major, for example, is not specialized enough; they think English is something everybody can do.

One of my students said his father asked, "How is an English major going to help you? You already speak the language."

That's as narrow as thinking that anybody could major in biology because you already have a body, or major in math because you know how to count. It's not a valid argument, and English majors would know that, because we know how to make - or counter - an argument.

Although practical experience and the direct application of knowledge are the result of any good education, they're not necessarily what is most significant about it.

The importance of a good education, especially one heavy in the humanities, is about being able to survey, understand and either strengthen or dismantle the apparatus that underlies our civilization, culture and society.

Only a sense of context informed by history, the ability to understand competing philosophies and an intellectual curiosity can permit us to confront unexamined systemic injustice, manufactured falsehoods and the electing of a meme into a position of enormous political power. Not that I'm bitter.

Taking a lot of selfies doesn't mean you live an examined life, and you'll remember hearing that "an unexamined life is not worth living." That line isn't from Stephen Colbert or Lady Gaga by the way; it's Socrates via Plato.

We're in danger of losing our hold on a shared culture because we no longer have a shared basis of knowledge or basis to assess what has actual value. For example, just because you get a lot of retweets doesn't mean your ideas are original, judicious or accurate.

One of the most interesting new presences on Twitter is called "@HalfanOnioninaBag," which is exactly what its name indicates. It was created only to garner more Twitter followers than Donald Trump and, in its brief life, it has amassed 768,000 of them.

One terrific aspect of a humanities education is that it allows you to distinguish irony, satire and humor from what is serious. You can distinguish a fraudcast from a broadcast.

Is language important enough to deserve study? Why don't we just listen to what people mean behind the words?

Because how we envision the world depends on how we construct our description of it. Language makes you see things in a certain way - and once you've seen it that way, you can't unsee it. Words can be as irrevocable as an action. They can cut as deeply as a surgeon's scalpel.

So what can you do with an English major? The quick answer is: Anything you please. English majors, who know how to read carefully, think critically, write brilliantly, argue convincingly and speak with wit, panache and a vocabulary wide enough to include the word "panache," are in leadership positions in every field.

Whether in government, academics, business, technology, medicine, the law, teaching, writing or the fine arts, graduates who hold bachelor's degrees in English have the erudition, confidence and skills to organize and articulate the world's most interesting and vital ideas. You can write this down: Our future depends on them.

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The importance of a good education, especially one heavy in the humanities, is about being able to survey, understand and either strengthen or dismantle the apparatus that underlies our civilization, culture and society. Share story College students have always worried about the Big Talk they might need to have with their parents.

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Mark Cuban: Liberal arts is the future - Business Insider

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Mark Cuban: Liberal arts is the future - Business Insider

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Billionaire investor Mark Cuban offered a perhaps bleak prediction on the future of jobs in an interview Friday with Bloomberg's Cory Johnson at the NBA All-Star Technology Summit in New Orleans.

Discussing the swiftly evolving nature of jobs due to automation, he noted that across a broad array of industries, robots will replace human workers.

Prompted by Johnson, he then made a bold proclamation about the types of skills and majors that will dominate in his version of the future labor market.

Here's an excerpt of their conversation (emphasis ours):

Johnson: So essentially what you're making the case for is education and job training for grown ups.

Cuban: No, no. I think that won't matter. What are you going to go back and learn to do?

Johnson: What it takes, right? Whether it's finance, whether it's software programming.

Cuban: No finance. That's the easiest thing - you just take the data have it spit out whatever you need. I personally think there's going to be a greater demand in 10 years for liberal arts majors than there were for programming majors and maybe even engineering, because when the data is all being spit out for you, options are being spit out for you, you need a different perspective in order to have a different view of the data. And so having someone who is more of a freer thinker.

Cuban's forecast of the skills needed to succeed in the future echoes that of computer science and higher education experts who believe people with "soft skills," like adaptability and communication, will have the advantage in an automated workforce.

Cuban highlighted English, philosophy, and foreign language majors as just some of the majors that will do well in the future job market.

"The nature of jobs is changing," Cuban said.

You can watch the whole interview here:

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CUBAN: Don't go to school for finance - liberal arts is the future

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Billionaire investor Mark Cuban offered a perhaps bleak prediction on the future of jobs in an interview Friday with Bloomberg's Cory Johnson at the NBA All-Star Technology Summit in New Orleans. Discussing the swiftly evolving nature of jobs due to automation, he noted that across a broad array of industries, robots will replace human workers.

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Writing Poetry Can Lift Spirts, Spur Creativity At Any Age : Shots - Health News : NPR

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Writing Poetry Can Lift Spirts, Spur Creativity At Any Age : Shots - Health News : NPR

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Creating some form of art is commonly believed to help older people stay mentally and physically healthy. Scientific research hasn't quite caught up with that belief.

But that hasn't deterred the dozen or so older adults in Janet Hoult's poetry workshop. She refers to them all as "my poets." They meet weekly at the Culver City Senior Center in Culver City, Calif. Hoult is 80. Her eldest pupil, Ruth Berman, is 91.

Like everyone in the class on the day I visit, Berman's brought some new work to share. It's a sweet poem about a gift from her granddaughter, expressed in rhyming couplets.

"My jewelry that's real is hidden out of sight," she reads, "but my butterfly necklace, I wear day and night." Another member of the class has a more meditative piece. Terry Dicks' poem is about her spiritual struggles - her choice between "mud," as she puts it, and her quest for the place "where miracles flow and all rain is holy water."

Regardless of age or subject matter, everyone here is serious about becoming a better poet. Ruth Berman says she works on each assignment all week.

"As soon as I leave the class, I go home and all these thoughts come into my mind," says Berman. "I write and I rewrite and I write. I must do it about 30 times before I get it the way I want it to be."

You wouldn't guess, from Berman's cheerful enthusiasm, what led her to start writing poetry. She took it up just last year after her husband died.

"It was sudden," she says of his death. "Very sudden. And I knew that I had to keep busy in order to focus and live again."

Researchers say there's no scientific proof that poetry - or any other artistic pursuit - actually helps older people live longer or live better.

"We still have a long way to go in understanding physical health outcomes," says Sunil Iyengar, the director of research and analysis at the National Endowment for the Arts.

It would be great to know for sure, Iyengar says, because compared to other kinds of health interventions, engaging in the arts is pretty inexpensive.

But it can be difficult to study. Making art is a complex process. Sometimes it's done alone. Sometimes in a group. And singing might have a different impact than painting or writing.

"We're not talking about a pill," says Iyengar. "We're not talking about [testing] a device. We're talking about something that is so deeply embedded in our culture and our society, and that contains ... many factors."

So far, research findings on the relationship between the arts and health have been all over the map. A roundup of some 30 studies shows that while most found benefits, they didn't measure the same things. Some looked at physical effects, like fewer falls or less use of medication. Others looked at effects on the mind - like improved memory or decreased depression. Unfortunately, many of the studies had no control groups, and were often too small to draw meaningful conclusions.

Iyengar says federal agencies are now funding more rigorous research and the results are just starting to come in. The early evidence suggests that the arts have positive cognitive, social, and emotional impacts on older adults.

For Hoult, the leader of the poetry workshop in Southern California, the emotional sustenance she gained from writing her first poems was profound. That was in 1999, after her son was killed in an accident.

Poetry "helped me begin to focus how I felt about losing my son," she says. "When you lose, you also remember what you had before the loss. And so poetry allows you to begin to look at a relationship, at what was of value to you."

In Hoult's workshop, Marsha Wilde reads a poem expressing a sense of loss on a global scale.

"How many words for murder do we already have in our North American language?" she asks. "Are there enough? Should we invent more? Would we write better poems if we invented more words that mean destruction? "

It was a long poem and there was silence in the room when she finished reading it. Most of the poems that are read aloud here tend to be lighter. But that doesn't matter. The people in this room all support each other. Ruth Berman says she loves each and every poem and all of the poets, too.

"I find them all fascinating," she says. "I want to get up and hug each one of them. They bring me such joy."

Even though science can't yet tell us if this poetry workshop is improving Ruth Berman's health, it's clearly doing her heart a lot of good.

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Can Poetry Keep You Young? Science Is Still Out, But The Heart Says Yes

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Creating some form of art is commonly believed to help older people stay mentally and physically healthy. Scientific research hasn't quite caught up with that belief. But that hasn't deterred the dozen or so older adults in Janet Hoult's poetry workshop. She refers to them all as "my poets."

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Defending the English Major — The Heights

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Defending the English Major — The Heights

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My parents were overjoyed by my decision to attend Boston College as my senior year of high school came to a close. But there was one catch: I wanted to major in English.

I did my best to convince them that it was a path worth pursuing, and while they tried their hardest to be supportive of what I wanted, I could tell they still weren't quite resigned to the idea.

A few weeks later, at a banquet dinner for seniors and their parents, my mom and dad arrived a few minutes late. As a result, they ended up sitting at a table with school administrators, rather than the other parents at the event. My parents conversed with the faculty during dinner, and when asked about my plans for the fall, my mom relayed that I would attend BC.

"She wants to major in English," my dad said, "I mean, I just don't get it. What is she going to do with that?"

"Actually," the principal replied, "I went to Boston College and I majored in English there."

The superintendent spoke up next, "I majored in English at Boston College as well."

"I'm just going to stop talking now," my dad said with a laugh.

The coincidence was comical and uncanny, but it also illuminates an important truth: undergraduates can do just about anything in their futures with an English major.

The value of an English major is in its versatility and longevity. In a world where technology and media change rapidly, whether content appears in print or online, a mastery of written language will never become outdated or unnecessary. Written language is a huge part of everyday life. Every time we open the computer, pick a book or newspaper, or even turn on the television, we are confronted with written language. In each case, someone with talent was needed to write the words that we hear or see. Without the work of great writers, we would be significantly less entertained and informed.

Even so, content writing is not the only field possible for an English major. Steve Strauss, senior columnist at y and small business expert, that English majors are the best choice for any business' next hire. In addition to their wit, great writing, critical thinking, and content creation, he cites their ability to relate to customers, as well as boldness, in his list of reasons for hiring English majors. These qualities and skills he notes are characteristic of English students and are necessary in almost any business environment.

Students decide to major in English with a variety of careers in mind. Teaching and professional writing comprise only a few careers available to English majors. School administration, for example, can become a career for former English teachers or can be pursued in and of itself. English majors work in business, marketing, healthcare communications, nonprofit, and government sectors. Pre-law students choose English over any other major as undergraduates. For future journalists, editors, and publishers, an English major is an obvious choice. With their widely applicable skills, English majors can be valuable in nearly any field.

Effective communication, particularly written communication, can often separate English majors from their business major counterparts. Professionals with an English background may best able to communicate with and relate to a variety of clients. Every story read in an English course is another perspective understood, another life or experience lived. Naturally then, an avid reader has the insight to better understand people of every identity and background, making English majors able to connect to nearly anyone. These traits and skills make the English major a strong choice for jobs in sales or account management.

Content creation and copywriting, for instance, are necessary in nearly every marketing and advertising agency. English majors are often passionate people who know how to relate to others and tap into emotion. Emotional content creation can be groundbreaking in the field of advertising, song and screen writing, and more. Storytelling and emotional advertising are growing in popularity, while ads that rely solely on facts fail to stand out to consumers.

English majors excel in marketing communications, publishing, and editing because of their careful attention to detail. Research and analysis practiced in the English major can carry over into the working world and make English majors problem solvers and careful fact-checkers. In these and other teamwork settings, those who have majored in English can constructively criticize, catch thoughts that others have missed, and take a project from good to great via an eye for detail. Oftentimes, the right details can be everything for the credibility of a company or a client.

In general, pursuing an English major fosters creativity and beautiful writing. These are abilities that cannot be quickly taught, the way one might learn how to make a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, or the basics of computer coding. Great writers must be groomed, criticized, questioned, and crafted just like the very essays and stories they write. For slogans with elegance, commercials with impact, and campaigns that stick, look to none other than the English major, who can tap into the beauty and power of language like no one else.

To all my fellow English majors, the next time someone asks you why you do what you do, or how your major could ever possibly be advantageous, tell them to look around. Tell them that words are everywhere, and that to harness their power is everything.
Featured Image by Meg Dolan / Heights Editor

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Connors: Defending the English Major - The Heights

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My parents were overjoyed by my decision to attend Boston College as my senior year of high school came to a close. But there was one catch: I wanted to major in English.

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Academy of Arts and Sciences makes case for increasing foreign language learning capacity

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Academy of Arts and Sciences makes case for increasing foreign language learning capacity

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A major 2013 report from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences warned that at "the very moment when China and some European nations are seeking to replicate our model of broad education," including the humanities, the U.S. was instead "narrowing" its focus and abandoning its "sense of what education has been and should continue to be."

The paper caught the attention of policy makers, including members of Congress. Four Republicans and four Democrats asked the academy to dig deeper into the state of language education in the U.S. They wanted to know what the U.S. could do to ensure excellence in language education, especially how it might more efficiently use existing resources. They also asked how language learning influences economic growth, cultural diplomacy, productivity for future generations and a sense of personal fulfillment.

Political winds now seem even more foul to the humanities (and more inward-blowing) than they were in 2013. And many foreign language departments at all kinds of colleges and universities have found their budgets threatened and, in some cases, eliminated. But those involved in the resulting report are hopeful their findings in support of language education opportunities for all students will gain traction.

" America's Languages: Investing in Language Education for the 21st Century," released today, doesn't call for "massive increases in funding at the local, state or federal levels," said Paul LeClerc, director of Columbia University's Global Center in Paris and chair of the academy's Commission on Language Learning. "For the most part, we ask for sustained funding and encourage creative partnerships to increase teaching capacity, not massive government spending programs."

The commission acknowledges its greatest challenge in making foreign language learning accessible to all students is teaching capacity, and it recommends upping the number of teachers in pre- and K-12 schools. But it hopes such instruction will be supplemented with partnerships among schools, governments, businesses and nonprofits. The Chicago Public Schools system, for example, offers an Arabic language program that's guided by Chicago's Center for Arabic Language and Culture, and supported by local Arabic speakers, local and international businesses, and the Qatar Foundation International.

The report also calls for more teaching of heritage languages spoken by immigrants to the U.S. and their families, in part to help those skills persist from one generation to the next. It urges additional, targeted support for the many Native American languages.

The commission calls, too, for more opportunities for students to learn languages -- and, with them, cultures -- abroad. One specific recommendation is to restructure federal financial aid to help students from low-income backgrounds study abroad during the summer, as well as the academic year.

As for what's at stake in such efforts, LeClerc said having more Americans with competency in languages other than English "is essential from virtually any point of view you can think of" -- from economic growth and competitiveness to national defense to increased academic achievement and what he called "successful functioning in a global economy."

Rosemary Feal, fellow commissioner and executive director of the Modern Language Association, was more pointed. "The greatest risk for failing to implement the key recommendations in this report is to further aggravate national isolationism," which is not only detrimental for business purposes, she said, "but downright dangerous in an era in which immigration bans and a physical barrier with Mexico are being instituted or threatened."

In the current political climate, Feal added, "the recommendations of the report are even more relevant than when it was commissioned." She said language learning is one of the best ways to cultivate empathy, and the earlier in children's education the process starts, "the more likely they are to become well-functioning global citizens."
Making the Case
The report notes that national law enforcement offices and the State and Defense Departments all have increased their foreign language capacities in recent years, citing national security. "The message in each case was clear: effective communication is the basis of international cooperation, and a strong national defense depends on our ability to understand our adversaries as well as our friends," it says.

Regarding business, nearly 30 percent of executives say they've missed out on opportunities over a lack of on-staff language skills, according to a 2014 NAFSA: Association of International Educators study quoted in the report. Some 40 percent said they'd failed to reach their international potential due to language barriers.

"America's Languages" includes profiles of professionals who've thrived due to their language skills -- whether they originally understood their value or not. "When I was in high school, I thought learning a foreign language was a complete waste of time and effort," said James Tobyne, who works in strategic partnerships and business development at alibaba.com, which is often referred to as China's Amazon.com. Yet now, he told the commission, "as an employee of one of the world's largest internet companies, my language skills -- including proficiency in Mandarin Chinese -- are an essential component of my job."

Globally, the commission says, some 300 to 400 million Chinese students are studying English, and about two-thirds of all European adults know more than one language. That's compared to some 200,000 U.S. students studying Chinese in K-12, according to government estimates, and the approximately one-fifth of Americans who know a language other than English.

The report also calls for an expanded capacity in world languages "a social imperative," with the provision of language access to social services mandated under Title IV of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Affordable Care Act.

"Growing numbers of American citizens speak languages other than English, and in some major urban areas, as many as half of all residents speak a non-English language at home," it says. "But all too often, their access to vital services, including health care, and even their ability to exercise simple rights are limited not only by their inability to communicate in English," but also by service providers' inability to speak or secure the help of those who speak other languages.

The commission also cites additional research suggesting that foreign language study has numerous cognitive benefits for children and adults, and has been linked to higher academic achievement in other disciplines.

The academy hinted at these findings in December with a data-based national "snapshot" of U.S. language capacity, and the picture wasn't pretty: language education is dwindling at every level, from K-12 to postsecondary, and a diminishing share of U.S. residents speak languages other than English. That's despite an "emerging consensus among leaders in business and politics, teachers, scientists, and community members that proficiency in English is not sufficient to meet the nation's needs," the paper read.

According to U.S. Census Bureau data included in that report and again in "America's Languages," more than 60 million residents over age 5 -- or about 20 percent of the population -- speak a language other than English at home. But other research suggests that just 10 percent of the population speaks a second language proficiently, and most are "heritage speakers," meaning they speak it for family or cultural reasons. Of those who speak a language other than English at home, 57 percent were foreign born.

Public elementary and middle school language education options have decreased within the last decade, and only a small minority of high school students are taking intermediate or advanced language courses. The number of college students enrolled in the most commonly studied languages -- with the exception of American Sign Language -- also has fallen in recent years.
Building Language Learning Capacity
Like Feal, the commission as a whole believes that instructional opportunities in other languages should be offered as early in life as possible. Its primary goal is that every school in the U.S. offer meaningful instruction of languages other than English as part of their standard curricula. The commission encourages colleges and universities to offer beginning and advanced language instruction to all students, and to reverse recent programmatic cuts "wherever possible." It also applauds recent efforts to expand undergraduate language requirements.

Some 44 states and Washington, D.C., report that they can't find enough qualified K-12 teachers to meet current needs, but all districts respond to shortages in different ways, the commission says. It encourages further study and better data of the scope of the problem.

As for creatively increasing capacity, the commission calls for federal loan forgiveness plans to attract qualified teachers. While the federal Perkins Loan program will forgive up to 100 percent of a need-based loan for students training to become language teachers, the report says, the Education Department offers no such forgiveness for Direct Loans, offered irrespective of need.

The report also advises coordination of state credentialing systems so that qualified teachers can more easily find work in areas that need them. It imagines that technology will play a role in expanding capacity, including in offering blended-learning models in understaffed areas.

Within college and universities -- for students who wish to become language teachers and those who don't -- the commission calls for a "recommitment" to language instruction.

While language programs were particularly vulnerable to cuts during the Great Recession, the report says, two- and four-year colleges and universities should now find new ways to provide opportunities for advanced study in languages, including through blended-learning programs and the development of new regional consortia that allow colleges and universities to pool resources. A number of such collaborations exist, including the Big Ten Academic Alliance. Fourteen member universities use a distance-learning program to offer online classes in some 65 less commonly taught languages, including Uzbek and Dutch.

Such efforts will be particularly important "as we increase the number of learning opportunities in less commonly taught languages like Arabic, Persian and Korean," the commission wrote. "Only by maintaining such offerings in higher education can we ensure that we will have the teachers and linguistic and cultural experts we need for life and work in the 21st century."

The report praises institutions that have instituted mandatory language study even for those undergraduates who took Advanced Placement courses in high school. Such institutions recognize that this kind of course work is "a qualification for higher-level language courses, rather than an exemption from language requirements," the report says. "Not every college or university has the resources to institute such a policy immediately, but it is a laudable goal and worthy of serious consideration."

The commission also encourages college and university curricula designed for Native American and heritage language speakers, and supports offering course credit for proficiency in these languages. The Spanish Heritage Language Program at the University of Houston, for example, offers specific courses for heritage Spanish speakers. Students who have successfully completed the intermediate level fulfill the university's foreign language requirement but are encouraged to enroll in more advanced classes.

Feal said that the report strongly emphasizes a "K-16" approach, with schools working with colleges and universities to promote language learning. It also promotes as "glocal" (local-to-global) approach. Still, she said, as far as funding and other resources are concerned, the new report "outlines a clear and compelling case for the value of language learning in the postsecondary system, where language study at the most advanced levels takes place."

The report ends by saying that in the past, the U.S. has only focused on language education "in times of great need, such as encouraging Russian studies during the Cold War or instruction in certain Middle Eastern languages after the terrorist attacks of 2001." At such moments, it says, "enrollments increase dramatically, but students require years of training before they can achieve a useful level of proficiency, often long after the immediate crisis has faded and national priorities have changed."

A wiser, more forward-thinking strategy, then, "would be to steadily improve access to as many languages as possible for people of every age, ethnicity and socioeconomic background -- to treat language education as a persistent national need like competency in math or English, and to ensure that a useful level of proficiency is within every student's reach."

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Academy of Arts and Sciences makes case for increasing foreign language learning capacity

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A major 2013 report from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences warned that at "the very moment when China and some European nations are seeking to replicate our model of broad education," including the humanities, the U.S. was instead "narrowing" its focus and abandoning its "sense of what education has been and should continue to be."

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Four Ways Artists Can Help Heal Communities - Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

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Four Ways Artists Can Help Heal Communities - Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

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Mar 2, 2017, 10:00 AM

Leaders from Louisville-one of seven winners of the 2016 Culture of Health Prize-share how artists can play a role in creating healthier, more equitable communities.

Our Louisville, Kentucky, neighborhood of Smoketown sits across the street from the largest concentration of health care services in our state. Yet people here live 9 years less than the typical Louisville resident. Poverty, racism, unemployment and other social determinants of health have created this gap between residents of Smoketown and those from more affluent parts of the city.

An artist's creativity has helped make that disparity concrete. Andrew Cozzens' Smoketown Life Line Project documents the impact of trauma on many aspects of people's lives and health, as revealed through interviews with more than 20 local residents.

You see the impact in metal rods of different lengths-each representing the length of one community member's life. Crimps in the rods marked with bands of color represent adverse experiences-violence (red), addiction (white), incarceration (black), trauma (blue)-showing how lives have, in effect, been shortened.

Cozzens created the project as part of Project HEAL (Health. Equity. Art. Learning.), a three-year framework through which trained artists can help communities identify their health priorities and unearth complex issues through sometimes tough conversations. Ultimately, Project HEAL uses the arts to enable communities to work toward health equity, hand-in-hand with policymakers, health care institutions, nonprofits, and others.

What Artists Can Do

This approach can work anywhere because every community has artists: choir directors, dance instructors, musicians, painters, poets, photographers. In Louisville, Project HEAL has shown how artists are able to do four things:

Create opportunities for a shared vision of a healthier, more connected future.

Artists who are connected to the community can lift up unheard voices and channel them into equitable policymaking. More than that, they can offer hope. And hope heals. Cozzens' project, for example, was about more than creating a sculpture. Friends and family came together to discuss shared experiences and how trauma impacts their community, with an eye toward a future where violence and lack of opportunities don't hold residents back. Cozzens is continuing to create rods, and plans to turn the piece into a temporary outdoor art installation. Through this artwork, policymakers and community stakeholders will be able to see how neighborhoods like Smoketown are disproportionately impacted by incarceration and other traumatic experiences. We hope this will spur them into finding more ways to improve conditions within the community.

Bring neighbors together and give them tools for facing and addressing adversity.

Artists Greg Acker and Hamidou Koivogui held weekly drum circles in Smoketown last summer. In August, a shooting happened a few blocks away just 45 minutes before the drum circle started. Whether they knew the victim or not, participants looked to the circle for healing, a release for their anger at another young life being taken, and support from others who were grieving. The presence of art and community spirit in the neighborhood that day offered an outlet for grief, bringing people together in a way that our artists hope to build on for future projects.

Use art to facilitate dialogue with policymakers.

For instance, Project HEAL uses arts and culture as a form of discovery and language-creating a feedback loop between policymakers and those most impacted by policy decisions. Spoken word artist and Smoketown native Hannah Drake will launch a project called One Poem at a Time in April, which is National Poetry Month. Negative billboards and signs advertising, for example, cheap lawyers and predatory fast-cash schemes, will be replaced with positive poetry and images. Evidence shows that in the same way lead puts environmental toxins into the environment, negative advertising puts social toxins into a neighborhood. A series of artist-facilitated community discussions with policy makers is being planned as part of One Poem at a Time. Using images and positive messages created with community members and supported by artists, Project HEAL provides a new way for communities to engage in a discussion to support health in all policies.

Pioneer new relationships between communities and health systems that lead to more culturally responsive health services.

KentuckyOne Health has partnered with us to incorporate a "community health champion" into our framework. The champion works with our Project HEAL artists, participating in arts and cultural events alongside community members to establish trust based on shared experiences and then connecting them to local health resources. With Humana, we're looking at how artist interventions can be used to increase the number of healthy days (based on the CDC Healthy Days measure) enjoyed by Humana Associates participating in arts and culture experiences. This prototype could create new opportunities in the future for earning incentives, in the same way Humana members currently earn points for going to medical checkups and being physically active.

Measuring Impact

We're excited about the potential for Project HEAL-trained artists have to become an ingrained part of health promotion across the nation, and we want to bring credibility and evidence so this approach can thrive.

That's why we're creating a way to evaluate our work-we call it Cultural ROI. This evidence-informed framework aims to expand imaginative capacity and measure the overall impact on a city's economy that comes from improving health by engaging artists. To evaluate Project HEAL and establish it as an evidence-based model, we've partnered with University of Louisville's Commonwealth Institute of Kentucky.

Demonstrating Project HEAL's effectiveness, we think, will motivate communities to find and train artists who want to step off the stage or outside of the studio and focus on health-using their creative process as a form of social sculpture that exposes a different, more hopeful future. Having an evidence base will also help boost funding for training artists as change agents.

Evaluations of art and music therapy have given us much evidence of the positive impact arts can have on individual lives. What makes our work unique is that we go beyond seeking to enhance individual people's healthy behaviors; we target change at the organizational, community, and public-policy levels. We believe health and well-being are culturally created, not professionally provided. And artists can work with their communities to lead the way.
Learn more about how Louisville is working to improve health for all of its residents.

Josh Miller Theo Edmonds is CEO and co-founder of IDEAS xLab. An artist and former healthcare executive, he serves on Louisville's Commission on Public Art and co-chairs the Louisville Health Advisory Board's Cultural Committee. is chief operating officer and co-founder of IDEAS xLab. IDEAS xLab - which trains artists to find innovative ways to create equitable places and nurture healthy communities - is the creation of Josh and colleagues Theo Edmonds, Chris Radtke and Ayelet Aldouby. A photographer with a background in art administration, he co-chairs the Louisville Health Advisory Board's Communications Committee.

Tags: Community Health, Public and Community Health

Leaders from Louisville-one of seven winners of the 2016 Culture of Health Prize-share how artists can play a role in creating healthier, more equitable communities.

Our Louisville, Kentucky, neighborhood of Smoketown sits across the street from the largest concentration of health care services in our state. Yet people here live 9 years less than the typical Louisville resident. Poverty, racism, unemployment and other social determinants of health have created this gap between residents of Smoketown and those from more affluent parts of the city.

An artist's creativity has helped make that disparity concrete. Andrew Cozzens' Smoketown Life Line Project documents the impact of trauma on many aspects of people's lives and health, as revealed through interviews with more than 20 local residents.

You see the impact in metal rods of different lengths-each representing the length of one community member's life. Crimps in the rods marked with bands of color represent adverse experiences-violence (red), addiction (white), incarceration (black), trauma (blue)-showing how lives have, in effect, been shortened.

Cozzens created the project as part of Project HEAL (Health. Equity. Art. Learning.), a three-year framework through which trained artists can help communities identify their health priorities and unearth complex issues through sometimes tough conversations. Ultimately, Project HEAL uses the arts to enable communities to work toward health equity, hand-in-hand with policymakers, health care institutions, nonprofits, and others.

What Artists Can Do

This approach can work anywhere because every community has artists: choir directors, dance instructors, musicians, painters, poets, photographers. In Louisville, Project HEAL has shown how artists are able to do four things:

Create opportunities for a shared vision of a healthier, more connected future.

Artists who are connected to the community can lift up unheard voices and channel them into equitable policymaking. More than that, they can offer hope. And hope heals. Cozzens' project, for example, was about more than creating a sculpture. Friends and family came together to discuss shared experiences and how trauma impacts their community, with an eye toward a future where violence and lack of opportunities don't hold residents back. Cozzens is continuing to create rods, and plans to turn the piece into a temporary outdoor art installation. Through this artwork, policymakers and community stakeholders will be able to see how neighborhoods like Smoketown are disproportionately impacted by incarceration and other traumatic experiences. We hope this will spur them into finding more ways to improve conditions within the community.

Bring neighbors together and give them tools for facing and addressing adversity.

Artists Greg Acker and Hamidou Koivogui held weekly drum circles in Smoketown last summer. In August, a shooting happened a few blocks away just 45 minutes before the drum circle started. Whether they knew the victim or not, participants looked to the circle for healing, a release for their anger at another young life being taken, and support from others who were grieving. The presence of art and community spirit in the neighborhood that day offered an outlet for grief, bringing people together in a way that our artists hope to build on for future projects.

Use art to facilitate dialogue with policymakers.

For instance, Project HEAL uses arts and culture as a form of discovery and language-creating a feedback loop between policymakers and those most impacted by policy decisions. Spoken word artist and Smoketown native Hannah Drake will launch a project called One Poem at a Time in April, which is National Poetry Month. Negative billboards and signs advertising, for example, cheap lawyers and predatory fast-cash schemes, will be replaced with positive poetry and images. Evidence shows that in the same way lead puts environmental toxins into the environment, negative advertising puts social toxins into a neighborhood. A series of artist-facilitated community discussions with policy makers is being planned as part of One Poem at a Time. Using images and positive messages created with community members and supported by artists, Project HEAL provides a new way for communities to engage in a discussion to support health in all policies.

Pioneer new relationships between communities and health systems that lead to more culturally responsive health services.

KentuckyOne Health has partnered with us to incorporate a "community health champion" into our framework. The champion works with our Project HEAL artists, participating in arts and cultural events alongside community members to establish trust based on shared experiences and then connecting them to local health resources. With Humana, we're looking at how artist interventions can be used to increase the number of healthy days (based on the CDC Healthy Days measure) enjoyed by Humana Associates participating in arts and culture experiences. This prototype could create new opportunities in the future for earning incentives, in the same way Humana members currently earn points for going to medical checkups and being physically active.

Measuring Impact

We're excited about the potential for Project HEAL-trained artists have to become an ingrained part of health promotion across the nation, and we want to bring credibility and evidence so this approach can thrive.

That's why we're creating a way to evaluate our work-we call it Cultural ROI. This evidence-informed framework aims to expand imaginative capacity and measure the overall impact on a city's economy that comes from improving health by engaging artists. To evaluate Project HEAL and establish it as an evidence-based model, we've partnered with University of Louisville's Commonwealth Institute of Kentucky.

Demonstrating Project HEAL's effectiveness, we think, will motivate communities to find and train artists who want to step off the stage or outside of the studio and focus on health-using their creative process as a form of social sculpture that exposes a different, more hopeful future. Having an evidence base will also help boost funding for training artists as change agents.

Evaluations of art and music therapy have given us much evidence of the positive impact arts can have on individual lives. What makes our work unique is that we go beyond seeking to enhance individual people's healthy behaviors; we target change at the organizational, community, and public-policy levels. We believe health and well-being are culturally created, not professionally provided. And artists can work with their communities to lead the way.
Learn more about how Louisville is working to improve health for all of its residents.

Josh Miller Theo Edmonds is CEO and co-founder of IDEAS xLab. An artist and former healthcare executive, he serves on Louisville's Commission on Public Art and co-chairs the Louisville Health Advisory Board's Cultural Committee. is chief operating officer and co-founder of IDEAS xLab. IDEAS xLab - which trains artists to find innovative ways to create equitable places and nurture healthy communities - is the creation of Josh and colleagues Theo Edmonds, Chris Radtke and Ayelet Aldouby. A photographer with a background in art administration, he co-chairs the Louisville Health Advisory Board's Communications Committee.

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Four Ways Artists Can Help Heal Communities

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Mar 2, 2017, 10:00 AM Leaders from Louisville-one of seven winners of the 2016 Culture of Health Prize-share how artists can play a role in creating healthier, more equitable communities. Our Louisville, Kentucky, neighborhood of Smoketown sits across the street from the largest concentration of health care services in our state.

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Amazingly flexible: Learning to read in your 30s profoundly transforms the brain -- ScienceDaily

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Amazingly flexible: Learning to read in your 30s profoundly transforms the brain -- ScienceDaily

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Reading is such a new ability in human evolutionary history that the existence of a 'reading area' could not be specified in our genes. A kind of recycling process has to take place in the brain while learning to read: Areas evolved for the recognition of complex objects, such as faces, become engaged in translating letters into language. Some regions of our visual system thereby turn into interfaces between the visual and language systems.

"Until now it was assumed that these changes are limited to the outer layer of the brain, the cortex, which is known to adapt quickly to new challenges," says project leader Falk Huettig from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. The Max Planck researchers together with Indian scientists from the Centre of Bio-Medical Research (CBMR) Lucknow and the University of Hyderabad have now discovered what changes occur in the adult brain when completely illiterate people learn to read and write. In contrast to previous assumptions, the learning process leads to a reorganisation that extends to deep brain structures in the thalamus and the brainstem. The relatively young phenomenon of human writing therefore changes brain regions that are very old in evolutionary terms and already core parts of mice and other mammalian brains.

"We observed that the so-called colliculi superiores, a part of the brainstem, and the pulvinar, located in the thalamus, adapt the timing of their activity patterns to those of the visual cortex," says Michael Skeide, scientific researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences (MPI CBS) in Leipzig and first author of the study, which has just been published in the magazine Science Advances. "These deep structures in the thalamus and brainstem help our visual cortex to filter important information from the flood of visual input even before we consciously perceive it." Interestingly, it seems that the more the signal timings between the two brain regions are aligned, the better the reading capabilities. "We, therefore, believe that these brain systems increasingly fine-tune their communication as learners become more and more proficient in reading," the neuroscientist explains further. "This could explain why experienced readers navigate more efficiently through a text."
Large-scale study with illiterates in India
The interdisciplinary research team obtained these findings in India, a country with an illiteracy rate of about 39 percent. Poverty still limits access to education in some parts of India especially for women. Therefore, in this study nearly all participants were women in their thirties. At the beginning of the training, the majority of them could not decipher a single written word of their mother tongue Hindi. Hindi, one of the official languages of India, is based on Devanagari, a scripture with complex characters describing whole syllables or words rather than single letters.

Participants reached a level comparable to a first-grader after only six months of reading training. "This growth of knowledge is remarkable," says project leader Huettig. "While it is quite difficult for us to learn a new language, it appears to be much easier for us to learn to read. The adult brain proves to be astonishingly flexible." In principle, this study could also have taken place in Europe. Yet illiteracy is regarded as such a taboo in the West that it would have been immensely difficult to find volunteers to take part. Nevertheless, even in India where the ability to read and write is strongly connected to social class, the project was a tremendous challenge. The scientists recruited volunteers from the same social class in two villages in Northern India to make sure that social factors could not influence the findings. Brain scans were performed in the city of Lucknow, a three hours taxi ride away from participants' homes.
A new view on dyslexia
The impressive learning achievements of the volunteers do not only provide hope for adult illiterates, they also shed new light on the possible cause of reading disorders such as dyslexia. One possible cause for the basic deficits observed in people with dyslexia has previously been attributed to dysfunctions of the thalamus. "Since we found out that only a few months of reading training can modify the thalamus fundamentally, we have to scrutinise this hypothesis," neuroscientist Skeide explains. It could also be that affected people show different brain activity in the thalamus just because their visual system is less well trained than that of experienced readers. This means that these abnormalities can only be considered an innate cause of dyslexia if they show up prior to schooling. "That's why only studies that assess children before they start to learn to read and follow them up for several years can bring clarity about the origins of reading disorders," Huettig adds.

Journal Reference:

Skeide, M., Kumar, M., Mishra, R. K., Tripathi, V.N., Guleria, A., Singh, J.P., Eisner, F., & Huettig, F. Learning to read alters cortico-subcortical cross-talk in the visual system of illiterates. Science Advances. Science Advances, 2017 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1602612

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Amazingly flexible: Learning to read in your 30s profoundly transforms the brain

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Reading is such a modern cultural invention that there is no specific area in the brain dedicated to it. Scientists have found that learning to read as an adult reconfigures evolutionarily ancient brain structures hitherto assigned to different skills.

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Enough with trashing the liberal arts. Stop being stupid. - The Washington Post

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Enough with trashing the liberal arts. Stop being stupid. - The Washington Post

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Trashing the liberal arts seems to have become practically a sport among some politicians these days. Maybe they think that the "liberal" in "liberal arts" is a political reference, which it isn't.

Kentucky Gov. Matthew Bevin (R) recently suggested that French literature majors should not get state funding for college tuition. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who is running for the Republican presidential nomination, said that welders earn more money than philosophy majors - fact checkers found this not to be true - while saying the country needs fewer philosophers and more welders.

Meanwhile, former Florida governor and GOP presidential candidate Jeb Bush said:

"Universities ought to have skin in the game. When a student shows up, they ought to say, 'Hey, that psych major deal, that philosophy major thing, that's great, it's important to have liberal arts ... but realize, you're going to be working [at] a Chick-fil-A.' "

Meanwhile, Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) said: "Is it a vital interest of the state to have more anthropologists? I don't think so." And Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) wanted to change the historic mission of the University of Wisconsin system by removing words that commanded the university to "search for truth" and "improve the human condition" and replacing them with "meet the state's workforce needs."

There's more but you get the idea. These politicians see the liberal arts as a wasteful pursuit for college students who would do better studying subjects that can guarantee decent-paying jobs. That line of thinking suggests, of course, that a college education is only worth the job that students get at the end and nothing else, and that a liberal arts degree is irrelevant and unwanted in the American business community. None of that is true.

[What the 'liberal' in 'liberal arts' really means]

Enough with the trashing of the liberal arts. It's gotten really old - and really, well, stupid.

For years now, business leaders have been saying loudly that the skills learned in liberal arts education are exactly what they are looking for in employees. The ability to think through problems for innovative solutions, to work in groups, to exercise a broad intellect, etc. Edgar Bronfman wrote back in 2013 on InsideHighered.com:

For all of the decisions young business leaders will be asked to make based on facts and figures, needs and wants, numbers and speculation, all of those choices will require one common skill: how to evaluate raw information, be it from people or a spreadsheet, and make reasoned and critical decisions. The ability to think clearly and critically - to understand what people mean rather than what they say - cannot be monetized, and in life should not be undervalued. In all the people who have worked for me over the years the ones who stood out the most were the people who were able to see beyond the facts and figures before them and understand what they mean in a larger context.

So here's a new post about the value of a liberal arts education, this by Keith Evans, president of The Westminster Schools in Atlanta. You can read his blog here.

[Why the tech world values a liberal arts education]

By Keith A. Evans

We've all watched as the saga of the Affluenza Teen has unfolded in predictable and unpredictable ways in 2016. Eighteen-year-old Ethan Couch, who fled the country after being charged with intoxication manslaughter, was arrested in Mexico and is now being held in an isolation cell "for his own safety." Given the overwhelming research into the toxic mental health effects of isolation, it is ironic that a form of imprisonment reserved for the most dangerous inmates would be understood as in his best interest. Perhaps "tough on crime" translates to "tough on affluenza" in this case.

Couch came to mind recently as I listened to a thoughtful and persuasive defense of a liberal arts education in the 21st century offered by John McCardell, the vice chancellor of The University of the South. He spoke to the way that a liberal arts education offers more than vocational training to get a good job. It builds inner resources of resilience and personal capacity to lead a purposeful life, come what may. I thought of Couch (and others) when McCardell noted, "Nothing indemnifies people from the things that make life hard." Truer words were never spoken.

The presidential election cycle seems to have our country hyper-focused on the "things that make life hard." Our most successful candidates on either side have channeled and cultivated the grievances of the electorate across the spectrum. Playing by the rules turned out to be a flimsy indemnification strategy. Our real and perceived trials - underemployment, stagnant wages, discrimination, immigration, diminished global leadership, changing social mores, you name it - quickly transmute disappointment into anger. Indeed, the mood of the country is most often described as angry, and that anger is a bludgeon wielded by both candidates against each other and by the electorate against the status quo.

Anger, and the breathless "top this" solutions it inspires - from carpet bombing ISIS to converting to a socialist or semi-socialist state - are more than political phenomena; they have many features of a social contagion as well. The idea that human behavior could be contagious dates back to the foundations of modern psychology in the late 1800s. The theory goes that individuals in a group fear rejection if they act outside the norms of the group. "Reduction of restraints" occurs when a norm is openly violated or modified and fear of rejection is thereby lessened. The open expression of anger, in some cases over previously taboo topics, reduces social restraints and can lead to generalizing emotion well beyond the original subjects at hand. So does the Affluenza Teen end up in isolation as a result of a not-going-to-take-it-anymore contagion? Maybe. Or do a group of men in Oregon enact an armed takeover of a remote fish and game building because the norms restraining this kind of behavior have been reduced? Possibly. Social contagions are known to exist, but identifying and proving them is neither simple nor easy.

We may not agree on what is or is not a social contagion, but we likely could agree that it's hard to be happy and angry at the same time. McCardell put his finger on something important in his assertion that a complete education is aimed at something more than just the skills or knowledge to make a living. Our national impulse in challenging economic times has been to demand increasing return on investment out of schools, colleges, and universities. Over time, that ROI has been defined more and more narrowly. As a result, public K-12 education is driven by standardized testing that suffocates curiosity and creativity. Higher education, guilty as charged of ratcheting up tuition and saddling students with high debt, is increasingly evaluated in terms of the starting salaries and lifetime earnings of its graduates.

Not a single American student, however, will be indemnified from the things that make life hard by the mastery of facts on a test or a big salary. Difficulties come our way from both personal circumstances and the inevitable unfairness of an imperfect society. If contagious, radioactive anger is our best or only resource to tap in the face of adversity, what does that mean for the future not just of our democracy, but our institutions and quality of life?

By almost any definition, the United States has seen tougher circumstances than these, yet we seem a bit brittle. Our current national mood may be revealing something missing in our educational agenda - the cultivation of wisdom, judgment, grace once inspired by the liberal arts - and now replaced by things seemingly more serviceable but far less ambitious.

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Enough with trashing the liberal arts. Stop being stupid.

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Trashing the liberal arts seems to have become practically a sport among some politicians these days. Maybe they think that the "liberal" in "liberal arts" is a political reference, which it isn't. Kentucky Gov. Matthew Bevin (R) recently suggested that French literature majors should not get state funding for college tuition.

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Trusted Sources: Why Museums and Libraries Are More Relevant Than Ever | Smithsonian Insider

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Trusted Sources: Why Museums and Libraries Are More Relevant Than Ever | Smithsonian Insider

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By David Skorton, Secretary of the Smithsonian

Washington, D.C. is a city of symbols. The rites, rituals, and places that define Washington capture the aspirations of our nation and its citizens.

Just last month, we saw a new President take the Oath of Office on the Capitol steps, and lead a parade from the Capitol Hill to the White House. This traditional journey reflects both the separation of, and the bond between, two of the branches of our government.

One block south of the parade route is the National Mall. It too, connects the Capitol to the White House. And it too, reflects our national ambitions, values and ethos. Over the generations rather than erecting armories or palaces on the Mall, we built museums. No other nation makes as bold a statement on the primacy of education and learning as we do on our Mall. While the walk up Pennsylvania Avenue symbolizes in part our Constitution, the National Mall symbolizes our democracy - a democracy founded and continuously renewed by an informed citizenry.

Even as we celebrated the peaceful transition of power, Americans remain sharply divided on many social, intellectual, and scientific matters. Some of these divisions follow along strictly partisan lines; some reflect the challenging economic situation of too many Americans, and some are founded on deeply-held cultural beliefs. Common to all is a growing lack of trust in American institutions - from government, to religious organizations, to the media. And this lack of trust leads to lack of confidence in the information we need as citizens to form educated opinions or make critical decisions. Honest disagreements on scientific and cultural issues are made worse - far worse - by the perception of "fake news" and uncertainty on whether data and information are trustworthy no matter the source.

How do we move beyond our current distrust of information toward a future in which we can begin again to attain information that we will trust? Where and how do we find venues where we can and will respectfully discuss, disagree and debate - in other words, talk with and not at each other?

More and more, the trustworthiness of information is based on the perceived trustworthiness of the source. Since our founding, this nation has consistently placed that trust in its museums and libraries. Even today, libraries and museums are considered honest purveyors of information and places for conversation on issues of local and national significance.

Our democracy, "of the people, by the people, and for the people," provides a perfect foundation for carrying out the timeless mission of our great cultural institutions. Now, as much as at any time in our past, our country and world are evolving, and opportunities to explore our future and our past, the wisdom and works of our ancestors, and the extraordinary potential of tomorrow's leaders, abound.

Today's museums are dynamic learning hubs, using the power of art and artifacts to engage, teach and inspire. Museums touch lives and transform the way people see the world and each other. As Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, I see these conversations happening daily at our 19 museums and the National Zoo. In future months, we will host programs, welcoming thought leaders and community members to join in mutually respectful and fruitful discussions at the Smithsonian as so many of our colleagues in the 125,000 libraries and 35,000 museums are doing across our country. These cultural institutions invite our fellow citizens across America to learn, be inspired, and be uplifted.

All across this country, in cities and in rural areas, cultural institutions are helping to strengthen our communities through the arts, history, culture and science. Like the Smithsonian, these organizations are working to foster meaningful dialogue about what's important to their communities and to the country.

The role they play in supporting the world's greatest democracy is broad and enduring: they collect, preserve and share the icons and artifacts that define America; they tell the story of country and our people; they convey the beauty and power of the arts; they explore and explain scientific progress, and they seek and share knowledge.

The ability of all cultural institutions, including the Smithsonian, to play this role depends on the continued trust of our leaders and the public in them. Cultural institutions cannot be seen as partisan or political.

Of course, at times, the research done by the curators, scientists and other scholars at libraries, archives and museums touches on controversial topics, as it does in our great colleges and universities. For example, Smithsonian scholars have been investigating the effects of climate change for more than 160 years. As an institution, we agree with the scientific consensus that climate change is occurring and that human activity is a factor. But we also recognize that much more research is needed. Our primary goals are to inform the public and provide our leaders with the data needed to make policy decisions. It is worth noting that while we support the current scientific consensus, we have protected the rights of a dissenting Smithsonian scientist to challenge the consensus.

In the end, many of the issues that all cultural institutions explore, from climate change to economic inequality, to race relations, may ultimately have political or partisan implications. Our role is to not advocate or judge. Instead, cultural institutions aim to provide context and information-and often the forum-to address the big issues knowledgeably and constructively. In cities and in rural areas across America, cultural institutions are helping to strengthen our communities through the arts, history, culture and science.

As each swearing in of a new President on the National Mall reminds us, our democracy depends on us.

Tags: climate change, history, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Smithsonian Libraries

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Trusted Sources: Why Museums and Libraries Are More Relevant Than Ever

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By David Skorton, Secretary of the Smithsonian Washington, D.C. is a city of symbols. The rites, rituals, and places that define Washington capture the aspirations of our nation and its citizens. Just last month, we saw a new President take the Oath of Office on the Capitol steps, and lead a parade from the Capitol Hill to the White House.

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What’s a Vote Worth? (a.k.a., The Importance of the Quantitative Liberal Arts) – UMW DTLT

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What’s a Vote Worth? (a.k.a., The Importance of the Quantitative Liberal Arts) – UMW DTLT

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DTLT is sponsoring a design sprint on The Quantitative Liberal Arts on Wednesday, March 22, at 12pm, in HCC 407. Bring your lunch if you like (we'll provide dessert!), and come ready to discuss and assemble resources for helping our students think deeply and critically about the relationship of data and narrative. In this post, Kris Shaffer unpacks one area in which the synthesis of data and critical thought is essential to finding meaning and directing action in our current political system.
Frederick Gibbs and Dan Cohen write:

Any robust digital research methodology must allow the scholar to move easily between distant and close reading, between the bird's eye view and the ground level.

But this isn't just for scholars. Merging quantitative and qualitative reasoning, applying critical thought to data, synthesizing the arts, sciences, and humanities, ... these are essential elements of modern education. In fact, I'd argue that they are among the most important elements of modern education, if for no other reason than they are really hard to do well. They are also nearly absent from the information being circulated widely in our culture.

And how do we help our students develop these abilities?

Let's take the presidential election as an example: How much is a vote worth?

Whenever there is a discrepancy between the electoral college and the popular vote in a US presidential election, this question resurfaces. Few things are more quantified in US culture than election data, and yet few things are more contested than the meaning of election data.There are a number of ways to count the value of a vote, and underlying each is a narrative, a set of values. And it's at the intersection of data analysis and the unpacking of those values where we find meaning. So let's explore a few of the common narratives surrounding the value of a vote and see what we can find.

When we use a system like the electoral college, citizen votes in smaller states correspond to a larger share of the electoral votes. This is because each state's number of electors is the sum of its representatives in the House and the Senate (with the District of Columbia receiving an amount equal to the smallest state). Since the House is already determined in proportion to population, when we add two electors to each state, it messes with the proportional system, disproportionately affecting small states. (This is why opposition to the Electoral College is often encapsulated in the phrase, "One person, one vote" ― every vote counts the same.)

So in what states are individual votes worth the greatest share of the electoral college? Here is a chart, based on 2016 election results and the 2010 census ( download the data here).

While most states have about 1.5-2.0 electors per million citizens, the 15 smallest states and districts show a precipitous rise in electors per citizen as population gets smaller, with the result that a citizen in Wyoming holds more than three times the share of the electoral college than a citizen in California.

Now this is citizens, not voters. Things are a little different when we look at the ratio of electors to votes.

Interestingly, Wyoming votes are still worth about three times of the electoral college than they are in California. But when we look at votes instead of citizens, we see a swing-state effect. There are a number of states where the election was closer than in California, and as a result had a higher voter turnout, giving each individual vote less of a share of the electoral college than in a state where fewer citizens turn out to vote. Notably, votes in the perennial swing state of Florida are worth about one-fourth of a Wyoming vote's share of the Electoral College.

But this brings up a second narrative about the value of a vote: how likely is it that a changed vote will change the election results? Most states have a winner-take-all model, where the state's winner gets all of the electoral votes. So if you want to influence the outcome of the election, this narrative says you shouldn't move to a state where your vote is worth a large share of the electoral college. Instead, you should move to a state where the election is regularly a tight race. Which states are those?

The closest races in 2016 were New Hampshire, Michigan, Maine, Wisconsin, Nevada, and Pennsylvania. These are the states in 2016 where your vote was most likely to change the election results. In California, New York, Illinois, Massachusetts, and Texas, not so much.

But these aren't the swing states we heard about constantly during the election. Where are Florida? North Carolina?

As usual, a single statistic isn't enough to capture the complexity of the issue. If I simply want my vote to count for more of the electoral college, I move to a small state like Wyoming. If I want a high likelihood that my vote will change the Electoral College tally, I move to a close state like New Hampshire.

But if I want my vote to change the winner of the election, I want to move to a large, winner-take-all state with consistently close results. This is a state where my vote is both likely to change who my state's electors vote for and a state with a lot of electors, and therefore a large impact on the final election result.

Which states fit that bill?

This is kind of hard to read, so let's take out the three states with both a large margin of victory and a large number of electors (California, Texas, and New York) and zoom in on the others (click the image to enlarge).

Now we can readily visualize the states with a small margin of victory and a high number of electors ― they are in the upper-left of the chart: Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Arizona, and Florida. These are the states where close race intersects with high impact. (Note that North Carolina is still not in this group. While it was considered a close race going into the election, it turned out to be more firmly red than pollsters and pundits expected.)

The three states the media paid the most attention to into the wee hours of election night, also the three states whose results were contested by the Stein campaign, are in this list: Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. While New Hampshire was closer than all three of these, and while it was a very politically active state (with the highest voter turnout by percentage of 2010 population), it isn't a very big prize, and thus wasn't a big story in the media, even on election night.

There are a number of different narratives that can be spun with this data, including some I didn't discuss here (where did candidates invest the most money? buy the most TV ads?). And it is all too easy to dismiss a narrative by countering it with other data. Data alone isn't sufficient to answer the question how much is a vote worth? In fact, data alone is insufficient to most questions we care about. But the same is true for narrative. We need both data and narrative, and the critical abilities to combine them in appropriately nuanced ways. That's why we need the quantitative liberal arts.

On Wednesday, March 22, at noon in HCC 407, we'll have a brown-bag design sprint where we explore the quantitative liberal arts. We'll unpack and critique some common data-driven narratives we engage in our culture, discuss how the issues of data needing critique and narrative needing data come up in our classes, and construct a concrete set of resources and tasks we can use to help our students (and ourselves!) bring data and narrative together in critical and meaningful ways.

So please join us! Feel free to bring a lunch. We'll provide dessert! And we'll hopefully all leave at least a little better equipped to help our students engage these important issues.
Header image by Mike Wilson (CC0).

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What's a Vote Worth? (a.k.a., The Importance of the Quantitative Liberal Arts)

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DTLT is sponsoring a design sprint on The Quantitative Liberal Arts on Wednesday, March 22, at 12pm, in HCC 407. Bring your lunch if you like (we'll provide dessert!), and come ready to discuss and assemble resources for helping our students think deeply and critically about the relationship of data and narrative.

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Want a Job with that English Degree? | Corrigan Literary Review

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Want a Job with that English Degree? | Corrigan Literary Review

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If you want to major in English, you might feel some pressure. Folks might warn you against it. Folks might tell you that you can't get a job with an English degree, might advise you that a "practical" degree is the safe bet in a rough economy, might crack jokes about you working at Starbucks while writing a novel in your...

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Why Study Philosophy? 'To Challenge Your Own Point of View' - The Atlantic

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Why Study Philosophy? 'To Challenge Your Own Point of View' - The Atlantic

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What did your religious family think about your pursuit of philosophy?
It made my mother intensely uncomfortable. She wanted me to be a good student but not to take it too seriously. She worried that nobody would want to marry such a bookish girl. But I ended up getting married at 19. And I wasn't an outwardly rebellious child; I followed all the rules. The problem was, I was allowed to think about whatever I wanted to. Even though I decided very early on that I didn't believe in any of it, it was okay as long as I had freedom of mind. It was fine with my family.
How early do you think children can, or should, start learning about philosophy?
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I started really early with my daughters. They said the most interesting things that if you're trained in philosophy you realize are big philosophical statements. The wonderful thing about kids is that the normal way of thinking, the conceptual schemes we get locked up in, haven't gelled yet with them. When my daughter was a toddler, I'd say "Danielle!" she would very assuredly, almost indignantly, say, "I'm not Danielle! I'm this!" I'd think, What is she trying to express? This is going to sound ridiculous, but she was trying to express what Immanuel Kant calls the transcendental ego. You're not a thing in the world the way there are other things in the world, you're the thing experiencing other things-putting it all together. This is what this toddler was trying to tell me. Or when my other daughter, six at the time, was talking with her hands and knocked over a glass of juice. She said, "Look at what my body did!" I said, "Oh, you didn't do that?" And she said, "No! My body did that!" I thought, Oh! Cartesian dualism! She meant that she didn't intend to do that, and she identified herself with her intentional self. It was fascinating to me.

Right-a recent study In your new book, you respond to the criticism that philosophy isn't progressing the way other fields are. For example: In philosophy, unlike in other areas of study, an ancient historical figure like Plato is just as relevant today.
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Exactly. It changes our view of what's imaginable. Commercial fiction that didn't challenge people's stereotypes about characters didn't have the same effect of being able to read others better, but literary fiction that challenges our views of stereotypes has a huge effect. A lot of women philosophers have brought this into the conversation. Martha Nussbaum really led the way in this. She claimed that literature was philosophically important in many different ways. The other thing that's changed is that there's more applied philosophy. Let's apply philosophical theory to real-life problems, like medical ethics, environmental ethics, gender issues. This is a real change from when I was in school and it was only theory.

There's the claim that the only progress made is in posing problems that scientists can answer. That philosophy never has the means to answer problems-it's just biding its time till the scientists arrive on the scene. You hear this quite often. There is, among some scientists, a real anti-philosophical bias. The sense that philosophy will eventually disappear. But there's a lot of philosophical progress, it's just a progress that's very hard to see. It's very hard to see because we see with it. We incorporate philosophical progress into our own way of viewing the world. Plato would be constantly surprised by what we know. And not only what we know scientifically, or by our technology, but what we know ethically. We take a lot for granted. It's obvious to us, for example, that individual's ethical truths are equally important. Things like class and gender and religion and ethnicity don't matter insofar as individual rights go. That would never have occurred to him. He makes an argument in The Republic that you need to treat all Greeks in the same way. It never occurs to him that you would treat barbarians (non-Greeks) the same way.

It's amazing how long it takes us, but we do make progress. And it's usually philosophical arguments that first introduce the very outlandish idea that we need to extend rights. And it takes more, it takes a movement, and activism, and emotions, to affect real social change. It starts with an argument, but then it becomes obvious. The tracks of philosophy's work are erased because it becomes intuitively obvious. The arguments against slavery, against cruel and unusual punishment, against unjust wars, against treating children cruelly-these all took arguments.

Which philosophical arguments have you seen shifting our national conversation, changing what we once thought was obvious?
About 30 years ago, the philosopher Peter Singer started to argue about the way animals are treated in our factory farms. Everybody thought he was nuts. But I've watched this movement grow; I've watched it become emotional. It has to become emotional. You have to draw empathy into it. But here it is, right in our time-a philosopher making the argument, everyone dismissing it, but then people start discussing it. Even criticizing it, or saying it's not valid, is taking it seriously. This is what we have to teach our children. Even things that go against their intuition they need to take seriously. What was intuition two generations ago is no longer intuition; and it's arguments that change it. We are very inertial creatures. We do not like to change our thinking, especially if it's inconvenient for us. And certainly the people in power never want to wonder whether they should hold power. So it really takes hard, hard work to overcome that.
How do you think philosophy is best taught?
I get very upset when I'm giving a lecture and I'm not interrupted every few sentences by questions. My style is such that that happens very rarely. That's my technique. I'm really trying to draw the students out, make them think for themselves. The more they challenge me, the more successful I feel as a teacher. It has to be very active. Plato used the metaphor that in teaching philosophy, there needs to be a fire in the teacher, and the sheer heat will help the fire grow in the student. It's something that's kindled because of the proximity to the heat.

They could argue with me about anything. If it were a good argument I would take it seriously. See if you can change my mind. It teaches them to be self-critical, to look at their own opinions and see what the weak spots are. This is also important in getting them to defend their own positions, to take other people's positions seriously, to be able to self-correct, to be tolerant, to be good citizens and not to be taken in by demagoguery. The other thing is to get them to think about moral views. Kids have a natural egotistical morality. Every kid by age three is saying, "That's not fair!" Well, use that to get them to think about fairness. Yes, they feel a certain sense of entitlement, but what is special about them? What gives them such a strong sense of fairness? They're natural philosophers. And they're still so flexible.

There's a peer pressure that sets in at a certain age. They so much want to be like everybody else. But what I've found is that if you instill this joy of thinking, the sheer intellectual fun, it will survive even the adolescent years and come back in fighting form. It's empowering.
What changes in philosophy curriculum have you seen over the last 40 years?
One thing that's changed tremendously is the presence of women and the change in focus because of that. There's a lot of interest in literature and philosophy, and using literature as a philosophical examination. It makes me so happy! Because I was seen as a hard-core analytic philosopher, and when I first began to write novels people thought, Oh, and we thought she was serious! But that's changed entirely. People take literature seriously, especially in moral philosophy, as thought experiments. A lot of the most developed and effective thought experiments come from novels. Also, novels contribute to making moral progress, changing people's emotions.

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Why Study Philosophy? 'To Challenge Your Own Point of View'

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What did your religious family think about your pursuit of philosophy? It made my mother intensely uncomfortable. She wanted me to be a good student but not to take it too seriously. She worried that nobody would want to marry such a bookish girl. But I ended up getting married at 19.

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The Essential Role of Storytelling in the Search for Truth - Scientific American Blog Network

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The Essential Role of Storytelling in the Search for Truth - Scientific American Blog Network

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The work of public health is based on scientific evidence. We have real data on risks from gun violence to antibiotic resistance to addiction. However, even as the data accumulates, public trust in experts is on the decline. The research of Yale professor Dan Kahan suggests that our understanding of basic facts about politicized science issues depends on whether or not we trust the person conveying them. And in the decision to trust a source, objective expertise appears to matter less than the determination that this person shares our beliefs, assumptions and suspicions, that they are, in a sense, a member of our tribe. Scientific cherry-picking is not the exclusive domain of the rural, the non-college educated, or the religious. Kahan found that highly educated people with advanced reasoning skills were the most adept at filtering out evidence that contradicted their cultural predispositions.

I teach storytelling in public health at the University of Missouri. While many of my colleagues in journalism meet the fake news challenge by doubling down on objectivity, I urge my students to get more subjective with the stories they tell. As trust in experts declines, authenticity and personal connection matter more. And where does authenticity come from, anyway?

Human beings are primed to tell stories but also to listen for the person behind a story being told. Storytelling, whether it's reporting the news or writing a memoir, involves the active selection and ordering of some information and the omission of other information. Principles of selection inform what questions we ask and which answers we might receive. This directing, ordering and selecting reflects a human consciousness at work, a person with beliefs, assumptions and suspicions.

Being in the presence of that consciousness is one of the great pleasures of reading literature. Years ago at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Frank Conroy used to tell his students that the reason we love stories is that we long to be accompanied. When readers are told that the perspective of the person telling the story doesn't matter because the story consists of objective facts, they increasingly suspect they are being lied to. This suspicion is often disarmed when they believe they are being spoken to by a real human being. My friend's sister, for example, discounts NPR news in its entirety but is addicted to This American Life.

So, when one of my students wanted to research how immigrant children become "language brokers" for their parents, such as a child who was pulled out of history class to go to the hospital and explain to her father that he'd had a heart attack, I asked her to explore both why we should care as a society but also, why she cared. Her finished piece included both statistics about immigration trends, and translation services, but also some honest reflection about her own point of view. An Argentinian who came to the U.S. for graduate school, she wondered how her childhood might have been different if she had immigrated with her family. In her research she found that language brokering could undermine parental authority; might that have happened to the parents she had been raised to respect?

If we are willing to entertain the idea that both sides of the equation-the journalists or academics presenting their findings and the public that increasingly doesn't trust or believe them-belong to groups with often differing beliefs, assumptions and suspicions, then telling stories about science and people and events, in short the world we live in, becomes an exercise in cross-cultural communication.

The demands of that exercise can't get much more high stakes then in the case of young American soldiers deployed to Afghanistan. In their research into cultural sense making, Louise Rasmussen, Winston Sieck and Joyce Oslund used a specific scenario-a Mullah who is working with Americans to distribute relief supplies and is discovered to have set aside a truck load of those supplies-to investigate how soldiers put facts together into a story and the implications for conflict.

They were able to categorize soldiers by the kind of questions they asked about the scenario. The least prepared were those who concluded quickly a crime had been committed and whose questions were aimed at determining its severity. They asked, for example, how much material the Mullah set aside. The second category accepted that their usual "perspective, viewpoint or framework," did not apply in this situation. Their questions focused on meaning and interpretation, rather than facts. They asked, for example, how the Mullah made the decision to set material aside in the first place. Facts are stubborn things, it is true, but the meaning of any given set of facts is subject to interpretation. So while the data may have been generated in your lab, the task of science communication is to convey the significance of those data to the people outside of your lab-an audience that may and often does have an entirely different frame for interpreting the material you present.

In the search for truth, the investigation that an ethical memoirist undertakes-examining both verifiable facts as well as potentially distorted memories and assumptions based on perspective-may often yield better results than an examination of the record alone. By better I mean both truer and more credible. In addition to revealing a person behind the facts reported-and thus the possibility for connection-the focus on transparency and framing leads to questions of the self-reflective kind.

This is important because not being believed is not the only danger that exists for a storyteller who denies that her own values, perceptions and culture are powerful influences on the story being told. The story itself is at risk. In the midst of interpretation, the teller needs to ask herself: what might I be missing here, because of who I am and what I see, that more data is not likely to reveal? As society further segments itself into political and cultural groups, it is worth remembering that academics and journalists are not immune. As our politics becomes increasingly tribal, the acknowledgement that one is first and foremost a human being may be radical indeed.

References:

Kahan, Dan M. What is the "science of science communication?" Journal of Science Communication, Vol. 14, No. 3, 2015

Rasmussen, L.J., Sieck, W.R., Osland, J. Using Cultural Models of Decision Making to Develop and Assess Cultural Sense making Competence. Chapter 8, Advances in Cross-Cultural Decision Making, edited by Dylan Schmorrow, Denise Nicholson, June 17, 2010 by CRC Press.

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The Essential Role of Storytelling in the Search for Truth

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The work of public health is based on scientific evidence. We have real data on risks from gun violence to antibiotic resistance to addiction. However, even as the data accumulates, public trust in experts is on the decline.

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Zakaria on the Virtues of a Liberal Arts Education - Bloomberg

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Zakaria on the Virtues of a Liberal Arts Education - Bloomberg

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"In Defense of a Liberal Education" Author Fareed Zakaria discusses his book. He speaks on "Bloomberg Surveillance." (Source: Bloomberg)

Dominic Raab Looks for 'Win-Win' in the Brexit Process

40:05 - Former Member of the U.K. Brexit Committee Dominic Raab discusses public opinion and the process of Brexit. He speaks with Francine Lacqua on "Bloomberg Surveillance." (Source: Bloomberg)

Full Show: Surveillance (05/18)

Full Show: Surveillance (05/17)

Macron's PM Choice Brings France Together: Bonnell

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Zakaria on the Virtues of a Liberal Arts Education

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"In Defense of a Liberal Education" Author Fareed Zakaria discusses his book. He speaks on "Bloomberg Surveillance." (Source: Bloomberg) Dominic Raab Looks for 'Win-Win' in the Brexit Process 40:05 - Former Member of the U.K. Brexit Committee Dominic Raab discusses public opinion and the process of Brexit.

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Why America’s obsession with STEM education is dangerous - The Washington Post

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Why America’s obsession with STEM education is dangerous - The Washington Post

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Fareed Zakaria, a columnist for The Washington Post, is the host of "Fareed Zakaria GPS" on CNN and the author of "In Defense of a Liberal Education."

If Americans are united in any conviction these days, it is that we urgently need to shift the country's education toward the teaching of specific, technical skills. Every month, it seems, we hear about our children's bad test scores in math and science - and about new initiatives from companies, universities or foundations to expand STEM courses (science, technology, engineering and math) and deemphasize the humanities. From President Obama on down, public officials have cautioned against pursuing degrees like art history, which are seen as expensive luxuries in today's world. Republicans want to go several steps further and defund these kinds of majors. "Is it a vital interest of the state to have more anthropologists?" asked Florida's Gov. Rick Scott. "I don't think so." America's last bipartisan cause is this: A liberal education is irrelevant, and technical training is the new path forward. It is the only way, we are told, to ensure that Americans survive in an age defined by technology and shaped by global competition. The stakes could not be higher.

This dismissal of broad-based learning, however, comes from a fundamental misreading of the facts - and puts America on a dangerously narrow path for the future. The United States has led the world in economic dynamism, innovation and entrepreneurship thanks to exactly the kind of teaching we are now told to defenestrate. A broad general education helps foster critical thinking and creativity. Exposure to a variety of fields produces synergy and cross fertilization. Yes, science and technology are crucial components of this education, but so are English and philosophy. When unveiling a new edition of the iPad, Steve Jobs explained that "it's in Apple's DNA that technology alone is not enough - that it's technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our hearts sing."

Innovation is not simply a technical matter but rather one of understanding how people and societies work, what they need and want. America will not dominate the 21st century by making cheaper computer chips but instead by constantly reimagining how computers and other new technologies interact with human beings.

For most of its history, the United States was unique in offering a well-rounded education. In their comprehensive study, "The Race Between Education and Technology," Harvard's Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz point out that in the 19th century, countries like Britain, France and Germany educated only a few and put them through narrow programs designed to impart only the skills crucial to their professions. America, by contrast, provided mass general education because people were not rooted in specific locations with long-established trades that offered the only paths forward for young men. And the American economy historically changed so quickly that the nature of work and the requirements for success tended to shift from one generation to the next. People didn't want to lock themselves into one professional guild or learn one specific skill for life.

That was appropriate in another era, the technologists argue, but it is dangerous in today's world. Look at where American kids stand compared with their peers abroad. The most recent international test, conducted in 2012, found that among the 34 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United States ranked 27th in math, 20th in science and 17th in reading. If rankings across the three subjects are averaged, the United States comes in 21st, trailing nations such as the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovenia and Estonia.

In truth, though, the United States has never done well on international tests, and they are not good predictors of our national success. Since 1964, when the first such exam was administered to 13-year-olds in 12 countries, America has lagged behind its peers, rarely rising above the middle of the pack and doing particularly poorly in science and math. And yet over these past five decades, that same laggard country has dominated the world of science, technology, research and innovation.

Consider the same pattern in two other highly innovative countries, Sweden and Israel. Israel ranks first in the world in venture-capital investments as a percentage of GDP; the United States ranks second, and Sweden is sixth, ahead of Great Britain and Germany. These nations do well by most measures of innovation, such as research and development spending and the number of high-tech companies as a share of all public companies. Yet all three countries fare surprisingly poorly in the OECD test rankings. Sweden and Israel performed even worse than the United States on the 2012 assessment, landing overall at 28th and 29th, respectively, among the 34 most-developed economies.

But other than bad test-takers, their economies have a few important traits in common: They are flexible. Their work cultures are non-hierarchical and merit-based. All operate like young countries, with energy and dynamism. All three are open societies, happy to let in the world's ideas, goods and services. And people in all three nations are confident - a characteristic that can be measured. Despite ranking 27th and 30th in math, respectively, American and Israeli students came out at the top in their belief in their math abilities, if one tallies up their responses to survey questions about their skills. Sweden came in seventh, even though its math ranking was 28th.

Thirty years ago, William Bennett, the Reagan-era secretary of education, noticed this disparity between achievement and confidence and quipped, "This country is a lot better at teaching self-esteem than it is at teaching math." It's a funny line, but there is actually something powerful in the plucky confidence of American, Swedish and Israeli students. It allows them to challenge their elders, start companies, persist when others think they are wrong and pick themselves up when they fail. Too much confidence runs the risk of self-delusion, but the trait is an essential ingredient for entrepreneurship.

My point is not that it's good that American students fare poorly on these tests. It isn't. Asian countries like Japan and South Korea have benefitted enormously from having skilled workforces. But technical chops are just one ingredient needed for innovation and economic success. America overcomes its disadvantage - a less-technically-trained workforce - with other advantages such as creativity, critical thinking and an optimistic outlook. A country like Japan, by contrast, can't do as much with its well-trained workers because it lacks many of the factors that produce continuous innovation.

Americans should be careful before they try to mimic Asian educational systems, which are oriented around memorization and test-taking. I went through that kind of system. It has its strengths, but it's not conducive to thinking, problem solving or creativity. That's why most Asian countries, from Singapore to South Korea to India, are trying to add features of a liberal education to their systems. Jack Ma, the founder of China's Internet behemoth Alibaba, recently hypothesized in a speech that the Chinese are not as innovative as Westerners because China's educational system, which teaches the basics very well, does not nourish a student's complete intelligence, allowing her to range freely, experiment and enjoy herself while learning: "Many painters learn by having fun, many works [of art and literature] are the products of having fun. So, our entrepreneurs need to learn how to have fun, too."

No matter how strong your math and science skills are, you still need to know how to learn, think and even write. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon (and the owner of this newspaper), insists that his senior executives write memos, often as long as six printed pages, and begins senior-management meetings with a period of quiet time, sometimes as long as 30 minutes, while everyone reads the "narratives" to themselves and makes notes on them. In an interview with Fortune's Adam Lashinsky, Bezos said: "Full sentences are harder to write. They have verbs. The paragraphs have topic sentences. There is no way to write a six-page, narratively structured memo and not have clear thinking."

Companies often prefer strong basics to narrow expertise. Andrew Benett, a management consultant, surveyed 100 business leaders and found that 84 of them said they would rather hire smart, passionate people, even if they didn't have the exact skills their companies needed.

Innovation in business has always involved insights beyond technology. Consider the case of Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg was a classic liberal arts student who also happened to be passionately interested in computers. He studied ancient Greek intensively in high school and majored in psychology while he attended college. And Facebook's innovations have a lot to do with psychology. Zuckerberg has often pointed out that before Facebook was created, most people shielded their identities on the Internet. It was a land of anonymity. Facebook's insight was that it could create a culture of real identities, where people would voluntarily expose themselves to their friends, and this would become a transformative platform. Of course, Zuckerberg understands computers deeply and uses great coders to put his ideas into practice, but as he has put it, Facebook is "as much psychology and sociology as it is technology."

Twenty years ago, tech companies might have survived simply as product manufacturers. Now they have to be on the cutting edge of design, marketing and social networking. You can make a sneaker equally well in many parts of the world, but you can't sell it for $300 unless you've built a story around it. The same is true for cars, clothes and coffee. The value added is in the brand - how it is imagined, presented, sold and sustained. Or consider America's vast entertainment industry, built around stories, songs, design and creativity. All of this requires skills far beyond the offerings of a narrow STEM curriculum.

Critical thinking is, in the end, the only way to protect American jobs. David Autor, the MIT economist who has most carefully studied the impact of technology and globalization on labor, writes that "human tasks that have proved most amenable to computerization are those that follow explicit, codifiable procedures - such as multiplication - where computers now vastly exceed human labor in speed, quality, accuracy, and cost efficiency. Tasks that have proved most vexing to automate are those that demand flexibility, judgment, and common sense - skills that we understand only tacitly - for example, developing a hypothesis or organizing a closet." In 2013, two Oxford scholars conducted a comprehensive study on employment and found that, for workers to avoid the computerization of their jobs, "they will have to acquire creative and social skills."

This doesn't in any way detract from the need for training in technology, but it does suggest that as we work with computers (which is really the future of all work), the most valuable skills will be the ones that are uniquely human, that computers cannot quite figure out - yet. And for those jobs, and that life, you could not do better than to follow your passion, engage with a breadth of material in both science and the humanities, and perhaps above all, study the human condition.

One final reason to value a liberal education lies in its roots. For most of human history, all education was skills-based. Hunters, farmers and warriors taught their young to hunt, farm and fight. But about 2,500 years ago, that changed in Greece, which began to experiment with a new form of government: democracy. This innovation in government required an innovation in education. Basic skills for sustenance were no longer sufficient. Citizens also had to learn how to manage their own societies and practice self-government. They still do.
Twitter: @FareedZakaria
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Why America's obsession with STEM education is dangerous

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Fareed Zakaria, a columnist for The Washington Post, is the host of "Fareed Zakaria GPS" on CNN and the author of "In Defense of a Liberal Education." If Americans are united in any conviction these days, it is that we urgently need to shift the country's education toward the teaching of specific, technical skills.

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Medicine and literature: two treatments of the human condition | Aeon Essays

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Medicine and literature: two treatments of the human condition | Aeon Essays

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Every month or so, I see a patient called Fraser in my primary care clinic, a soldier who was deployed in Afghanistan. Fifteen years after coming home, he is still haunted by flashbacks of burning buildings and sniper fire. He doesn't work, rarely goes out, sleeps poorly, and to relieve his emotional anguish he sometimes slices at his own forearms. Since leaving the army, he has never had a girlfriend. Fraser was once thickly muscled, but weight has fallen off him: self-neglect has robbed him of strength and self-confidence. Prescription drugs fail to fully quieten the terror that trembles in his mind. Whenever I used to see him in clinic, he'd sit on the edge of his seat, shakily mopping sweat from his forehead and temples. I'd listen to his stories, tweak his medications, and tentatively offer advice.

When Fraser began coming to see me, I was reading Redeployment (2014) by Phil Klay - short stories about US military operations, not in Afghanistan, but in Iraq. No book can substitute for direct experience, but Klay's stories gave me a way to start talking about what Fraser was going through; when I finished the book, I offered it to him. He found reassurance in what I'd found illuminating; our conversations took new directions as we discussed aspects of the book. His road will be a long one, but I'm convinced those stories have played a part, however modest, in his recovery.

It's said that literature helps us to explore ways of being human, grants glimpses of lives beyond our own, aids empathy with others, alleviates distress, and widens our circle of awareness. The same could be said of clinical practice in all of its manifestations: nursing to surgery, psychotherapy to physiotherapy. An awareness of literature can aid the practice of medicine, just as clinical experience certainly helps me in the writing of my books. I've come to see the two disciplines as having more parallels than differences, and I'd like to argue they share a kind of synergy.

Patients spend more time with a writer than they can ever spend with their physician, and the hours it takes someone to read and reflect on a book can be time well-spent. Redeployment might have eased some of Fraser's bewilderment and isolation, but by breaking down a boundary of experience it also helped me to understand a little more of what he had been through. There are numberless other books that do the same. William Styron's Darkness Visible (1990) offers an eloquent testimony of how it feels to suffer severe depression, and I've seen it give sufferers a promise and an encouragement that they, like Styron, might find a way back to the light. The list of books I've discussed with patients over the years is as plural as the humanity that pours through the clinic: Ray Robinson's Electricity (2006) when talking about life with severe epilepsy; Annie Dillard's The Abundance (2016) while exploring the place of wonder in sustaining our lives; Andrew Solomon's Far from the Tree (2014) on the challenges of caring for a disabled child; Ben Okri's poem 'To an English Friend in Africa' (1992) in a discussion of the trials and rewards of NGO work.

There are parallels between generating and appreciating lasting stories and art, and generating and appreciating healing, therapeutic encounters. Both are helped by adopting the same attitude of open curiosity, of creative engagement, of seeking to empathise with the predicament of the other, of tapping into the wider context of human lives. The doctor, like the writer, works best when she's alive to the subtlety of individual experience, and is able at the same time to see that individual in his or her social context.

If it's true that readers make better doctors, and literature helps medicine, it's worth asking if the relationship is reciprocal - does the practice of medicine have something to offer literature? Certainly, the stories doctors hear take the pulse of a society. Clinicians are often confessors, bound to confidentiality and privy to a community's secrets in the way that priests once were. More than 300 years ago, Robert Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) equated priests with doctors when he said that 'a good divine either is or ought to be a good physician'; the French novelist Rabelais was both.

In former centuries, the two professions offered the same unfiltered exposure to a cross-section of society, the same professional duty to stand witness over life's crises, and to reckon with questions of purpose and futility that are of urgent relevance to literature. Burton's contemporary John Donne (also a clergyman) wrote a series of poetic meditations following his own narrow survival from life-threatening illness. The most famous of these, 'Devotions upon Emergent Occasions' (1624), confirms that proximity to death can reinforce a sense of belonging to a community of humanity:

any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde;
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

If it's going to be effective, clinical practice requires a highly trained attentiveness to verbal and non-verbal streams of information. Clinicians of all kinds sieve details ceaselessly from the words and bodies of their patients. And we also expect clinicians to see through the fake narratives we live by - to act as translators and literary critics of the stories we project to the world.

'There's no need for fiction in medicine,' wrote Arthur Conan Doyle in Round the Red Lamp (1894), 'the facts will always beat anything you can fancy.' The trajectories of our lives can be as tumultuous or unexpected as any story or movie but will, at the same time, follow the patterns of those archetypal stories we learn in the nursery or see at the cinema. What does the writer do but name and articulate patterns and archetypes of experience, and offer them to the reader to be recognised? And what does the clinician do but offer recognition to the patient's story - to say 'your suffering has a name', and in its naming, attempt to tame it?

the language we use to articulate pain has the power to transform our experience of it

In its use of metaphor, the best writing offers a kind of enchantment, transforming our perspective and helping us to make sense of the world, from Homer's 'rosy-fingered dawn' to Dylan Thomas's 'bible-black' night. A deeper engagement with literature can help clinicians with the metaphors they use: if a cancer is incurable, it doesn't make sense to think of it as a monster to be defeated but as an inner ecology to be held in balance. When he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, Anatole Broyard, a former editor at The New York Times Book Review, said that he wanted his physician to spin metaphors that would reconcile him to his condition: 'The doctor could use almost anything,' he wrote in Intoxicated by My Illness (1992). '"Art burned up your body with beauty and truth." Or "You've spent your self like a philanthropist who gives all his money away."' Broyard wanted language to conjure dignity from illness, to help him 'look upon the ruin of his body as tourists look upon the great ruins of antiquity'.

In her poetic and careful study of vaccination, On Immunity (2014), Eula Biss showed how the human immune system is better compared to a well-maintained garden than a militia. War metaphors in health and healing can be valid, but bring different ideas to the mind of each patient - an appreciation of storytelling can assist physicians to choose the metaphor that will best help their patients, and also help patients articulate inner experience to their physicians. Pain descriptions are the most vivid daily example of our tendency to metaphorise experience - next time you have a pain, think about whether it's 'stabbing' or 'ripping', 'throbbing' or 'aching'. The nerves perceiving the pain communicate none of these things, but studies have shown that the language we use to articulate pain has the power to transform our experience of it.

In his autobiographical essay The Practice (1951), the poet and general practitioner William Carlos Williams wrote that medicine's clamour and diversity can, if approached in the right spirit, be inspirational and even restorative. Medicine nourished Carlos Williams's sense as a writer of what it means to be human, and offered the very lexicon he used to write:

Was I not interested in man? There the thing was, right in front of me. I could touch it, smell it ... it was giving me terms, basic terms with which I could spell out matters as profound as I cared to think of.

Sigmund Freud noticed that doctors' choice of vocabulary has always influenced the way people understand and come to terms with illness: 'All physicians, therefore, yourselves included, are continually practising psychotherapy, even when you have no intention of doing so and are not aware of it.' He asked whether clinicians might not be more effective if they were able to understand the power of words, and resolve to wield that power more effectively.

At the heart of both physicians' and writers' work is a will to imagine and recognise the patterns of our lives, and ease its dissonances. But there's a crucial difference: writers and readers have the liberty to lose themselves in their world of characters and plotlines, while clinicians must remain perceptive, attentive and, crucially, keep to time. Physicians who give themselves up entirely to the suffering of their patients risk burnout. This is the Faustian pact at the heart of the contract between physicians and their patients - to be offered limitless experience of the plurality of humanity, but at the risk of exhausting compassion in a way that's less relevant for the writer.

Neuroscientific research suggests that the more closely you empathise with someone in mental or physical pain, the more your brain behaves as if you're in pain yourself. When compassionate attitudes are gauged in new medical students, junior doctors and more senior trainees all the way up to those on the verge of retirement, they have been seen to drop stepwise with age and experience, as if the practice of medicine brings with it a cargo of such mental and emotional weight that some clinicians become overburdened.

Abraham Verghese, the Stanford physician and novelist, has observed 'what we need in medical schools is not to teach empathy as much as to preserve it'. The weight of clinical practice can be overwhelming for some - that's why more doctors in the West are working part-time and retiring earlier than ever before. But the profession's very multiplicity offers insights and inspirations, satisfactions and consolations, available in few other others.

20 years into my medical career, medicine and literature can feel like the verso and recto of a single page

In an interview for the BBC in 1962, Sylvia Plath said: 'I would like to have been a doctor ... somebody who deals directly with human experiences, is able to cure, to mend, to help.' She explicitly contrasted clinicians' 'mastery of the practical' with her life as a poet where, she complained, she felt as if 'one lives a bit on air'. As a child, she played at doctors, and as an adolescent, she attended births and watched human dissections. But she baulked at the discipline involved in medical training, and worried its burdens would have been too much.

Those burdens are real, and doctors have to find ways of bearing them. I'm now 20 years into my medical career, and medicine and literature have sometimes felt like the verso and recto of a single page, at other times the left and right foot of a steady gait, but neither of those metaphors carries the sense of heaviness that medical work can bring, which a love of literature can leaven. As I look forward to the next 20 years of medical practice, I know that the burden of stories will get heavier, but prefer to imagine that weight as ballast, and the airy, poetic quality of literature as wind in the sails. If the two can work together, there's a limitless ocean of humanity out there to explore.
This is an edited extract from the 2016 Sheridan Lecture on Medicine and Literature, delivered at Brown University, Providence.
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Medicine and literature: two treatments of the human condition - Gavin Francis | Aeon Essays

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Every month or so, I see a patient called Fraser in my primary care clinic, a soldier who was deployed in Afghanistan. Fifteen years after coming home, he is still haunted by flashbacks of burning buildings and sniper fire.

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The Daily Illini : English graduates most employed LAS major post-graduation - The Daily Illini

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The Daily Illini : English graduates most employed LAS major post-graduation - The Daily Illini

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While the English major often faces a common stereotype, Head of the English department Vicki Mahaffey said there's more to an English major than some might think.

"The stereotype the English major has is that you just read books and everyone can read books," she said.

However, the students majoring in English accomplish more than just reading books.

"People don't realize (the major) teaches you to read on such an intense level that you're able to discover things you probably otherwise wouldn't," Mahaffey said.

According to the Illini Success report, English was one of the top majors to get jobs after graduation. Because English classes encourage students to think more critically, Mahaffey is not surprised at all.

Jacob Singleton

Eighty-three percent of English majors are employed post-graduation, while four percent are still seeking employment after graduation. The rest of the students are either volunteering or continuing education, according to the report.

The report is based on the 2015-2016 school year and surveyed students who identified 51 percent male and 49 percent female, with 53 percent white, 16 percent Asian, 14 percent international, eight percent Hispanic, five percent black, three percent multiracial and one percent other.

The average salary for the graduates was $36,161, which happens to be the lowest salary among other LAS departments. The department with the highest starting salary after graduation is astronomy and physics with an average of $62,489.

Even though there is a considerable margin between the highest and lowest mean salary upon graduation, English courses offer skills that courses in other majors don't offer, Mahaffey said.

"In most disciplines people are schooled to think a certain prescribed way," she said. "English teaches (them) to unlearn those habits of the mind."

English courses teach students to develop a deep understanding of how to extract knowledge from facts, rather than just absorb facts for what they are. This process produces autonomy of the mind, skepticism, resistance to the norm and creativeness, Mahaffey said.
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English graduates most employed LAS major post-graduation

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While the English major often faces a common stereotype, Head of the English department Vicki Mahaffey said there's more to an English major than some might think."The stereotype the English major has is that you just read books and everyone can read books," she said.However, the students majoring in English accomplish more than just reading...

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Improving Medicine With Art - The New York Times

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Improving Medicine With Art - The New York Times

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"I've rescued them from their domain that is driven by crisis and the mastery of information, and embedded them in a process where they're not experts," Mr. Williams said of the students. "They don't know about art. But they know how to look and think and talk together."

Mr. Williams, joined by the museum educator Siobhan McCusker, welcomed the class with quotations by the actress Meryl Streep describing empathy as a key to her success. Then Mr. Williams presented David, as conveyed in the French painter Claude Vignon's circa 1620 work "David With the Head of Goliath." This take on Caravaggio's classic depicts David, a sword-bearing teenager after his first kill, as forlorn and androgynous.

Mr. Williams doesn't tell his students the titles of pieces and discourages their reading the labels. For this piece, he started by asking the students to capture the mood in one word and say it aloud.

"Pain." "Innocence." "Sad." "Pensive." "Oops." "Heavy." "Exhausted." "Murder." "Light." "Regret."

He challenged the students to delve into the psyche of the young hero, or to cast their "empathetic imagination" upon him, at this life-changing moment. Then he flipped the exercise back on the students.

"I wonder if you can think of ways in which this story and the image relates to your own experience today," Mr. Williams said. "Do you feel any connections?"

"I personally worked very hard to get to med school," one female student said. "But now that I'm here, I'm like: 'Whoa, do I really want to do this? This is a big change.' So there's lots of time for introspection, and a little bit of regret."

Mr. Williams and Ms. McCusker also drew from the museum's Latin American art collection. Ms. McCusker used two 55-inch-by-92-inch paintings from "The Strangest Fruit" series, made in 2013 by the San Antonio artist Vincent Valdez, to illustrate the point of not judging a book by its cover.

One painting depicts a man wearing plain jeans and a long-sleeve top; the other shows a shirtless man in baggy jeans with a huge tattoo on his back. Ms. McCusker asked the students to rate their empathy for the two men, seemingly suspended in air, on a scale of 1 to 10. After she revealed the artist's personal connections to his subjects and explained his portrayal of them in a "hanging" manner as homage to the Latinos lynched in Texas in the 19th and 20th centuries, some students increased their empathy scores.

Later, Mr. Williams showed the students a fiberglass sculpture about 10 feet tall, "Border Crossing (Cruzando el Rio Bravo)," made in 1987 by the El Paso artist Luis Jiménez. The work depicts a man with a woman on his back, holding a small child to her bosom. It elicited conversation about illegal immigration and how doctors ultimately decide who gets health care.

The effectiveness of a program like this is hard to measure. It is more about process than product. But Dr. MacClements, who attended medical school in South Africa during the H.I.V. outbreak in the late 1980s, saw tremendous value in the experience.

"This whole exercise has reconnected me with my spiritual side," he said. "It has reinvigorated how I practice medicine."

Toward the end, the students were divided into three groups, each paired with a painting. Each student was to compose a sentence in response to the work and then as a group arrange those lines in order, like a poem, to be read aloud.

Aghogho Evuarherhe was part of the group that examined "The Land of the Free," a 1900 piece by William Gilbert Gaul that depicts a Sioux woman who has hiked to a mountaintop to mourn. Reading the sentences the students assembled, Mr. Evuarherhe said: "This is my home. I've climbed so high but I'm still so alone. I worry about my family's future. I wonder what the new year will bring. The world has something for me. Strength isn't how much, but how far."

For Mr. Evuarherhe, these "magical" moments at the Blanton were a nice counterbalance to his studying. He especially liked sharing perspectives on the art with other students.

"We thought of her journey to get there," Mr. Evuarherhe said. "There were probably regrets walking up that mountain, and there were probably challenges. That's how I feel our journey is right now. But we just keep the big picture in mind. When we finish our medical training, and we're standing on top of that mountain, it's going to be this beautiful moment where we realize we made it."

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"I've rescued them from their domain that is driven by crisis and the mastery of information, and embedded them in a process where they're not experts," Mr. Williams said of the students. "They don't know about art. But they know how to look and think and talk together."

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Thoughts about how to change the game for advocates of the humanities

(and how to cope when you can't)

I work in an institution that has long benefited from the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities in reaching a nationwide audience. Our primary and secondary education programs introduce some two million students to Shakespeare annually with NEH grants, while NEH Summer Institutes have extended scholars' ability to investigate the literature and culture of Western Europe from roughly 1450 through the eighteenth century. NEH funding and guidance has helped us set the agenda for early modern digital humanities. It was the NEH that largely revived our fellowships program and launched centers dedicated to Shakespeare Studies and the History of British Political Thought in the 1980s that continue to this day. Most recently, we were able to leverage NEH support to send a copy of Shakespeare's First Folio to every state, where our partners-public libraries, museums, and universities-offered some 1,500 programs and welcomed over half a million visitors. I offer all this as context for what follows.

I have spent several weeks thinking about and advocating for the NEH in conjunction with the recent National Humanities Advocacy day. Despite a proposed budget that axes one of America's most successful agencies, I feel I should explain why my feelings of incredulity are mixed with hope. The most recent election shows us that humanities advocates haven't been doing all that well in one major area: encouraging others to see issues from multiple perspectives. Too often, we have ceded the field to those who vote before thinking, come to conclusions based on flimsy premises, and assume that one's take on reality is the only reality. (We, too, may be the tiniest bit guilty of these traits. We are, after all, only human.) If we want to affect real and positive change in public engagement with the humanities, we need to transition ourselves to become active conversation partners with those with whom we disagree.

If the humanities actually are in crisis in America, that may be a good thing for all of us who advocate for them. When we see something that we value in trouble, we are much more driven to ask new questions, to search for new solutions, and to try unlikely avenues that will solve "the problem." If we want to "save" the humanities, we need to locate the radical levers to change their place in American culture, and to meet our antagonists in genuine engagement. We should seek different leverage points through which small changes can have oversized impacts.

Social media allows for each of us to be vociferous in our opposition, to call out what we see as wrong or unjust, to advocate for those who have less political capital than we do. We need (at least I know I need) to know that we aren't alone, and social media is an excellent way to prove this. But we shouldn't equate our tribe's likes and hearts with actually changing the larger culture.

How do we best communicate the value of the humanities to non-specialist, and even non-scholarly, audiences who are too often distracted by the sound bite and the tweet, who listen to "those idiots" on talk radio? It is up to each of us to reconsider how to profess the advantages that a robust approach to "the big questions" provides for our culture. It is those trained in humanities disciplines who pose these kinds of questions most productively, and it is humanities thinkers who must point out that the answers do themselves produce subsequent questions that are meaningful. Valuing this inquiry-based, iterative, and recursive process is the essence of the humanities. The content or topic is not the essence of the humanities, nor is finding an answer. It is the inquiry-based process through which a humanities-trained thinker approaches a problem that holds the humanities' true value.

I worry that, all too often, humanities advocates have lost sight of the lessons taught by philosophy, history, religion, and literature that we are supposed to be professing. What do I mean by that? The list below is obviously personal, but it offers my sense of how the humanities can help us reshape our process of humanities advocacy. You will have other thinkers and historical events that speak to you more powerfully. Think about what got you into this field and what sustains you in it. What ideas get you out of bed in the morning, and which thinkers have posed the big questions that continue to engage you?

Centuries ago, Sun Tzu told us that the battle is won or lost before it is joined. Planning (based on valid pre-analysis) is all. I take this to mean that we need to be engaged in our communities and support local public education directly by visiting classrooms and volunteering our knowledge in collaborative, not high-handed, ways. Get young humans in the habit of thinking about their place in the world, why it is the way it is, and what they might do about it.

Shakespeare succeeded as a playwright by promiscuously using any and all resources that could be brought to bear in pleasing his audience. We know he borrowed heavily from others to give his audience what they wanted and that he worked with whomever he could that would give him a better play. Use the audience's culture to communicate. When you mention T.S., if your audience thinks of Taylor Swift, use that. If a conservative writer says something you agree with, use that to build upon in advocating.

The history of the Jesuits demonstrates how flexibility can make inroads in closed cultures when head-to-head challenges are repulsed. I admire them for not compromising their core beliefs while they used any possible accommodations to meet cultural expectations and received knowledge, even when those were radically at odds with their objectives. Our faith in a core belief-that studying the humanities makes us better humans-can sustain us.

Don't assume you know what someone is thinking, or why they have come to that conclusion. Hesse's Siddhartha taught us that listening-really listening-is the key to understanding. We can combine rigorous humanistic inquiry with the goal of broader cultural dissemination if we are quiet, listen, and admit that we sometimes don't know all the answers. Don't assert answers; embrace not knowing the question. And seek with respect.

When Wollstonecraft advocated for a national education system that included women, she proposed perhaps the most original idea that Western Culture had yet heard. While it would take centuries for this profound concept to come to pass, a time will come when we must be as brave as she was in declaring what is right and just.

And if all this fail, remember that Boethius took solace in the recognition that sometimes, no matter how well we've planned, how flexible or brave we've been, or how well we've listened, the only thing we truly control is our response to a situation. But that was Boethius. We will be frustrated, angry, and depressed, but if the core ideas of the humanities are worth professing, then we should be able to rely on them to sustain us.

Collectively, humanities scholars need to find ways to make the sometimes admittedly esoteric work humanities thinkers do more accessible to the public upon whom we rely, no matter how indirectly, for our support. This has the advantage of exposing other to the recursive, inquiry-based method that defines the humanities.

As humanities thinkers, our goal should be to challenge received ways of thinking-including our own-through productive and generative discussion. In short, seek out ways to meet those who you don't already know (or cannot fathom why they think the way they do), and strive to understand why they believe what they believe. Seek out opportunities to partner in thinking with non-scholarly constituencies. Here are a few ideas:

Visit the website of your state-based humanities council and explore how they meet the needs of underserved communities. Volunteer for what looks interesting, or propose what isn't there.

If you are a faculty member, ask your dean or chair how to go about initiating a partnership with your local public library, with outdoor- or environmentally focused clubs, and with public schools. Help budding thinkers of all ages pose questions for collaborative exploration.

Propose a "humanities listening series" to your local librarian, and enlist her help in lining up those who will be good at moderating discussion on whatever topics emerge.

Explore innovative and emerging media channels. When you've found one that works for you, ask three questions for every answer, solution, or declaration you offer.

We will never convince everyone that studying the humanities (or even thinking like a humanist) has intrinsic worth until we make it personal for each of them. Reaching out to those who don't already agree with us is a radically extensible idea when we agree to let non-specialists set the topic and lead the approach. We need to move beyond valorizing only what we have mastered and meet the public where their interests are by formulating the questions and seeking the answers along with them. We just might learn something important.

I would welcome learning more about what you have heard or read lately that gives you hope for reaching out to those who think differently from you.

Owen Williams welcomes over 200 scholars to the Folger Institute's programs at the Folger Shakespeare Library each year as the Assistant Director for Scholarly Programs. He has an A.B. in Classics, Greek, from Stanford, an M.A. in English Literature from the University of Tulsa (and wrote his thesis on Troilus and Criseyde), and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Pennsylvania, where he worked on late-Elizabethan religious resistance and law. Editor of Foliomania! Stories Behind Shakespeare's Most Important Book (2011, reissued 2015), he is currently co-editing Periodization and "Early Modern" English Temporalities: Reimagining Chronology through 16th- and 17th-century Habits of Thought, with Kristen Poole for the University of Pennsylvania Press.

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Thoughts about how to change the game for advocates of the humanities (and how to cope when you can't) I work in an institution that has long benefited from the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities in reaching a nationwide audience.

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Why The Art of Speaking Should Be Taught Alongside Math and Literacy | MindShift | KQED News

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Why The Art of Speaking Should Be Taught Alongside Math and Literacy | MindShift | KQED News

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Classrooms in the U.S. often focus most attention on literacy and math, largely because those skills are considered foundational and are tested. However most people will also need to communicate their thoughts and ideas to other people through oral language, and yet effective communication strategies are often not taught with the same precision and structure as other parts of the curriculum.

School 21, a public school in London has made "oracy" a primary focus of everything they do. From the earliest grades on up teachers support students to find their voice, express differing opinions politely, and challenge one another's thinking. These are skills called for in the Common Core, but can be hard to find in many classrooms because students haven't been taught how to make "turn and talks" truly effective.

The Edutopia team visited School 21 and captured some amazing videos of students practicing their communication skills with support from teachers.

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Why The Art of Speaking Should Be Taught Alongside Math and Literacy

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Classrooms in the U.S. often focus most attention on literacy and math, largely because those skills are considered foundational and are tested. However most people will also need to communicate their thoughts and ideas to other people through oral language, and yet effective communication strategies are often not taught with the same precision and structure as other parts of the curriculum.

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How creative writing makes you a better person - The Boston Globe

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How creative writing makes you a better person - The Boston Globe

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Now that we know President Trump's budget outlines the destruction of the National Endowment for the Arts, which funds a range of important programs, including public television and Broadway shows such as "Hamilton," it is important to note that the literary arts receive virtually no support from national foundations outside of the NEA, and we lag behind our peers in leveraging individual philanthropy. So the consequences of losing NEA funding could be dire.

And the timing couldn't be worse.

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We live in a time of great cultural and economic division. Strangers hurl insults at one another online, hate crimes are on the rise, and civil political exchange is a relic of the past. We have seemingly lost our ability to understand one another and consequently have no ability to define, let alone work toward, any greater public good.

This is precisely the moment to invest in reading and writing.

Over the last several years, researchers have linked reading fiction - and, by extension, vivid, character-driven narrative - with improvement in social perception and emotional intelligence as well as increased empathy and comfort with ambiguity. It's no wonder that, in an interview in January, President Obama stated that he will spend time training the next generation of leaders on key issues like climate change while also connecting them "with their peers who see fiction or nonfiction as an important part of that [training] process." He went on to point out that "the role of stories to unify - as opposed to divide, to engage rather than to marginalize - is more important than ever."

The $54 billion boost for the military is the largest since President Ronald Reagan's Pentagon buildup in the 1980s.

I couldn't agree more.

Twenty years ago, I founded GrubStreet, a tiny grass-roots organization that has grown into the largest creative writing centers in the country. We teach creative writing workshops to people ranging in age from 13 to 87. In our workshops, we insist on respect and generosity in conjunction with a rigorous artistic process. We push our students to create work that has as much nuance, depth, courage, thoughtfulness, insight, and truth as they can muster. This is hard work. It takes time. It's the opposite of the kind of knee-jerk writing and communicating that plagues the culture we share online. Moreover, our students do this in the company of others, which allows them to be seen, heard, and understood in their complexity and uniqueness, in their full humanness.

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This experience creates friendships and partnerships that bridge age and background. We have seen deep connections form between college students and middle-aged business executives, cabdrivers and MIT-trained brain scientists. Recently, a young student in our advanced novel workshop wrote a thoughtful essay about poverty and the upper-class nature of the writing world. He described networking over a drink with other writers while trying to hide his worry about having enough money for bus fare home. Two days later, another student, a woman in her late 40s, having read his essay, paid the balance of his tuition. She did it anonymously. This kind of generosity and kindness has become the norm in our community.

It's taken me quite a few years to fully understand how we got to this place of empathy. The reason has everything to do with the craft of writing itself. People come to us to become better writers, and we provide that service, but in the process of learning their craft and living up to all that it demands, they become better people.

Eve Bridburg is the founder and executive director of GrubStreet.

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How creative writing makes you a better person - The Boston Globe

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Now that we know President Trump's budget outlines the destruction of the National Endowment for the Arts, which funds a range of important programs, including public television and Broadway shows such as "Hamilton," it is important to note that the literary arts receive virtually no support from national foundations outside of the NEA, and we lag behind our peers in leveraging individual philanthropy.

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Why the Father of Modern Neuroscience Was Obsessed with Fiction

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Why the Father of Modern Neuroscience Was Obsessed with Fiction

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Fiction is, by definition, a world away from fact-but Santiago Ramón y Cajal, often heralded as "the father of modern neuroscience," used it to find objective truth. Cajal spent his days at the microscope, gazing down at faint, entangled fibers that appeared to his fellow anatomists as inscrutable labyrinths. Contrary to prevailing theory, the Spaniard discerned that the nervous system, including the brain, comprises distinctly individual cells (neurons), which, he theorized, must communicate across the infinitesimal spaces between them (synapses). It was Cajal who first applied the term plasticity to the brain; he went so far as to recommend "cerebral gymnastics" for mental enhancement, presaging twenty-first century insights and trends about brain exercise. "If he is so determined," Cajal said, "every man can be the sculptor of his own brain." If all Russian literature comes from Gogol's "Overcoat," and all modern American literature comes from "a book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn," then international brain research, including grand projects like the BRAIN Initiative and the Human Brain Project, emerges from the unlikely work of Santiago Ramón y Cajal.

Cajal was born in 1852, high in the mountains of northern Spain; his head always seemed to belong in the clouds. The landscape of his childhood was epic. Aragonese folklore echoed through dust-colored pueblos, swept through by the specters of conquests and kings. The young Cajal idolized these legendary figures, maybe because village life was incessantly prosaic. Alto Aragón was notoriously inhospitable; the highland region that Robert Hughes, in his biography of Goya (another native son), noted for its "sour wine, straw bedding, tough meat"-"semi-troglodytic conditions." Almost nothing grew from the callous, fissured soil; Cajal's home was a ramshackle pile of cobblestone. "Not a flower pot in the windows," he recalls in his autobiography, Recollections of My Life: "not the smallest decoration on the fronts of the houses, nothing in a word, to indicate the slightest feeling for beauty."

Cajal's father was a man of facts, implacable and austere. The son of peasant farmers, he'd abandoned his home at age twelve, in search of less desolate fields. He apprenticed to a lowly barber-surgeon and went on to achieve a medical degree, the triumph of a grueling life. There was no time for leisure, for distractions from the path. The human mind, Cajal's father believed, was made for obtaining knowledge. "He repudiated or despised all culture of a literary or of a purely ornamental or recreative nature," Cajal recalls. Only medical books were allowed in the house-absolutely no fiction. Art, Cajal's father believed, was the symptom of a devastating illness.

But Cajal's mother, a covert romantic, kept cheap fantasy novels hidden at the bottom of a trunk and smuggled them into the hands of her children, to their delight. As the local surgeon, Cajal's father was often away from home, and when he returned, his wife's "excessive softness" enraged him; he was chagrined to recognize it in his son, too. He tried to eradicate the boy's literary impulses, punishing him with whips, cudgels, and other instruments of torture often seen in "penny dreadful" horror tales and haunting children's nightmares.

The abuse only seemed to embolden Cajal's creative instincts. "Whenever I had finished supper," he recalls, "I eagerly hastened to my little room and, until I fell asleep, spent my time giving form and life to the jumble of stains on the wall and the cobwebs of the ceiling, which I transformed, by the power of thought, into the wings of a magic stage, across which filed the cavalcade of my fantasies." His mind transmuted shadows into story: a perceptual trick that would later help clarify his view of even more profound obscurities.

Cajal convinced his father that he needed a quiet room of his own in which to study. The pigeon house next to the family barn became the site of his first experiments, where he was free to imagine and explore. A window opened onto the roof of a neighbor, a pastry chef with slightly more elevated tastes. In the attic, among the sweetmeats and dried fruit, Cajal espied a smorgasbord of literary treats. He lost himself in Dumas, Hugo, Cervantes, and others. Long before peering through microscopes, Cajal trained his eyes to the pages of books. Reading novels primed his mind to explore more invisible realms.

After high school, Cajal's father enrolled him in medical school, where the only subject that held his interest was anatomy. Though it had emerged decades earlier, cell theory was revolutionizing-or scandalizing-the field then. Reading about it, Cajal encountered literary metaphors that drew him in, such as the famous line from the German pathologist Rudolf Virchow: "The body is a state in which every cell is a citizen." Cajal's first look through a microscope confirmed this idea, showing him, in his own words, "captivating scenes from life of the infinitely small." For twenty continuous hours-or so he claimed-he watched the movement of a leucocyte away from a capillary, akin, in his vivid imagination, to high-stakes escape. He even wrote and illustrated a novel about a miniature man-about the size of a cell-traveling through bodies of gargantuan beings on Jupiter.

Cellular anatomy, for Cajal, was like the most exciting fiction. He became a researcher, setting up a makeshift laboratory-not unlike the old pigeon house-in his parents' attic. Later, he witnessed a demonstration of the so-called black reaction, an erratic chemical stain-which other biologists had abandoned-that had the power to reveal whole hidden elements beneath the discriminating light of the microscope. Cajal was stunned by the clarity of the results; the arcane forms reminded him of ink on paper. He immediately applied the technique to the nervous system-the holy grail of human anatomy-hoping to uncover "the material course of thought and will."

Cajal modeled his scientific quest after literary heroes from his childhood. He cast himself in the mold of Crusoe, envisioning the brain as "a world consisting of a number of unexplored continents and vast stretches of unknown territory," and devoting his work to "islands of discovery." In 1888, working alone at the microscope in his home laboratory, Cajal observed the endpoint of a nerve fiber, a nearly imperceptible phenomenon that led him to declare that nerve cells were independent-thus beginning the saga of modern neuroscience. "The job of the anatomist," Cajal writes, "is to separate the apparent from the real." Like his beloved Don Quixote, he believed in an alternative view of the world; unlike Quixote, he succeeded in rallying the people around him, who eventually celebrated his foresight.

How did Cajal see what others could not? To anthropomorphize was his genius-yet such an approach seemed unscientific, to say the least. "Cajal treated the microscopic scene as though it were alive," recalled Charles Sherrington, his lifelong friend and fellow Nobel Laureate, "and were inhabited by beings which felt and did and hoped and tried even as we do." Sherrington saw that fantasy aided the unorthodox Spaniard's ability to visualize the brain. "If we would enter adequately into Cajal's thought in this field," Sherrington continues, "we must suppose his entrance, through the microscope, into a world populated by tiny beings actuated by motives and striving and satisfactions not very remotely different from our own." Cajal highlighted that subject and object-the brain scientist and the neuron-descended from the same evolutionary ancestor, contained the same physical material, and were beholden to the same mortal laws.

The world of the infinitely small, like novels of his youth, seemed more real to Cajal than everyday existence. How else could he routinely spend up to fifteen hours a day, for almost fifty years, alone in the laboratory? He claimed to have observed a million neurons, witnessing them in every phase of their lives: birth, development, movement, relationships, adversity, trauma, decline, and death. On thumbnail sheets of dead brain tissue, the Spaniard's cherished stories came to life. He imagined neurons as protagonists in an intense cerebral drama. Their fibers "groped to find another." Their aching contacts became "protoplasmic kisses"-"the final ecstasy of an epic love story."

More than a century after his 1906 Nobel Prize, Cajal's portraits are iconic. It might be natural to assume that these drawings are copies of what he saw through the eyepiece, like cerebral still lifes. Yet his illustrations were strikingly interpretative and deeply personal, blurring the line between abstraction and representation. After viewing many cells, Cajal distilled their features to a type. His images are composites, highlights, even exaggerations of actual neurons; I've heard it said that he often drew from memory after taking long walks through the park. Cajal called them "pieces of reality," these tactfully fictionalized depictions. Had he listened to his father, forsaking literature, he might never have recognized the truth. The human brain contains around eighty billion neurons, we now know, each of which may interact with up to ten thousand others. One might wonder: Do we tell their ephemeral stories, or do they, somehow, tell ours?

Benjamin Ehrlich is the author of The Dreams of Santiago Ramón Cajal.

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Why the Father of Modern Neuroscience Was Obsessed with Fiction

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Fiction is, by definition, a world away from fact-but Santiago Ramón y Cajal, often heralded as "the father of modern neuroscience," used it to find objective truth. Cajal spent his days at the microscope, gazing down at faint, entangled fibers that appeared to his fellow anatomists as inscrutable labyrinths.

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Mark Cuban Sees Greater Demand for Liberal Arts Majors - Bloomberg

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Mark Cuban Sees Greater Demand for Liberal Arts Majors - Bloomberg

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Mark Cuban Sees Greater Demand for Liberal Arts Majors

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Billionaire investor Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, discusses his views on the Trump administration and the future of jobs. He speaks with Bloomberg's Cory Johnson at the NBA All-Star Technology Summit in New Orleans. (Source: Bloomberg)

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Melissa Walker: Art can heal PTSD's invisible wounds | TED Talk | TED.com

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Melissa Walker: Art can heal PTSD's invisible wounds | TED Talk | TED.com

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Melissa Walker: Art can heal PTSD's invisible wounds

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Trauma silences its victims, says creative arts therapist Melissa Walker, but art can help those suffering from the psychological wounds of war begin to open up and heal. In this inspiring talk, Walker describes how mask-making, in particular, allows afflicted servicemen and women reveal what haunts them -- and, finally, start to let it go.

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How a Sword and Sorcery Camp Uses Immersive Role Play to Teach STEAM | MindShift | KQED News

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How a Sword and Sorcery Camp Uses Immersive Role Play to Teach STEAM | MindShift | KQED News

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YouTube/Guard Up!

The scene is right out of a survival horror movie. A yellow school bus unloads a group of eager young campers, ready to meet their counselors and settle in for some summer camp fun. Instead, they are greeted by a horde of groaning zombies advancing at them from an open field. The staff frantically hand out three foam Nerf darts to each incredulous camper and suggest they start running. The rest of the day is spent hiding and defending in a desperate bid to evade the droves of undead.

Hours later, the bus is back to gather the exhilarated survivors. But it's not over yet. Before they board, a jeep pulls up and a suited man jumps out and opens a briefcase filled with more foam darts. He distributes them liberally, along with plain business cards printed with the name "INGSOC." As abruptly as he arrived, he speeds off in a cloud of dust, leaving a pack of mystified campers in his wake.

This is one of the many schemes cooked up by Meghan Gardner and her team at Guard Up to engage students in learning.

Inspired by an elixir of live-action role playing (LARP), video games, and choose-your-own-adventure-style bedtime stories she had dreamed up for her daughters, Gardner envisioned a program where learning occurred within self-determined narrative adventures. After participating in a LARP, she thought "Why not kids instead of adults? Rather than learning an invented language, why not Latin? Instead of alchemy, why not chemistry?" Gardner hired a group of teachers with live role-play experience and launched a series of day and overnight camps that operate with what she terms "story-based education."

Guard Up opened a full-time facility in Burlington, Massachusetts, in 2001. The company offered weekly classes in fencing and swordsmanship for all ages, as well as story-based educational adventures. Guard Up then launched educational summer camps that eventually became the largest part of the company. Despite being unplugged and device free, much of the adventures play out like a story-rich video game. Gardner's background in anthropology, film, martial arts and fencing (she even taught a course in underwater defense with Navy SEAL trainers), as well as a passion for storytelling, explains her interest in both sword play and using stories to educate.

The camp included narrative elements from the very beginning, but became more deliberately educational in 2010. Today, campers can choose to survive a post-apocalyptic adventure in the Zombie STEM Summer Camp or journey to the fantasy world of Sidleterra in Wizards & Warriors STEM Camp.

But how does education take place when running from zombies and battling 9-foot witch kings?
Applying Learning in a Real-World Fiction
Immersive narratives and embodied actions combine to engage players in a range of learning. Campers can play in story worlds drawn from literature, mythology and history. The name "INGSOC" that was printed on the business cards may seem familiar because it is the political ideology from George Orwell's dark classic, 1984. Gardner remembered one resourceful young camper who went home and immediately researched the name on the internet. Within minutes of discovering the source he was out the door and on his way to check out a copy of the novel from the local library.

"The next day at camp, a huge group of kids, holding their Nerf blasters, surrounded this one boy who was reading out of 1984, " said Gardner. "He reads about INGSOC and says 'Guys! We can't be friends with them ... but we can infiltrate them.' "

This illustrates how an informal, story-driven environment can motivate students to take ownership of their learning. Similarly, when the players encounter Latin spells and scrolls, they are driven to learn and decode the classical language. Schools and libraries become resources to help students make sense of an unfolding narrative, solve problems and take action inside the game. Gardner feels that one of Guard Up's biggest accomplishments is having students use school as a resource to practically apply abstract knowledge. She believes that by giving students greater agency, they will better transfer and accommodate learning into their lives.

Research supports the approach. A study conducted with medical undergraduate students in Brazil found that using a cooperative role-play environment to teach cellular biology was preferred by the participants and produced equal or higher retention than traditional lecture-style classes. The researchers state that "by telling a story in which everyone takes part, there is greater student interaction and, as a consequence, we may expect better performance in their construction of knowledge." Rather than one-way teacher transmission, knowledge is co-created by the students, which may lead to better long-term absorption of the material.
A Computer Game Without Computers
Each summer, dystopic works of literature like Animal Farm, The Island of Dr. Moreau or I Am Legend are creatively adapted to structure the zombie apocalypse. The texts are not used in a wholesale linear fashion, but act as general guides to help inform an emerging story. Gardner aims for campers to be the masters of their own destiny, and the decisions they make alter and redirect the plot at every turn.

"When I first arrived I thought it would be people running around and hitting each other, but it's not. It's about reacting to the consequences of your actions and the responsibility that comes with it," said one 13-year-old camper.

"We go where they want to go in our story. We give the learner the agency and autonomy to control their own outcome," said Gardner. "There's a lot of improv, but improv with some guidelines." The affordance to play in a responsive environment is key to engaging players in video games, but Gardner exports the method off the screen and into the real world. "In this age of technology, so few kids are unplugged and playing pretend. We are a computer game without the computers."

Keeping up with players without the magic of lightning-fast processors can be an epic challenge. At any given time, the staff will build props and costumes, apply makeup, play a host of characters, and maintain constant radio contact with mission control, where maps and figurines are used to orchestrate the unfolding adventure. Every night, the team gathers to alter and tweak the story, and to make all necessary preparations for the next day. To help with the demanding task, they maintain a database of easily deployable "pocket plots" or modular story fragments that can be inserted to respond to the players' unscripted decisions.

Media scholar Dr. Henry Jenkins terms these "micronarratives" and identifies them as a prevalent storytelling feature in popular video games. The technique lets players enjoy the freedom and agency of self-expression, while still loosely following a larger story arc.

"Certain plot points are fixed whereas other moments can be expanded or contracted in response to audience feedback without serious consequences to the overall plot," wrote Jenkins.
The Heroic Journey to Intercultural Understanding
Although the Wizards & Warriors Camp emphasizes STEM learning, campers also benefit from a healthy exposure to global cultures. The camp sidesteps standard Lord of the Rings-style fantasy plots in favor of storylines drawn from world mythology and indigenous oral histories. The narratives are woven together according to the hero's journey, a recurrent narrative pattern that mythologist Joseph Campbell identified as common to all cultures. Notably, the universal but episodic structure of the hero's journey is often applied as a flexible template for storytelling in video games.

Camp policy dictates that a non-Eurocentric culture be used every other year, so in addition to the tales of the Romans, Celts and Norse, they include Japanese myths and indigenous oral histories. To treat these traditions with sensitivity and avoid the pitfalls of cultural appropriation, Guard Up contracts consultants to guide and advise them every step of the way.

"This year, we chose both the Abenaki and Arawak tribes to explore because they were very different from each other in location," said Gardner. "We had Claudia Fox Tree, a local Arawak educator, counsel us on the story, props and regalia, and enlisted the help of Jim Bruchac, Abenaki educator and author from the Ndakinna Education Center in upstate New York."

Gardner affirmed that indigenous people do not consider their stories myths - they are a collective history transmitted by oral tradition. Similarly, the indigenous vestments are not costumes but regalia, as they are not disguises but a genuine expression of culture and tradition. These efforts toward sensitive representation are transmitted to the campers, fostering a mindset to more respectfully encounter other cultures.

UNESCO advocates for including intercultural understanding in curricula to encourage a sense of global citizenship in an increasingly connected world. A 2010 UNESCO report states that "respect for cultural diversity falls within the social dimension of peace, equality and human rights, underpinned by the cultural context, within and through which learning occurs, and which forms the basis for inter-linkages between the various sustainability dimensions (i.e., socio-political, environmental and economic)."

A sensitive exposure to other cultures adds an ethical dimension to the experience, reinforced by the camp's emphasis on compassion, courage and honor as the highest virtues to which the young heroes should aspire.
Sneaky STEM: Designing Spells with Physics
Beneath the realm of sword and sorcery lies a foundation of hard science. Heroes begin their journey by affiliating themselves with one of several guilds, each offering instruction in a different branch of science. Chemistry is learned to brew potions in the Mages' Guild, while members of the Healers' Guild become versed in the rudiments of biology and first aid. "To get first-level spells, mages have to learn basic physics which they then use to cast them," explained Gardner. "We have 7-year-olds running around the camp reciting Newton's Laws of Physics." As players progress they can design and teach their own spells as long as they can scientifically defend them before a Board of Mages. Teachers and education graduate students are hired by the camp to sit on the guild boards, be camp counselors and also develop the camp's curriculum.

Scientific knowledge helps the heroes prevail, so they are motivated to research, consult with their teachers and librarians, and master the content to ensure that their spells don't backfire. Gardner calls the approach "sneaky STEM" and laughs with equal mischief and delight when she speaks about the campers learning "subversively." The informal environment of a camp grants the freedom to experiment in a way that might be challenging in formal school settings. "Standardized tests limit a teachers' ability to creatively engage the student," said Gardner. "I don't know how many times I've heard teachers complain that they have to teach to the test."
Intergenerational and Inclusive
Despite the constant menace of monsters and zombies, testimonials from the intergenerational campers repeatedly express a sense of acceptance, inclusion and belonging. The camp brings together a range of ages from 7 years old and upward, but unlike the age silos in schools, all age groups interact in an atmosphere of collaboration and mentorship. Like more traditional summer camps, older campers can become CITs, which is when they get to wear the monster costumes. Although the camp was about 70 percent boys at its inception, Guard Up has formed partnerships, offered scholarships, and targeted promotion to substantially increase its female population. "The counselors make a big effort to not differentiate between genders, "said one 16-year-old camper. "They refer to everyone as heroes. No one cares - just be you."

How a Sword and Sorcery Camp Uses Immersive Role Play to Teach STEAM

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How a Sword and Sorcery Camp Uses Immersive Role Play to Teach STEAM

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The scene is right out of a survival horror movie. A yellow school bus unloads a group of eager young campers, ready to meet their counselors and settle in for some summer camp fun. Instead, they are greeted by a horde of groaning zombies advancing at them from an open field.

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A counterintuitive approach to improving math education: Focus on English language arts teaching | Brookings Institution

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A counterintuitive approach to improving math education: Focus on English language arts teaching | Brookings Institution

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Recent education reform efforts commonly aim at improving teacher effectiveness. One study of three large districts finds that they spent approximately $18,000 for professional development for each teacher each year. 1 Numerous education agencies, such as the District of Columbia Public Schools with its IMPACT effectiveness system for school-based personnel, and the state of Tennessee with its Tennessee Educator Acceleration Model, have invested substantial resources in teacher evaluation and feedback. 2

These policies arose, at least in part, from the recognition that teachers affect not only student learning in the short-run, but also long-run outcomes such as college attendance and earnings as adults. 3 A recent study following more than two million students estimated that having a teacher in grades four through eight with average effectiveness, instead of one who is among the five percent least effective, would increase a students' lifetime income by more than $250,000. Teachers also affect the likelihood that a student attends any college, attends a higher-ranked college, does not have children as a teenager, and saves more for retirement. 4

Most of the researchers examining the effects of teachers on student test performance have concluded that math teachers have a greater effect on students' performance on math exams than English language arts teachers have on students' performance on English exams. 5 For example, studies in North Carolina and New York City found that math teachers had approximately a 35 percent greater impact on test scores in their field than did English teachers. 6

Nonetheless, the research on the long-term effects of teachers finds that English teachers have at least as much of an effect as math teachers. For example, that same study following 2.5 million students found that an English teacher who raises students' reading test scores by the same amount as a math teacher raises students' math test scores has an impact on long-term life outcomes approximately 1.7 times that of the math teacher. Even though, on average, English teachers don't increase English language arts test scores as much as math teachers increase math scores, English teachers have as strong an effect on students' later lives.

A forthcoming study using data from urban areas in two states sheds light on why English teachers have these strong effects even though their effects on current year test scores are not as strong. 7 The benefits of good English teachers are seen in students' achievement in future years, not only in English, but in other subjects as well. The study distinguishes the persistent effects that teachers have in their own subject-English teachers on students' later English test performance and math teachers on students' later math test performance-from cross-subject effects in which English teachers in one year can affect math performance in subsequent years and math teachers in one year can affect math performance in a subsequent year. While the effects that math and English teachers have on students' test scores in the year that they have them similarly persists in their own subject in subsequent years, the gains in English scores due to English teachers have far greater effects on students' subsequent math performance than the gains in math scores due to math teachers have on students' subsequent English performance.

In fact, in some cases students' math achievement in sixth grade due to having an above average English teacher in fifth grade is almost as great as that due to having an equally above average math teacher in fifth grade. In contrast, while having an above average English teacher in fifth grade meaningfully affects students' sixth grade English test performance, having a similarly above average math teacher in fifth grade has essentially no effect on English test performance. Data from New York City show that English teachers' persistent effect on math is 70 percent of their persistence effect on English, while math teachers' persistent effect on English is less than 5 percent of their persistent effect on math (see the following figure). Similarly, English teachers in Miami-Dade County Public Schools demonstrate a persistent effect on math that is 46 percent as large as their effect on English, while math teachers in the district have a persistent effect on English that is less than five percent as large as their persistent effect on math.

English teachers affect later student success across fields, while math teachers appear to only affect math performance. This pattern holds in both states studied, states with quite different state tests.

Why might the effects of good English teachers spill over into math learning, while the effects of good math teachers do not? One possibility is that the English curriculum might build capacities that are relevant for math learning. Reading skills and other linguistic skills, for example, might be key to understanding word problems on math exams. Similarly, English language arts teachers might promote the ability to think logically and organize complex materials, which, in turn, benefits math performance. An alternative explanation is that English teachers are able to motivate students, perhaps through drawing connections between the books they read and students' experiences, in ways that math teachers do not. A study using data on ninth grade students in North Carolina schools found that teachers can affect students in ways not reflected by test scores, such as whether they come to school (attendance) or complete the work necessary to progress to the next grade. Teachers who are good at improving these non-test-based outcomes for students also positively affect their students longer run outcomes such as graduation and college and career aspirations. 8 That study shows that accounting for these effects that teachers can have on students is key to understanding English teacher effectiveness on students' long-run outcomes, but far less important for understand math teachers' effects. That is, good English teachers-those with the greatest long-run effect on students-affect not only test performance in English but also behaviors such as skipping school.

The large research base on teachers' value-added to student test performance has consistently found that which math teacher a student has matters a lot for their learning during the year in that math teacher's class and that the learning sticks with students in subsequent years. The findings for the importance of English teachers on English test performance have been clear but less strong. However, the research linking teachers to students long-run outcomes has found that English teachers are as important as math teachers. We are beginning to see the reasons for this. English teachers have important effects that go far beyond test performance and affect not only behaviors such as attendance and successful course completion but also test performance in other subject areas such as math.

Although the focus here is on teachers' contributions to student learning, the findings may also have broader implications for other interventions that aim to develop students' skills in reading and language arts. The results suggest that observed gains on English language arts assessments in the year of instruction do not fully capture the benefits that students are accruing from high quality English language arts instruction. The capacities that students are developing in their English classes-whether these be skills in logic or organization or the motivation they need to excel in school-are advancing their math learning almost as much as their learning in math class. Understanding what good English teachers are doing well may be just what we need to improve math outcomes for students.
The author did not receive financial support from any firm or person with a financial or political interest in this article. She is currently not an officer, director, or board member of any organization with an interest in this article.

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A counterintuitive approach to improving math education: Focus on English language arts teaching | Brookings Institution

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Recent education reform efforts commonly aim at improving teacher effectiveness. One study of three large districts finds that they spent approximately $18,000 for professional development for each teacher each year. 1 Numerous education agencies, such as the District of Columbia Public Schools with its IMPACT effectiveness system for school-based personnel, and the state of Tennessee with its Tennessee Educator Acceleration Model, have invested substantial resources in teacher evaluation and feedback.

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History Is Not a Useless Major: Fighting Myths with Data | AHA

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History Is Not a Useless Major: Fighting Myths with Data | AHA

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Over the past 20 years, warnings from a variety of sources-from career counselors to administrators to government officials-have convinced many prospective college students (and their parents) that the only safe path to a well-paying job is through a STEM major. Members of the academy-including STEM faculty themselves-have repeatedly challenged assertions that majoring in the humanities is useless. And employers of STEM graduates say that they value skills cultivated in a wide-ranging curriculum.

But the sense persists that the push toward STEM comes at the direct expense of humanities majors; history enrollments have declined sharply since at least 2011. As Julia Brookins reported in the March 2016 issue of Perspectives on History: "The number of history BAs and BSs completed in the United States fell for the third time in four years, this time by 9.1 percent from the previous year, from 34,360 to 31,233 [in 2014]." According to the most recent data, this steep decline has continued, with only 28,157 history majors graduating in 2015 (a decline of 9.8 percent from 2014).

In advising students, talking to parents, and listening to the priorities articulated by state legislatures, we continue to encounter widespread myths about the lives of people who graduate with history BAs. These myths are largely based on misinformation about the prospective lives of those who major in history. They paint life with a degree in history as a wasteland of unemployment and underemployment-that careful study of Asoka's conquests or the Industrial Revolution leads to a life of "Would you like fries with that?"

A potent way to combat these myths is with concrete data. Thankfully, a massive repository of data, the American Community Survey (ACS), tells us much about the lives of history majors. Conducted by the US Census Bureau each year since 2000, the ACS is a statistical survey of 3.5 million American households. It includes questions on a wide range of topics, from demographic details like age and race/ethnicity to situational data like housing and employment status. Most usefully for us, it also records individuals' undergraduate majors. These data are then compiled and aggregated into one-, three-, and five-year estimates.

From the ACS, we know that over the years 2010-14, some 29.7 percent of all American adults over 25 completed a bachelor's degree or higher. Of those, 2.21 percent received a bachelor's in history or US history. The ACS data offer us a snapshot of these history majors across the country and at different phases of life: from recent graduates to those in retirement.

Overall, the ACS data suggest that the picture for history majors is far brighter than critics of the humanities would have you believe, even those who think the sole purpose of a college degree is to achieve a well-paying job.

Myth 1: History Majors Are Underemployed

One fear is that history degrees do not offer a life of gainful employment or the job security that other careers might. The truth is very different. The ACS found that 4.6 percent of history majors between the ages of 25 and 64 were unemployed at the time they were surveyed. The national average, by comparison, was 7.7 percent. Against all holders of a college degree, however, there was a modest difference: degree-holders overall had 4.1 percent unemployment, half a percentage point lower. While history majors do have a slightly higher unemployment rate, the data show that someone interested in the field should not be deterred; the difference is very slight.

Myth 2: A History Major Does Not Prepare You for Gainful Employment

Most myths begin with a kernel of truth that is then warped beyond recognition. The idea that a history degree doesn't lead directly into a profession is true only for students who expect to become professional historians or to work in a closely related occupation. The vast majority of history majors, of course, do not become professional historians; according to the ACS, only 4.5 percent of history majors become educators at a postsecondary level (that is, mostly college professors). The proportion who become museum professionals-0.5 percent of the total-is a very small slice of the overall pie as well.

But the ACS data imply that many history majors do not expect to become historians and that they find meaningful careers in a wide range of fields. A history degree provides a broad skillset that has ensured that history majors are employed in almost every walk of life, with some notable trends (see fig. 1).

History majors seem particularly well-prepared for, and attracted to, certain careers. Nearly one in five goes into education-just over half as primary-, middle-, and high-school teachers. Another 15 percent enter management positions in business, and 11 percent go into the legal professions (most becoming lawyers). The "fries" myth is definitely not backed up by the data; only 1.7 percent of history majors work in food preparation, compared to 5 percent of the overall population.

It's important to note that nearly half of the history majors identified by the ACS went on to graduate school (see fig. 2)-a much higher percentage than the national average (37 percent) and higher than majors in English (45 percent) and the liberal arts (26 percent). This might be because law, management, and education require advanced study. It could also mean that students interested in careers that require graduate training see a history major as a springboard. Likely it is a combination of the two. But knowing this, history departments must understand that it is imperative that they prepare majors for graduate school and offer guidance in educational and career choices.

Myth 3: History Majors Are Underpaid

Again, we start with a kernel of truth. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences Humanities Indicators project released an analysis of ACS data showing that those with degrees in the humanities earn less (in terms of median income) than those with degrees in engineering, health care, business, and the sciences (see fig. 3).

Part of this is based more on field than on level of achievement; the work of engineers and computer programmers is better remunerated than that of, for example, elementary school teachers-even though our society demands good teachers. But history fares well in terms of compensation when compared to other humanities majors. The differences in median income among the humanities disciplines are not significant; the disparity between highest- and lowest-paid humanities majors in the workforce is only a few thousand dollars (see fig. 4).

Data suggest prospects for potential history majors are good, but history departments must offer guidance in career and graduate school choices.

Because of the diversity of careers that humanities majors-particularly history majors-go into, there is a wider-than-average distribution of incomes based upon field of work (see fig. 5). As in the general workforce, it is the occupation of college graduates in the humanities, rather than their undergraduate major, that accounts for differences in income. For history majors between the ages of 25 and 64 who are neither unemployed nor out of the workforce, the median income is currently $60,000 per year. But for those in managerial positions, the median is $80,000. For those in the legal occupations, the median is $100,000. But for those in education, it is $47,000, and for those who go into community and social services, the median is $45,000.

In short, it is not that history majors are underpaid. It is that the diverse range of occupations that a history degree prepares them for includes several important, but vastly undervalued, public service careers. If the only consideration when choosing a major is whether you will be earning six figures by the age of 30, then history may not be the best field. But for students who are inspired by work in which the greatest rewards may not necessarily be financial, a history major remains an excellent option.

The ACS data shed fascinating light on some of the myths about life with a history degree. Majoring in history does not doom a graduate to a life of unemployment or underemployment. In fact, history majors go on to become much better educated than the average person, filling roles in a wider range of careers than holders of many other degrees. The worst that can be said of this situation is that many of those careers are socially undervalued. But that does not mean that a degree in history is any less valuable.

Methodological note: All ACS data cited in this article include only those individuals between the ages of 25 and 64 who were in full-time employment, who achieved a bachelor's degree or higher, and who stated that their field of study for their bachelor's degree was either history or US history. All data were taken from the ACS's 2010-14 5-year Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS). Data on the number of history bachelors' degrees awarded in 2015 were gleaned from the annual National Center for Education Statistics via the NSF's WebCASPAR system at https://ncsesdata.nsf.gov/webcaspar.

Paul B. Sturtevant is a medievalist, social scientist, and public historian. He received a PhD in medieval studies from the University of Leeds and is a social science analyst at the Smithsonian Institution, as well as editor in chief of The Public Medievalist; http://www.publicmedievalist.com/. Follow him on Twitter @publicmedieval.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Attribution must provide author name, article title, Perspectives on History, date of publication, and a link to this page. This license applies only to the article, not to text or images used here by permission.

The American Historical Association welcomes comments in the discussion area below, at AHA Communities, and in letters to the editor. Please read our commenting and letters policy before submitting.

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History Is Not a Useless Major: Fighting Myths with Data

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Over the past 20 years, warnings from a variety of sources-from career counselors to administrators to government officials-have convinced many prospective college students (and their parents) that the only safe path to a well-paying job is through a STEM major. Members of the academy-including STEM faculty themselves-have repeatedly challenged assertions that majoring in the humanities is useless.

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Surfing the 4th Industrial Revolution: Artificial intelligence and the liberal arts | Brookings Institution

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Surfing the 4th Industrial Revolution: Artificial intelligence and the liberal arts | Brookings Institution

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Policy Advisor - Brookfield Insitute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship

Research and Policy Fellow - Hult International Business School, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

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Surfing the 4th Industrial Revolution: Artificial intelligence and the liberal arts | Brookings Institution

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Accelerating trends in artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics point to significant economic disruption in the years ahead. Together, machine learning, natural-language recognition, biometrics, a...

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Demand booming on college campuses for creative writing

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Demand booming on college campuses for creative writing

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NEW HAVEN, Conn. (AP) - Some credit the rise of social media. Others attribute it to a flourishing culture of self-expression. Whatever the reason, colleges across the United States are seeing a boom in demand for courses on creative writing.

Colleges are adding writing programs to accommodate interest in what has become the rarest of fields in the humanities - a sector that is growing, rather than losing students to science and technology.

The number of schools offering bachelor's degrees in creative writing has risen from three in 1975 to 733 today, according to the Association of Writers & Writing Programs, an industry group based at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.

So what will these students do after graduating?

"Most of them are aware that this probably is not going to be their career. At least, I hope they're aware," said David Galef, director of the creative writing program at Montclair State University in New Jersey. "They're interested in doing something they feel is creative."

While some will become professional writers, others will find work in fields such as public relations, advertising or something completely unrelated. Instructors say some students see their focus on writing as a way to understand themselves, make use of a liberal education and enrich their lives.

One Montclair State undergraduate, Gil Moreno, 46, enrolled years after completing another bachelor's degree, in business management, and dreams of becoming a writer. Even if he can't do it professionally, he'll keep it up on the side.

"I'm looking to get away from the business world," he said. "I'm kind of looking to live in my own separate world."

The number of creative writing bachelor's programs has grown steadily, but spiked from 161 in 2008 to 592 in 2013, according to the AWP . English departments elsewhere have offered new concentrations or minors in writing, and still more major programs are planned, including one beginning next fall at the University of Chicago.

In some English departments, the boom has created tension between creative writing and those who emphasize instruction of literature.

At Yale University's English department, which is reviewing admissions procedures for the writing concentration amid a surge in applications, professors say their writing program is unusual in requiring that all courses include reading in contemporary work of the chosen genre.

"All over the country students are more interested in writing about themselves than they are in reading other people," said English professor Leslie Brisman, who has taught at Yale since 1969. "We are in favor of creativity. We are not in favor of ignorance."

The number of course offerings in creative writing has roughly doubled over the last five years at Yale, where the creative writing director, Richard Deming, suspects the interest can be credited, at least partly, to social media.

"This act of expressing one's voice in a public way - some people feel that they want to add craft, they want to hone those skills and take it to a place of more intensity," he said. "It just builds from there."

Another explanation for the boom, according to David Fenza, director of the AWP, is a cultural disconnect between longstanding staples of English departments and college students who come from increasingly diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds.

"They want to see literature about their diaspora, not the diaspora of others," he said. "They want literature about them and their families and their ancestors and not the ancestors of white, European, English-speaking peoples."

Erica Wachs, a Yale junior specializing in creative writing, arrived at the Ivy League school thinking she would study either English or global affairs. Her first writing classes included some of the most exciting moments of her freshman year, including sessions with writers discussing their craft. She now is planning a career writing for the entertainment industry.

"I hope writing is what I will spend the rest of my life doing," she said.

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Demand booming on college campuses for creative writing

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NEW HAVEN, Conn. (AP) - Some credit the rise of social media. Others attribute it to a flourishing culture of self-expression. Whatever the reason, colleges across the United States are seeing a boom in demand for courses on creative writing.

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Prepare British children for life after Brexit – teach them another language

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Prepare British children for life after Brexit – teach them another language

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Just speaking English isn't going to cut it anymore. shutterstock

The formal negotiations to untangle the UK from the intricacies of the European Union are now well underway. And it is clear that looking forward, Britain's new relationship with the EU will necessitate conducting trade and political communications in a new dynamic - one which is unlikely to be done in the medium of English.

When the UK leaves the EU there will be no member state remaining where English is the lead official language. "Ah", you say, "what about Ireland, they speak English there". Yes they do, but in Ireland, Irish Gaelic is considered the first official language.

So to trade with the EU, the UK will need high-level negotiators fluent in German, French and Spanish, which it currently does not have.

Additionally, leaving the EU will result in a restriction of immigrant s from across EU member states. The need for visas will drastically reduce the number of workers who can come to the UK to fill jobs British people are either unwilling or unable to do.

And recognising this gap, the Foreign and Common Wealth office and the Ministry of Defence have opened in-house training centres to provide lessons in up to 80 different languages for their staff.

Global English

Much of this lack of language skill can be put down to the fact that children in UK schools do not learn foreign languages with the same intensity as their European neighbours.

In England in particular, languages are seen as boring, irrelevant or too hard - turning many off learning a language at a young age. And the "false-friend" of global English provides a fertile foundation for these ideas.

In contrast young people in the rest of Europe understand the need to speak at least one other language for their future prospects and they are supported by a strong holistic language education system.

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Since 2002, there has been a 16% decrease in applications to study a language at British universities. At secondary school level, there has been an even bigger decline - the number of pupils studying for a GCSE in a language has dropped 41%.

The number of young people taking French, German, and Spanish at A-level has also gone down by 22% in the past 14 years. German is the worst hit language - it has seen a decline in students taking it at A-Level of 45%.

Language learning

A lack of qualified teachers - almost 3,500 more language teachers are needed to meet current demand in Britain - along with a reduction in provision and resources, are just some of the reasons for this national decline in young people choosing to study a language at secondary level.

This comes despite the fact that language provision at primary level is available in some form in almost all schools in England. The failure of the English Baccalaureate to fully engage young people with languages has also been pinpointed as another contributing factor.

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Motivating young people is also a big challenge for teachers. At a time when morale is already low among language teachers, it can be hard to get young people to see the relevance of language learning in their own lives and future employment. Getting pupils to see the enjoyment of learning a language can also be difficult.

Part of the challenge is the perceived difficulty of the GCSE and A-Level examinations. As the British Council highlights:

The comparative difficulty of exams in languages in relation to other subjects, and widely reported harsh and inconsistent marking, are deeply demotivating for both pupils and teachers.

Transferable skills

Yet, with more investment in language provisions in secondary schools, the need to later train adults in languages while they work would not be necessary.

This lack of language skills across all employment sectors is costing the UK economy an estimated £48 billion each year, and the British Chambers of Commerce lists making language learning compulsory in secondary schools as one of its main factors for economic growth.

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It's at this point that I'm usually asked, "but if Britain is leaving the EU, then why do languages matter anymore?" And my answer is always the same, it is precisely because Britain is leaving the EU that languages matter even more. Not only to avoid isolationist attitudes evolving further, but to ensure that young people have the skills they need to succeed in a global jobs market.

And it's not just about learning a language - languages open doors, improving mobility, intercultural awareness, empathy, and confidence for the young people who study them.

The benefit of the transferable skills young people gain from learning a language is perhaps more valuable than the language itself. And limiting the access young people have to languages simply means not preparing them for a new post-Brexit world.

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Prepare British children for life after Brexit - teach them another language

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The formal negotiations to untangle the UK from the intricacies of the European Union are now well underway. And it is clear that looking forward, Britain's new relationship with the EU will necessitate conducting trade and political communications in a new dynamic - one which is unlikely to be done in the medium of English.

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Our loss when we leave out the literature

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Our loss when we leave out the literature

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Looking for something to read last week, I pulled from the shelf a copy of Dostoyevsky's "Crime and Punishment", a novel I hadn't read since 1960 as a student of European literature.

I remembered the basic story clearly enough - Raskolnikov, a poor law student of unstable temperament, dreamed that he witnessed a group of drunken people beating a horse to death, after which he murdered an old woman, a pawnbroker. After killing her with an axe, he was surprised when the old woman's daughter walked in, so he killed her in the same way. The last four fifths of the story reveal his justification of the murder and his punishment: the relentless torment of conscience.

Anybody who wonders why one would re-read a novel when he already knows the story should ask himself why he listens to a piece of music more than once, or looks at a painting or a movie again, and the answer becomes self-evident.

In my case, I also wondered if I still had the stamina to tangle with one of the big, nineteenth century Russians. In addition, I wanted to enjoy again Dostoyevsky's' story telling technique, his creation and description of characters, his descriptions of Petersburg street scenes, even though rendered by an interpreter.

My younger brother and I were lucky to be the sons of parents who read. Our homes are flush with books, newspapers and magazines; we recommend books and articles to each other. Our older brother, puzzlingly, was never a reader, nor is his wife. Their homes have been devoid of printed material.

What do you talk about with somebody who doesn't read? The kids and the grandkids? The weather? TV shows? Sports? But then what?

A good friend of mine read nothing but nonfiction; he read for information only. He didn't accept that fiction presented information of a different kind, that under the spell of a skillful writer, we can better understand how a man of conscience might feel after killing two people, how the torment of a ruthless conscience might convince him to believe that his guilt was written clearly on his face, self-evident even to strangers, and might make him eager to be found out. (My friend might have replied that he didn't intend to kill anyone with an axe or any other implement and therefore didn't need to know the personal consequences.)

The National Endowment for the Arts reported that in 1982, 57 percent of adults read at least one work of literature for pleasure in the previous year. In 2015, the figure fell to 43 percent. The survey didn't distinguish between physical books and electronic ones.

White women are more likely to read fiction than men, whites in general more likely than blacks and Hispanics. The higher the level of education, the more prevalent the reading of literature. But the growing number of people with college degrees hasn't produced a growing number of readers of fiction. Should this be worrisome?

The Washington Post article on the NEA report cites "a number of recent studies" demonstrating that "fiction - particularly literary fiction - seems to boost the quality of empathy in the people who read it, their ability to see the world from another person's eyes. And good works of literature, particularly novels, can grant you direct access to another person's mind - whether it be the mind of the author, or of one of their imagined characters - in a way that few other works of art can."

An article in a 2011 Scientific American reported on a study of nearly 14,000 students, 75 percent of whom revealed themselves to be less empathetic than were their counterparts tested 30 years earlier.

If people generally are less empathetic today, less able to recognize and understand another's point of view and sympathize with it - as our national politics suggests - is it that people are more isolated today, more likely to live alone, more comfortable connecting to electronic devices than to people and the tensions that might accompany personal relationships, more willing to prevail or die?

If there is a causal relationship between the reading of literature and the development of empathy, and if we want to promote empathy, there is a reason to hope for a more empathetic society by emphasizing the reading and discussion of literature throughout one's life.
Contact Rob Woutat at rwoutat@gmail.com.
Read or Share this story: http://www.kitsapsun.com/story/opinion/columnists/rob-woutat/2017/04/06/our-loss-when-we-leave-out-literature/100056862/

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Our loss when we leave out the literature

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Looking for something to read last week, I pulled from the shelf a copy of Dostoyevsky's "Crime and Punishment", a novel I hadn't read since 1960 as a student of European literature.

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My Humanities Degree Is Anything But Useless | HuffPost

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My Humanities Degree Is Anything But Useless | HuffPost

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Growing up I always loved to read and write, just as other people loved to build or play sports. In fact, I loved those things too. However, when it came to applying to school, I didn't think twice about applying for an English degree. I knew that I wanted to be one of those people who loved what they did for a living. I mean, isn't that what we all want? To go to work every day and not have it feel like an obligation, but to have it feel like a hobby or something you truly love.

Now, I'm in my final week of classes in my undergrad, and I have absolutely no regrets. The love I had for English and literature before entering school is nothing compared to the love I have for it now. The skills that I have learned are remarkable.

Others may look at me and think it's great that I can read and write, but so can most people in the country we live in. They may wonder what on earth I'm going to do with a degree like this. They may even frown upon my choice as something impractical or unrealistic. In fact, many even wonder what the point is behind all of the humanities and arts degrees.

Well, I'm here to tell you that there's a point to the work I put in every single day, an important point in fact. I write so that the world and people around me can relate to one another. I write so that I can understand pain, humility, grief and tragedy. I write so that I can connect with the world. I write so that I can process thoughts and make calculated and smart decisions.

I WRITE TO SHARE MY LIFE WITH OTHERS.

I read so that I can understand those who came before me. I read so that I can learn from history, and make smart decisions about the future. I read because no matter how much the world changes, the fundamental elements of humanity never will. I read because it allows me to grow, to become open-minded and knowledgeable.

I READ BECAUSE I WANT TO LISTEN TO WHAT OTHERS HAVE TO SAY.

Every day you engage in these two activities in different forms and you take for granted the importance of them. I, on the other hand, do not. I believe creativity and innovation created the world we live in, and practicing those skills every day is something I value. Expression of thoughts and opinions helps our societies function and endure through stressful life events and tragedy. I study English because there are infinite ways to view the world and I don't ever want to be limited to an amount someone else sees fit.

I'm sick of hearing that my humanities degree is useless because it has taught me more about life than I could have ever imagined. It is not impractical to enjoy what you study, it's smart. No one ever created something remarkable out of boredom or disinterest. If I earn less than my science or math counterpart than at least I do so out of passion and not out of obligation. However, look around you, there are some people accomplishing incredible things who have humanities degrees, so don't underestimate us.

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My Humanities Degree Is Anything But Useless

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Growing up I always loved to read and write, just as other people loved to build or play sports. In fact, I loved those things too. However, when it came to applying to school, I didn't think twice about applying for an English degree.

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Hey, Computer Scientists! Stop Hating on the Humanities | WIRED

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Hey, Computer Scientists! Stop Hating on the Humanities | WIRED

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As a computer science PhD student, I am a disciple of big data. I see no ground too sacred for statistics: I have used it to study everything from sex to Shakespeare, and earned angry retorts for these attempts to render the ineffable mathematical. At Stanford I was given, as a teenager, weapons both elegant and lethal-algorithms that could pick out the terrorists most worth targeting in a network, detect someone's dissatisfaction with the government from their online writing.

WIRED OPINION

About

Computer science is wondrous. The problem is that many people in Silicon Valley believe that it is all that matters. You see this when recruiters at career fairs make it clear they're only interested in the computer scientists; in the salary gap between engineering and non-engineering students; in the quizzical looks humanities students get when they dare to reveal their majors. I've watched brilliant computer scientists display such woeful ignorance of the populations they were studying that I laughed in their faces. I've watched military scientists present their lethal innovations with childlike enthusiasm while making no mention of whom the weapons are being used on. There are few things scarier than a scientist who can give an academic talk on how to shoot a human being but can't reason about whether you should be shooting them at all.

The fact that so many computer scientists are ignorant or disdainful of non-technical approaches is worrisome because in my work, I'm constantly confronting questions that can't be answered with code. When I coded at Coursera, an online education company, I developed an algorithm that would recommend classes to people in part based on their gender. But the company decided not to use it when we discovered it would push women away from computer science classes.

It turns out that this effect-where algorithms entrench societal disparities-is one that occurs in domains from criminal justice to credit scoring. This is a difficult dilemma: In criminal justice, for example, you're confronted with the fact that an algorithm that fulfills basic statistical desiderata is also a lot more likely to rate black defendants as high-risk even when they will not go on to commit another crime.

I don't have a solution to this problem. I do know, however, that I won't find it in my algorithms textbook; I'm far more likely to find relevant facts in Ta-Nehisi Coates's work on systemic discrimination or Michelle Alexander's on mass incarceration.

My personal coding projects have presented similarly thorny ethical questions. Should I write a computer program that will download the communications of thousands of teenagers suffering from eating disorders posted on an anorexia advice website? Write a program to post anonymous, suicidal messages on hundreds of college forums to see which colleges offer the most support? My answer to these questions, incidentally, was "no". But I considered it. And the glory and peril of computers is that they magnify the impact of your whims: an impulse becomes a program that can hurt thousands of people.

Perhaps it's more efficient to allow computer scientists to do what we're best at-writing code-and have other people regulate our products? This is insufficient. Coders push products out at blinding speed, often cloaked in industry secrecy; by the time legislation catches up, millions of people could be harmed. Ethics training is required for professionals in other fields in part because it's important for doctors and lawyers to be able to act ethically even when no one's looking over their shoulders. Further, computer scientists need to help craft regulations because they have the necessary technical expertise; it's hard to regulate algorithmic bias in word embeddings if you have no idea what a word embedding is.

Here are some steps forward. Universities should start with broader training for computer science students. I contacted eight of the top undergraduate programs in computer science, and found that most do not require students to take a course on ethical and social issues in computer science (although some offer optional courses). Such courses are hard to teach well. Computer scientists often don't take them seriously, are uncomfortable with non-quantitative thinking, are overconfident because they're mathematically brilliant, or are convinced that utilitarianism is the answer to everything. But universities need to try. Professors need to scare their students, to make them feel they've been given the skills not just to get rich but to wreck lives; they need to humble them, to make them realize that however good they might be at math, there's still so much they don't know.

A more socially focused curriculum would not only make coders less likely to cause harm; it might also make them more likely to do good. Top schools squander far too much of their technical talent on socially useless, high-paying pursuits like algorithmic trading. As Andrew Ng, a Stanford computer scientist, admonished a roomful of Stanford students he was trying to recruit to Coursera: "You have to ask yourself, why did I study computer science? And for a lot of students, the answer seems to be, so I can design the latest social media app...I believe we can build things that are more meaningful than that."

There are many steps tech companies should take as well. Organizations should explore the social and ethical issues their products create: Google and Microsoft deserve credit for researching algorithmic discrimination, for example, and Facebook for investigating echo chambers. Make it easier for external researchers to evaluate the impacts of your products: be transparent about how your algorithms work and provide access to data under appropriate data use agreements. (Researchers also need to be allowed to audit algorithms without being prosecuted.) Ask social or ethical questions in hiring interviews, not just algorithmic ones; if hiring managers asked, students would learn how to answer them. (Microsoft's CEO was once asked, in a technical interview, what he would do if he saw a baby lying in an intersection: the obvious answer to pick up the baby did not occur to him).

Companies should hire the people harmed or excluded by their products: whose faces their computer vision systems don't recognize and smiles their emojis don't capture, whose resumes they rank as less relevant and whose housing options they limit, who are mobbed by online trolls they helped organize and do little to control. Hire non-computer-scientists, and bring them in for lunchtime talks; have them challenge the worldviews of the workforce.

It's possible that listening to non-computer scientists will slow the Silicon Valley machine: Diverse worldviews can produce argument. But slowing down in places where reasonable people can disagree is a good thing. In an era where even elections are won and lost on digital battlefields, tech companies need to move less fast and break fewer things.

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Hey, Computer Scientists! Stop Hating on the Humanities

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As a computer science PhD student, I am a disciple of big data. I see no ground too sacred for statistics: I have used it to study everything from sex to Shakespeare, and earned angry retorts for these attempts to render the ineffable mathematical.

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Why the humanities save lives - The San Diego Union-Tribune

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Why the humanities save lives - The San Diego Union-Tribune

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Donald Trump has proposed eliminating the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). But he might change his mind if he realized that the arts and humanities also serve people he professes to like: police officers. Meet my history Ph.D. student David Livingstone, who also happens to be the new police chief of Simi Valley. For the last few years, his days have started at 4 a.m. when he rises to work on his dissertation. Then he starts his day job at the Police Department to support his academic endeavors. A day off usually means a day at the UCSD library.

Many spirited defenses of the humanities against the Trump administration's proposed cuts have centered on the importance of humanities skills in today's workplace: empathy, critical thinking, the ability to write and communicate well. But David's case shows that the humanities can actually save lives.

David was chosen as chief of police not despite but because of his Ph.D. The skills that he acquired as a history graduate student proved essential to his success. His instinct as a historian has kicked in while managing the investigation of cold case murders. Because of his experience in historical archives, he has helped homicide detectives to follow paper trails and discover new evidence. When a young man was put in jail, the same historian's skills allowed him to get him out by proving investigative missteps and errors in the testimony of a key witness. The boy's parents, the Superior Court judge and local civil liberties groups commended him for his work. Like many graduate students, David also taught in an introductory course on the history of the world. His knowledge about the history of Islam now comes in handy in establishing relations with Simi Valley's Muslim community.

If David's experience in the ivory tower has followed him on the beat, his lived experience as police officer has, in turn, enriched his research. His dissertation asks a big question: What is the role of the police in a democratic society? David is writing a history of the West German Federal Border Guard, a paramilitary unit that was founded in 1950 and existed until 2005. His thesis reveals shocking continuities across 1945, with many former Nazis continuing their police careers in the postwar Federal Republic. But he also shows how the institution and the people within them slowly adapted to the different values of a democratic society. This process is one reason why today's Germany has 1/100th the number of fatal police shootings as the United States - 10 versus approximately 1,000 in 2015.

The key insight of his thesis - institutions can change, and so can people - is no less relevant for the role of the police in American society today. It reaffirmed David's critical attitude toward militarized policing in the U.S. Throughout his career, he has promoted a zero-tolerance policy toward police abuse. He has been in charge of many internal investigations, at times having to make unpopular decisions. His humanities background is especially important in Simi Valley, a place that is often mistakenly associated with one of the worst cases of police violence. In 1992, the Rodney King trial was moved from Los Angeles, where he was savagely beaten by four LAPD officers, to Simi Valley. The officers' subsequent acquittal then sparked the L.A. riots. This is why some of my academic colleagues were reluctant to announce publicly the news of David's appointment as chief.

But I believe David's story needs to be told now more than ever. As he leads a force of 125 police officers, he will draw on essential humanities skills as a thinker, writer, communicator, critic, historian and humanist. Cases like his illuminate the many ways in which the humanities make the world not just a better but a safer place - and actually save lives. I, for one, would feel much better if all police chiefs had rigorous training in the humanities. And for me, this is also personal: As the father of an African-American boy, I worry about the future of my son and those who look like him. The "Black Lives Matter" sign in our front yard was repeatedly stolen or defaced. This is why I could not be more proud of my Ph.D. student, the new police chief of Simi Valley.
Biess is an NEH Fellow and professor of history at the University of California, San Diego.

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Donald Trump has proposed eliminating the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). But he might change his mind if he realized that the arts and humanities also serve people he professes to like: police officers. Meet my history Ph.D.

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College business programs look to the liberal arts model

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College business programs look to the liberal arts model

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- Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images

A few dozen professors are packed into a lecture hall at Franklin & Marshall College, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. They're here from schools all over the country to talk about how to bring the critical thinking and creativity associated with the liberal arts into their business programs.

"Traditional business programs really tend to be taught from a single standpoint, usually a managerial standpoint," said Jeffrey Nesteruk, a professor of legal studies at Franklin & Marshall. "What we strive to do is to teach these same subjects but from multiple standpoints."

Nesteruk is leading research to help colleges - from the University of Pennsylvania to Mount Holyoke - transform the traditional model of a business major.

"So for instance in finance, the model says the role of the firm is the maximization of shareholder wealth," he said.

In a typical finance class, you might accept that at face value and move on to figuring out how firms maximize wealth. Not at F&M.

"We linger over that assumption," he said. "Why is that the purpose of the firm? Are there different purposes? What is served if you think of the firm that way? What is taken away?"

And how's this for breaking the mold? An entrepreneurship professor has teamed up with an improvisational dance instructor to teach a course on creativity. Another class combines literature and sustainable food production.

Business is the most popular undergraduate major in the country, but employers often complain that today's graduates don't have enough critical thinking, writing, and communication skills - the sort of skills you might develop by studying, say, literature or history.

The Business and Society Program of the Aspen Institute co-sponsored the workshop. The goal isn't only to produce more employable graduates, said associate director Claire Preisser, but more responsible business leaders.

"One way we try to achieve that is by influencing what new and future business leaders learn in their formal education," she said.

Students also want their careers to have meaning and social impact, said Kendy Hess, an associate professor of philosophy at the College of the Holy Cross, and they're increasingly discontent with government as the main driver of social change.

"So people who want to fix things are more and more drawn to business as the place where you can get things done," she said.

At a time when all colleges are under pressure to launch their graduates into productive careers, business has a lot to offer the liberal arts, too, said Hess.

"At the very least, internships and experiences and a chance to take all of this knowledge and information and understanding and dialogue, and try to use it," she said.

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College business programs look to the liberal arts model

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A few dozen professors are packed into a lecture hall at Franklin & Marshall College, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. They're here from schools all over the country to talk about how to bring the critical thinking and creativity associated with the liberal arts into their business programs. "Traditional business programs really tend to be taught from a single standpoint, usually a managerial standpoint," said Jeffrey Nesteruk, a professor of legal studies at Franklin & Marshall.

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Infographic: Benefits of Language Learning | Modern Language Association

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Infographic: Benefits of Language Learning | Modern Language Association

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Infographic: Benefits of Language Learning

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Learning a language boosts your brain, helps your grades, and improves your job prospects. So stand with the MLA and spread the word about the importance of language education!

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Did artists lead the way in mathematics?

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Did artists lead the way in mathematics?

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Is there a geometry lesson hidden in 'The Last Supper'? Wikimedia Commons

Mathematics and art are generally viewed as very different disciplines - one devoted to abstract thought, the other to feeling. But sometimes the parallels between the two are uncanny.

From Islamic tiling to the chaotic patterns of Jackson Pollock, we can see remarkable similarities between art and the mathematical research that follows it. The two modes of thinking are not exactly the same, but, in interesting ways, often one seems to foreshadow the other.

Does art sometimes spur mathematical discovery? There's no simple answer to this question, but in some instances it seems very likely.

Patterns in the Alhambra

Consider Islamic ornament, such as that found in the Alhambra in Granada, Spain.

In the 14th and 15th centuries, the Alhambra served as the palace and harem of the Berber monarchs. For many visitors, it's a setting as close to paradise as anything on earth: a series of open courtyards with fountains, surrounded by arcades that provide shelter and shade. The ceilings are molded in elaborate geometric patterns that resemble stalactites. The crowning glory is the ornament in colorful tile on the surrounding walls, which dazzles the eye in a hypnotic way that's strangely blissful. In a fashion akin to music, the patterns lift the onlooker into an almost out-of-body state, a sort of heavenly rapture.

It's a triumph of art - and of mathematical reasoning. The ornament explores a branch of mathematics known as tiling, which seeks to fill a space completely with regular geometric patterns. Math shows that a flat surface can be regularly covered by symmetric shapes with three, four and six sides, but not with shapes of five sides.

It's also possible to combine different shapes, using triangular, square and hexagonal tiles to fill a space completely. The Alhambra revels in elaborate combinations of this sort, which are hard to see as stable rather than in motion. They seem to spin before our eyes. They trigger our brain into action and, as we look, we arrange and rearrange their patterns in different configurations.

An emotional experience? Very much so. But what's fascinating about such Islamic tilings is that the work of anonymous artists and craftsmen also displays a near-perfect mastery of mathematical logic. Mathematicians have identified 17 types of symmetry: bilateral symmetry, rotational symmetry and so forth. At least 16 appear in the tilework of the Alhambra, almost as if they were textbook diagrams.

The patterns are not merely beautiful, but mathematically rigorous as well. They explore the fundamental characteristics of symmetry in a surprisingly complete way. Mathematicians, however, did not come up with their analysis of the principles of symmetry until several centuries after the tiles of the Alhambra had been set in place.

Quasicrystalline tiles

Stunning as they are, the decorations of the Alhambra may have been surpassed by a masterpiece in Persia. There, in 1453, anonymous craftsmen at the Darbi-I Imam shrine in Isfahan discovered quasicrystalline patterns. These patterns have complex and mysterious mathematical properties that were not analyzed by mathematicians until the discovery of Penrose tilings in the 1970s.

Such patterns fill a space completely with regular shapes, but in a configuration which never repeats itself - indeed, is infinitely nonrepeated - although the mathematical constant known as the Golden Section occurs over and over again.

Daniel Schectman won the 2001 Nobel Prize for the discovery of quasicrystals, which obey this law of organization. This breakthrough forced scientists to reconsider their conception of the very nature of matter.

In 2005, Harvard physicist Peter James Lu showed that it's possible to generate such quasicrystalline patterns relatively easily using girih tiles. Girih tiles combine several pure geometric shapes into five patterns: a regular decagon, an irregular hexagon, a bow tie, a rhombus and a regular pentagon.

Whatever the method, it's clear that the quasicrystalline patterns at Darbi-I Imam were created by craftsmen without advanced training in mathematics. It took several more centuries for mathematicians to analyze and articulate what they were doing. In other words, intuition preceded full understanding.

Perspective and non-Euclidian mathematics

Geometric perspective made it possible to portray the visible world with a new verisimilitude and accuracy, creating an artistic revolution in the Italian Renaissance. One could argue that perspective also led to a major reexamination of the fundamental laws of mathematics.

According to Euclidian mathematics, two parallel lines will remain parallel into infinity and never meet. In the world of Renaissance perspective, however, parallel lines eventually do meet in the far distance at the so-called "vanishing point." In other words, Renaissance perspective present a geometry which follows regular mathematical laws, but is non-Euclidian.

When mathematicians first devised non-Euclidian mathematics in the early 19th century, they imagined a world in which parallel lines meet at infinity. The geometry they explored was, in many ways, similar to that of Renaissance perspective.

Non-Euclidian mathematics has since moved on to explore space which has 12 or 13 dimensions, far outside the world of Renaissance perspective. But it's worth asking whether Renaissance art may have made easier to make that initial leap.

Pollock's chaotic paintings

An interesting modern case of art that broke traditional boundaries - and that has suggestive parallels with recent developments in mathematics - is that of the paintings of Jackson Pollock.

To those who first encountered them, the paintings of Pollock seemed chaotic and senseless. With time, however, we've come to see that they have elements of order, though not a traditional sort. Their shapes are simultaneously predictable and unpredictable, in a fashion similar to the pattern of dripping water from a faucet. There's no way to predict the exact effect of the next drip. But, if we chart the pattern of drips, we find that they fall within a zone that has a clear shape and boundaries.

Such unpredictability was once out of bounds for mathematicians. But, in recent years, it has become one of the hottest areas of mathematical exploration. For example, chaos theory explores patterns that are not predictable but fall within a definable range of possibilities, while fractal analysis studies shapes that are similar but not identical.

Pollock himself had no particular interest in mathematics, and little known talent in that arena. His fascination with these forms was intuitive and subjective.

Intriguingly, mathematicians have not been able to accurately describe what Pollock was doing in his paintings. For example, there have been attempts to use fractal analysis to create a numerical "signature" of his style, but so far the method has not worked - we can't mathematically distinguish Pollock's autograph work from bad imitations. Even the notion that Pollock employed fractal thoughts is probably incorrect.

Nonetheless, Pollock's simultaneously chaotic and orderly patterns have suggested a fruitful direction for mathematics. At some point, it may well be possible to describe what Pollock was doing with mathematical tools, and artists will have to move on and mark out a new frontier to explore.

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Did artists lead the way in mathematics?

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Mathematics and art are generally viewed as very different disciplines - one devoted to abstract thought, the other to feeling. But sometimes the parallels between the two are uncanny. From Islamic tiling to the chaotic patterns of Jackson Pollock, we can see remarkable similarities between art and the mathematical research that follows it.

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Humanities teach students to think. Where would we be without them? | Francine Prose | Opinion | The Guardian

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Humanities teach students to think. Where would we be without them? | Francine Prose | Opinion | The Guardian

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Humanities departments in America are once again being axed. The reasons, one hears, are economic rather than ideological. It's not that schools don't care about the humanities - they just can't afford them. But if one looks at these institutions' priorities, one finds a hidden ideology at work.

Earlier this month, the State University of New York (Suny) Stony Brook announced a plan to eliminate several of the college's well-regarded departments for budgetary reasons. Undergraduates will no longer be able to major in comparative literature, cinema and cultural studies or theater arts.

Three doctoral programs would be cut, and three departments (European languages and literature, Hispanic languages and literature, and cultural studies) would be merged into one. Not only students but faculty will be affected; many untenured teachers would lose their jobs, and doctoral candidates would have to finish their studies elsewhere.

This is happening at a time in which high salaries are awarded to college administrators that dwarf those of a junior or even senior faculty member teaching in at-risk departments. That discrepancy can only be explained through ideology. The decision to reduce education to a corporate consumer-driven model, providing services to the student-client, is ideological too.

Suny Stony Brook is spending millions on a multiyear program entitled "Far Beyond" that is intended to "rebrand" the college's image: a redesigned logo and website, new signs, banners and flags throughout the campus. Do colleges now care more about how a school looks and markets itself than about what it teaches? Has the university become a theme park: Collegeland, churning out workers trained to fill particular niches? Far beyond what?

The threat of cuts that Suny Stony Brook is facing is not entirely new. In 2010, Suny Albany announced that it was getting rid of its Russian, classics, theater, French and Italian departments - a decision later rescinded. The University of Pittsburgh has cut its German, classics and religious studies program.

This problem has parallels internationally. In the UK, protests greeted Middlesex University's 2010 decision to phase out its philosophy department. In June 2015, the Japanese minister of education sent a letter to the presidents of the national universities of Japan, suggesting they close their graduate and undergraduate departments in the humanities and social sciences and focus on something more practical.

Most recently, the Hungarian government announced restrictions that would essentially make it impossible for the Central European University, funded by George Soros, to function in Budapest.

These are hard times. Students need jobs when they graduate. But a singular opportunity has been lost if they are denied the opportunity to study foreign languages, the classics, literature, philosophy, music, theater and art. When else in their busy lives will they get that chance?

Eloquent defenses of the humanities have appeared - essays explaining why we need these subjects, what their loss would mean. Those of us who teach and study are aware of what these areas of learning provide: the ability to think critically and independently; to tolerate ambiguity; to see both sides of an issue; to look beneath the surface of what we are being told; to appreciate the ways in which language can help us understand one another more clearly and profoundly - or, alternately, how language can conceal and misrepresent. They help us learn how to think, and they equip us to live in - to sustain - a democracy.

Studying the classics and philosophy teaches students where we come from, and how our modes of reasoning have evolved over time. Learning foreign languages, and about other cultures, enables students to understand how other societies resemble or differ from our own. Is it entirely paranoid to wonder if these subjects are under attack because they enable students to think in ways that are more complex than the reductive simplifications so congenial to our current political and corporate discourse?

I don't believe that the humanities can make you a decent person. We know that Hitler was an ardent Wagner fan and had a lively interest in architecture. But literature, art and music can focus and expand our sense of what humans can accomplish and create. The humanities teach us about those who have gone before us; a foreign language brings us closer to those with whom we share the planet.

The humanities can touch those aspects of consciousness that we call intellect and heart - organs seemingly lacking among lawmakers whose views on health care suggest not only zero compassion but a poor understanding of human experience, with its crises and setbacks.

Courses in the humanities are as formative and beneficial as the classes that will replace them. Instead of Shakespeare or French, there will be (perhaps there already are) college classes in how to trim corporate spending - courses that instruct us to eliminate "frivolous" programs of study that might actually teach students to think.

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Humanities teach students to think. Where would we be without them? | Francine Prose

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Humanities departments in America are once again being axed. The reasons, one hears, are economic rather than ideological. It's not that schools don't care about the humanities - they just can't afford them. But if one looks at these institutions' priorities, one finds a hidden ideology at work.

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Home > Publications > Periodicals > ScotLit > Why Study Scottish Literature?

Why Study Scottish Literature?

Alan Riach
ScotLit 41, 2011
Let me begin with an idea suggested by the words with which Alasdair Gray begins to draw his great novel Lanark to a close: I started making maps when I was small
Showing place, resources, where the enemy
And where love lay. I did not know
Time adds to land. Events drift continually down,
Effacing landmarks, raising the level, like snow. The idea is simple enough: the arts are maps. They show us the terrain of life, contours, cliffs and coasts, they chart our deepest oceans and their rivers run like arteries across arid plains. But Alasdair Gray's words are also a warning: the maps tell us that human landscapes are always changing, and they require a special understanding, a training in how best they might be read. In answer to a question about the nature of art, the American novelist and poet Robert Penn Warren said, 'Ah believe it's just gettin' yore reality shaped a little better.' We have to learn how to make reality shapely.
All art represents and interprets the world. Represents and interprets. Representation might suggest approval or even celebration, and interpretation might imply criticism or even satire. Art resists the numbing of the senses. It helps us to live more fully, engaged with the world and critical of it.

The function of all the arts, and especially of literature, is, at the same time, both representation and critique. Mimesis - the representation of reality in art - might present a recognisable scene. But to articulate that scene in an aesthetic form is also to imply a distance from lived reality: the painting has its frame and space from the viewer, the pages of print have their book or magazine covers, the page is held at a space from the understanding of the reader. The reader works to go through it, and takes pleasure in that work. Music performed to be listened to has a different effect from that performed to be danced to. The immersion in screen media characteristic of the west in the modern world marks a significant escalation in the degree to which uncritical space is occupied. There is less work, less pleasure and less shock. For this reason alone, literature is one of the most valuable of all human resources. It still has a capacity to shock. It can show humanity at its worst, as well as its best. It remains a stranger to the bland.

But in any age of crass commercialism, the arts are disadvantaged, partly because the training that is needed to help us comprehend them is so vulnerable. The vanity of rampant managers and the strafing heartlessness of advertising clog up the channels of contemplation. In 'Criticism, Art, Letters', from The Best of Myles (1968), Flann O'Brien is only mildly exaggerating a popular philistinism when he declares that
. . . there is no excuse for poetry. Poetry gives no adequate return in money, is expensive to print by reason of the waste of space occasioned by its form, and . . . most of it is bad. Nobody is going to manufacture a thousand tons of jam in the expectation that five tons may be eatable. Well, he's got a point, hasn't he? You can imagine certain education ministers trying the thing on without a trace of irony, and getting knighthoods for the damage they do to generations.
The arts look after themselves. The creative force that produces them is so essential, so profoundly necessary, that they are as inevitable in human life as the desire for shelter, food and procreation. And sometimes, even when you're not looking for it, the necessary thing will find you. A long time ago I came across an audio cassette tape in a drawer in a university I was visiting and found a recording of the American poet William Carlos Williams, where he says this:
. . . because the purpose of the artist, whatever it is, is to take the life which he sees, and raise it, raise it up, to an elevated position where it has dignity, just the same as a Navajo Indian puts a mark around a clay water pitcher and makes it distinguished, so the artist's purpose in life, what he's for, why he's been preserved for the ages as he has been, the most, the imperishable thing, the one imperishable thing, that the world never lets die, is the work of art. Cities are wiped out, civilisation is wiped out, Homer persists. England will disappear. Shakespeare will be there. It's that. The race cherishes that, cherishes the work of the artist. He's the most important creature in any generation. The arts - all the arts - are as inseparable from being human as the dance is from the dancer, in Yeats's poem 'Among School Children'. But as the American critic Guy Davenport points out in his essay, 'Do You Have a Poem Book on E. E. Cummings?', in The Geography of the Imagination: Forty Essays, if the purpose of journalism is to inform and disseminate, it isn't doing its job: 'Thirty years of liberal twiddling with the lines of communication have made it almost impossible to broadcast anything but received propaganda.' And so, 'what's happening in the minds that keep other minds alive and give them the courage to live is reported, if at all, in a dangerously denatured and official trickle of news.' When the arts are neglected or obscured, people suffer from dullness and ignorance.
The purpose of the arts is to help people to live.

So much for generalisations. I would like to close in now on literature and Scottish literature in particular, with some personal data that I hope will be relevant.

My parents encouraged my reading when I was a boy, and my grandfather especially encouraged me. I have particular memories of my grandfather's gigantic bookcase and what appeared to be hundreds of great books, encyclopaedias, guides to world literature, titles like Races of the World, Everyman's Encyclopaedia, the collected works of Shakespeare, Scott, Burns, Keats, Shelley and Byron. It was so big I could almost literally climb inside it when I was a boy. I also have particular memories of my father giving me a copy of Huckleberry Finn and the notion of floating downriver on a raft still pleases me - but he also gave me a copy of Moby-Dick and I still remember the feeling when the breath literally left my body as I read the final chapter, when Ahab goes over the side.

Great writing has this power. It helps you through all your life, one way or another. All the arts do this, I think, but literature is the greatest of them all because it gives you such a range and depth of experience of other lives, languages, places, politics, and histories.

Literature is the most liberating of all the things human minds have created.

And it arises from two basic human forms of expression: stories and songs. All else comes from these. But even here, literalism is a danger. I remember a particularly egregious member of staff at a university English department meeting suggesting in all seriousness that Heart of Darkness should be taken off the curriculum because Kurtz was not a very good role model!

The proper reply was quickly and mercifully given: 'Neither is Lady Macbeth!'

Of course the Macbeths are not role models: they are the embodiments of our human potential at its worst. The arts propose not literal but metaphoric truths. In his autobiography, Theme and Variations, the conductor Bruno Walter defines this:
History! Can we learn a people's character through its history, a history formerly made by princes and statesmen with an utter disregard of, frequently even in opposition to, its interests? Is not its nature disclosed rather by its poetry, by its general habits of life, by its landscape, and by its idiom? Are we not able more deeply to penetrate into a nation's soul through its music, provided that it has actually grown on its soil? . . . Is anyone entitled to speak with authority of the Russians who has not become familiar with Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Gorky, and has not listened to the music of Mussorgsky, Borodin, and Tchaikovsky? . . . I have preserved the unshakable conviction that man's spiritual accomplishments are vastly more important than his political and historical achievements . . . For the works of the creative spirit last, they are essentially imperishable, while the world-stirring historical activities of even the most eminent men are circumscribed by time. Napoleon is dead - but Beethoven lives. Or, Dundas is dead, Burns lives. Or, Stalin is dead, MacDiarmid lives.
I was born in Scotland. I left when I was four and went to school and university in England, then returned to live in Scotland from 1979 to 1986, completing a PhD at Glasgow University. I went to New Zealand in 1986. New Zealand was absolutely central in world politics to my view at that precise moment. The country was nuclear-free and the Greenpeace ship the Rainbow Warrior had just been blown up by French spies, with murderous loss of life. Teaching across the range at the university where I worked, the University of Waikato - it is the Maori name for the area and the river that runs through it - I was able to initiate courses in Scottish, Irish and 'Postcolonial' literatures and Creative Writing and to teach in courses on English and American literatures and convene the big first-year 'Introduction to Literature' courses. So I was thinking about how best to introduce what really mattered to me to students who might have no prior knowledge to draw upon. So I was asking myself, 'What are the important things about Scottish literature you have to know about, to get a sense of the shape of the terrain, the character of the country, its national history, its music, languages, the major writers?' And a number of key moments were clearly of massive importance in providing crucial aspects of the country's myths and its actual history.

Now I'd like to give three examples, of how literature connects with our understanding of human geography, language and painting.

First, how should we begin to acquire a comprehensive understanding of the geographical variety of Scotland?

For generations, to mainlanders and lowlanders and international visitors, the islands of Scotland were quintessentially the so-called 'Romantic' Hebrides, with Bonnie Prince Charlie's great escape swirling in impenetrable mist and evidence of a human loyalty incorruptible almost to the point of foolishness. A legacy of romanticising Scottish history had been passing into popular perception over a hundred years. MacDiarmid wrote the first book that shifted the meaning of the term 'The Islands of Scotland' in 1939, on the eve of the Second World War: The Islands of Scotland, a revisionary demystification of island life. Over half of it was devoted to Shetland, where he had been living, much to Orkney and relatively little space given to the Hebrides.

The example was set by Walt Whitman really, the essential principle is to start from wherever you are. Whitman begins one poem, 'Starting from fish-shape Paumanok, where I was born . . .' You begin by looking out the window, walking out the door. Whatever is immediately around you is where you begin from. Think of James Joyce and Dubliners, William Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha County, Lewis Grassic Gibbon and the Mearns of Aberdeenshire. And it does not imply sentimental attachment, blind, flag-waving loyalty or any lack of irony. Consider Edward Dorn's brilliant little poem, 'Success?':
Success? I never had to worry about success.
Coming from where I come from,
You were a success the minute you left town. Second, how should we comprehend the languages of the literature of Scotland?
The eighteenth century saw a flourishing of poetry and song in Gaelic, sometimes drawing from the same sources as James Macpherson, whose poems and stories of Finn and Ossian linked back to pre-Christian myths, but also dealing directly with contemporary events, from the Jacobite rising of 1745 to the consequences visited upon the Highlanders after Culloden in 1746, and the Highland Clearances of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Two major poems not directly related to these events but still with astonishing immediacy and vibrant attraction are 'Praise of Ben Dorain' by Donnchadh Ban Mac an t-Saoir / Duncan Ban MacIntyre (1724-1812), which describes a deer hunt across a wooded mountain, and 'The Birlinn of Clanranald' by Alasdair MacMhaighstir Alasdair / Alexander MacDonald (c.1695-c.1770), which describes a sailing ship (or birlinn) crossing through a storm on a journey from Scotland to Ireland. Both these major works draw on the Gaelic tradition of both Scotland and Ireland, but there are also influences and affinities with English-language poems such as James Thomson's The Seasons (1730) and the Scots-language poems and songs of Robert Burns and others. So let me suggest that the name of Robert Burns should never be mentioned without in the same breath acknowledging the greatness of his contemporaries writing in Gaelic, his great predecessors in the Scots language, Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson, and the English-language dominated writings of the Enlightenment, which preceded and continued through his lifetime.

Third, let me invite you to consider two paintings of the capital city of our ancient nation. First, a work dated from 1825 by Alexander Nasmyth (1758-1840):

Alexander Nasmyth, 'Princes Street with the Commencement of the Building of the Royal Institution': Scottish National Gallery

Nasmyth's painting depicts a bright, bustling city, full of progressive commercial activity and prospects. It is a painting about draining away the past and building for the future. The view is from the north-west of the city, looking south-east, but almost everything in the picture is coming towards you, riding, walking, under construction, promising to become more than it already is. The fresh-fronted facade of the New Town smiles on the left, Princes Street - Edinburgh's main street for fashionable and expensive shopping - and all the prosperous people moving along it, in carriages or on foot, fashionable and well-dressed - charges out of the horizon and into the foreground. On the right, the Royal Institution is under construction. Later this building was home to the Royal Scottish Academy and now it is called the National Gallery of Scotland. The classical columns going up to proclaim the antiquity of the pedigree of new Edinburgh's quality. In the middle distance, the bed of the Nor' Loch is being excavated to make way for the railway: the industrial revolution is coming and the trains with it, and with them, Waverley Station at the end of the line, another monument to Walter Scott. But as the painting slopes uphill to the horizon, the Old Town is visible as a misty, receding, far-away place, and the Castle - surely Edinburgh's most distinctive landmark - is placed beyond the scope of the canvas, literally outside the frame. The painting was completed in 1825. It tells us that the ancient, pre-Union, walled city capital belongs in the past. The present and future is being celebrated. The painting is wonderfully confident, positive, clever and purposeful. It might even be predicting its own longevity in that the Royal Institution, depicted in the early stages of being built, is now connected to the National Gallery of Scotland, whose foundation stone was laid in 1850 by Prince Albert and which was opened to the public in 1859. Both were designed by William Henry Playfair (1790-1857), and the building you see in the painting was opened first, in 1826. You can walk between these columns, through the doors, and find this painting in the collection there. So the art gallery seen under construction in the painting came to be its own sheltering location. The prosperity and progressiveness the painting celebrates also holds forth the promise of its own preservation.

Compare it with a painting of almost exactly a hundred years later: 'Edinburgh (from Salisbury Crags)', by William Crozier (1893-1930).

William Crozier, 'Edinburgh (from Salisbury Crags)': Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art

This dates from 1927, so it is centrally located in the decade of the Scottish Renaissance. Crozier's painting looks from a position diagonally opposite to Nasmyth, from southeast of the city looking northwest. As you look over the roofs from Salisbury Crags, it is as if what is depicted is not receding so much as rising and turning back to meet you. You look over the roofs of the Old Town and the Castle rises above, looking west but also strangely looking over its shoulder back at you as well. This is a painting about the present impact and immediate relevance of the past. Curiously, it is full of houses but there are no people prominently visible. One imagines a population - not only the people in Nasmyth's painting - shoppers, artisan builders, investors, engineers, professionals and commercial classes - but residents, working people, people who inhabited these buildings, this piece of territory, in histories other than the present, where the very economic structure was different. It is a reminder that the way people are changes in history.

It is painted in a manner which is not Cubist but is certainly aware of Cubism. Crozier has surely been looking at paintings by Cézanne. In other words, he is choosing to paint the Old Town of Edinburgh using emphatically modern techniques. The colours are too dark to evoke a sentimental 'golden glow' - the lines are hard, the tones are not soft - but there is an inviting demonstration of curiosity about the maze-like design of the structures. The affinities with the work of, for example, F. G. Scott in music and Hugh MacDiarmid in poetry should be clear. Both Scott in songs and MacDiarmid in poems, in the 1920s, catch an idiom of pre-Enlightenment vernacular liveliness, linked to ballad metres, the Scots language, qualities of tenderness and eerie, unearthly effects of light and shadow. Similarly, Crozier is indicating a way back behind the Industrial Revolution, behind Romanticism and behind the Enlightenment, to a Scotland that existed before the Union of the Parliaments in 1707 and before the Union of the Crowns in 1603. It is anti-nostalgic, however. It does not propose a return to the past but rather a deepened occupation of present and future.

These paintings highlight a contrast that takes place within a fabric woven of national traditions. People are being represented in different ways. The direct and immediate correlations between social organisation, hierarchy and morality, painting, music, language, speech and literary art is unmistakeably vital in Scottish cultural production, and this is as true today as it ever was.

In 2010, the Scottish Government commissioned a formal report from a Working Group on Scottish Literature chaired by the writer and journalist Rosemary Goring. With regard to the place of Scottish literature in our education curriculum, the advice was firm. Let me quote directly. The report states:
Access to Scottish literature should be an integral part of the education process from the earliest stages, and not something only tackled as pupils approach exams. This should be seen as every pupil's right, giving them an insight into their cultural heritage, and allowing them to hear voices from their own background - or very different - who convey Scotland's distinctive history, outlook and values . . .
. . . On an official level, we would like to see the introduction of a mandatory examination question on Scottish Literature in the Higher examination syllabus. In England, Northern Ireland and Wales, national literature is a compulsory part of the curriculum, and it is hard to see why this is not the case in Scotland. Although Scottish teachers have every chance to teach Scottish literature should they wish, it is very much left to individual teachers' experience and preference whether or not this happens. We believe that it should not be an optional element, but compulsory. It seems remarkable that this recommendation had to be made at all, and that it was not acted upon immediately. It had already been made, more than once. In a letter published in The Herald on 29 November 2007, written when I was President of the ASLS, I said this: We believe that Scottish literature should be securely embedded throughout the curriculum - not to the exclusion of other great literatures in English or other languages or in translation, but as central to any study of literature in this country.
The appreciation of our literature should not simply depend on particular annual occasions such as St Andrew's Day or Burns' Night, but should sample a continuous, developing resource, which runs from St Columba through the great poetry of Barbour, Blind Harry, Henryson, Dunbar and Douglas, to David Lyndsay's great play on the eve of the Reformation. It can draw upon our ballads and folk tales.
It can introduce our young people to Ramsay, Fergusson and Burns, Duncan Ban MacIntyre and Alasdair MacMhaighstir Alasdair, Mary Macpherson, Walter Scott, James Hogg and Margaret Oliphant, to George Douglas Brown and John Davidson, Hugh MacDiarmid, Edwin Morgan and Liz Lochhead, and a host of other writers who probe human potential in all its variety in Scotland.
In some respects, our literature is more vulnerable to neglect or diminishment than our history, as one of our languages - Scots - is still often thought of as 'merely bad English'. Yet Scots is the language of a great literature and the daily speech of most people in Scotland. Appropriate attention to our literature empowers a validation of that speech.
Exploring our literature is an introduction to a range of areas of human experience and is an irreplaceable basis for sympathetic understanding, individual confidence, a sense of social engagement and intellectual stimulation. These fully address the 'four capacities' endorsed in the Government's Curriculum for Excellence. A familiar idea is that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy but I've never liked that much. It smacks of Fascism, the rule of might. Rather, say this: A language is a dialect with a literature. Scots has that all right.
And in an article I wrote for The Herald published on 13 March 2007, I wrote this:
A decade ago pupils were required to answer a compulsory exam question on Scottish literature. The only way to ensure people study a subject is to assess it. Meanwhile, teachers need a qualification to teach it. There should be a recognised foundation qualification for teachers of literature to give them an experience of great books. Until we get a generation of teachers coming through who are confident with the material, little will change. This article is intended to help make that change. When I worked in New Zealand, we had a visit from the President of Ireland, Mary Robinson. The line she delivered then has haunted me ever since: The arts are the genius of your country. And education is the key with which to unlock the door.
Copyright © Alan Riach 2011
Last updated 14 October 2014.

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Home > Publications > Periodicals > ScotLit > Why Study Scottish Literature? Let me begin with an idea suggested by the words with which Alasdair Gray begins to draw his great novel Lanark to a close: I started making maps when I was small Showing place, resources, where the enemy And where love lay.

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The Essential Role of Storytelling in the Search for Truth - Scientific American Blog Network

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The Essential Role of Storytelling in the Search for Truth - Scientific American Blog Network

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The work of public health is based on scientific evidence. We have real data on risks from gun violence to antibiotic resistance to addiction. However, even as the data accumulates, public trust in experts is on the decline. The research of Yale professor Dan Kahan suggests that our understanding of basic facts about politicized science issues depends on whether or not we trust the person conveying them. And in the decision to trust a source, objective expertise appears to matter less than the determination that this person shares our beliefs, assumptions and suspicions, that they are, in a sense, a member of our tribe. Scientific cherry-picking is not the exclusive domain of the rural, the non-college educated, or the religious. Kahan found that highly educated people with advanced reasoning skills were the most adept at filtering out evidence that contradicted their cultural predispositions.

I teach storytelling in public health at the University of Missouri. While many of my colleagues in journalism meet the fake news challenge by doubling down on objectivity, I urge my students to get more subjective with the stories they tell. As trust in experts declines, authenticity and personal connection matter more. And where does authenticity come from, anyway?

Human beings are primed to tell stories but also to listen for the person behind a story being told. Storytelling, whether it's reporting the news or writing a memoir, involves the active selection and ordering of some information and the omission of other information. Principles of selection inform what questions we ask and which answers we might receive. This directing, ordering and selecting reflects a human consciousness at work, a person with beliefs, assumptions and suspicions.

Being in the presence of that consciousness is one of the great pleasures of reading literature. Years ago at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Frank Conroy used to tell his students that the reason we love stories is that we long to be accompanied. When readers are told that the perspective of the person telling the story doesn't matter because the story consists of objective facts, they increasingly suspect they are being lied to. This suspicion is often disarmed when they believe they are being spoken to by a real human being. My friend's sister, for example, discounts NPR news in its entirety but is addicted to This American Life.

So, when one of my students wanted to research how immigrant children become "language brokers" for their parents, such as a child who was pulled out of history class to go to the hospital and explain to her father that he'd had a heart attack, I asked her to explore both why we should care as a society but also, why she cared. Her finished piece included both statistics about immigration trends, and translation services, but also some honest reflection about her own point of view. An Argentinian who came to the U.S. for graduate school, she wondered how her childhood might have been different if she had immigrated with her family. In her research she found that language brokering could undermine parental authority; might that have happened to the parents she had been raised to respect?

If we are willing to entertain the idea that both sides of the equation-the journalists or academics presenting their findings and the public that increasingly doesn't trust or believe them-belong to groups with often differing beliefs, assumptions and suspicions, then telling stories about science and people and events, in short the world we live in, becomes an exercise in cross-cultural communication.

The demands of that exercise can't get much more high stakes then in the case of young American soldiers deployed to Afghanistan. In their research into cultural sense making, Louise Rasmussen, Winston Sieck and Joyce Oslund used a specific scenario-a Mullah who is working with Americans to distribute relief supplies and is discovered to have set aside a truck load of those supplies-to investigate how soldiers put facts together into a story and the implications for conflict.

They were able to categorize soldiers by the kind of questions they asked about the scenario. The least prepared were those who concluded quickly a crime had been committed and whose questions were aimed at determining its severity. They asked, for example, how much material the Mullah set aside. The second category accepted that their usual "perspective, viewpoint or framework," did not apply in this situation. Their questions focused on meaning and interpretation, rather than facts. They asked, for example, how the Mullah made the decision to set material aside in the first place. Facts are stubborn things, it is true, but the meaning of any given set of facts is subject to interpretation. So while the data may have been generated in your lab, the task of science communication is to convey the significance of those data to the people outside of your lab-an audience that may and often does have an entirely different frame for interpreting the material you present.

In the search for truth, the investigation that an ethical memoirist undertakes-examining both verifiable facts as well as potentially distorted memories and assumptions based on perspective-may often yield better results than an examination of the record alone. By better I mean both truer and more credible. In addition to revealing a person behind the facts reported-and thus the possibility for connection-the focus on transparency and framing leads to questions of the self-reflective kind.

This is important because not being believed is not the only danger that exists for a storyteller who denies that her own values, perceptions and culture are powerful influences on the story being told. The story itself is at risk. In the midst of interpretation, the teller needs to ask herself: what might I be missing here, because of who I am and what I see, that more data is not likely to reveal? As society further segments itself into political and cultural groups, it is worth remembering that academics and journalists are not immune. As our politics becomes increasingly tribal, the acknowledgement that one is first and foremost a human being may be radical indeed.

References:

Kahan, Dan M. What is the "science of science communication?" Journal of Science Communication, Vol. 14, No. 3, 2015

Rasmussen, L.J., Sieck, W.R., Osland, J. Using Cultural Models of Decision Making to Develop and Assess Cultural Sense making Competence. Chapter 8, Advances in Cross-Cultural Decision Making, edited by Dylan Schmorrow, Denise Nicholson, June 17, 2010 by CRC Press.

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The Essential Role of Storytelling in the Search for Truth

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The work of public health is based on scientific evidence. We have real data on risks from gun violence to antibiotic resistance to addiction. However, even as the data accumulates, public trust in experts is on the decline.

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How Colleges Can Teach Students to Be Good Citizens - The Chronicle of Higher Education

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How Colleges Can Teach Students to Be Good Citizens - The Chronicle of Higher Education

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How Colleges Can Teach Students to Be Good Citizens

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After a bruising presidential campaign, many colleges are devoting renewed attention to fostering civic engagement in their students.

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Research documents life impact of attending a liberal arts college

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Research documents life impact of attending a liberal arts college

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ORLANDO, Fla. -- Talk to presidents of liberal arts colleges and they are proud of how their institutions educate graduates and prepare them for life. But ask the presidents to prove that value, and many get a little less certain. Some cite surveys of alumni satisfaction or employment. Others point to famous alumni.

And, privately, many liberal arts college presidents admit that their arguments haven't been cutting it of late with prospective students and their parents (not to mention politicians), who are more likely to be swayed by the latest data on first-year salaries of graduates, surveys that seem to suggest that engineering majors will find success and humanities graduates will end up as baristas.

Richard A. Detweiler believes he has evidence -- quantifiable evidence -- that attending a liberal arts college is likely to yield numerous positive results in graduates' lifetimes, including but not limited to career and financial success. He has been giving previews of his findings for the last year. On Friday, at a gathering here of presidents of the Council of Independent Colleges, he presented details and said he believes the results have the potential to change the conversation about liberal arts colleges. He said his findings show that the key characteristics of liberal arts colleges -- in and out of the classroom -- do matter.

At the meeting, Detweiler described his project. He started by examining the mission statements of 238 liberal arts colleges, looking at what the colleges say they are trying to accomplish with regard to their students. Among the common goals given for graduates were to produce people who would continue to learn throughout their lives, make thoughtful life choices, be leaders, be professionally successful and be committed to understanding cultural life.

Then Detweiler and colleagues conducted interviews with 1,000 college graduates -- about half from liberal arts colleges and half from other institutions. The graduates were not asked about the value of their alma maters or of liberal arts education, but were asked a series of very specific questions about their experiences in college and then their experiences later in life. The graduates were a mix of those 10 to 40 years after graduation, and conclusions were drawn on liberal arts graduates vs. other graduates only when there was statistical significance for both relatively recent and older alumni. Some of the findings may be relevant to liberal arts disciplines at institutions other than liberal arts colleges, but the comparison point was for those who attended the colleges.

What Detweiler found was that graduates who reported key college experiences associated with liberal arts colleges had greater odds of measures of life success associated with the goals of liberal arts colleges. Here are some of the findings:

Graduates who reported that in college they talked with faculty members about nonacademic and academic subjects outside class were 25 to 45 percent more likely (depending on other factors) to have become leaders in their localities or professions. Those who reported discussions on issues such as peace, justice and human rights with fellow students outside class were 27 to 52 percent more likely to become leaders.

Graduates who reported that students took a large role in class discussions were 27 to 38 percent more likely to report characteristics of lifelong learners than others were. Students who reported most of their classwork was professionally oriented were less likely to become lifelong learners.

Graduates who reported that as students they discussed philosophical or ethical issues in many classes, and who took many classes in the humanities, were 25 to 60 percent more likely than others to have characteristics of altruists (volunteer involvement, giving to nonprofit groups, etc.).

Graduates who reported that as students most professors knew their first names, and that they talked regularly with faculty members about academic subjects outside class, were 32 to 90 percent more likely to report that they felt personally fulfilled in their lives. Those who reported that professors encouraged them to examine the strengths and weaknesses of one's views, and whose course work emphasized questions on which there is not necessarily a correct answer, were 25 to 40 percent more likely to report that they felt personally fulfilled.

But What About Money?
Detweiler saved for last the characteristic that gets so much attention these days, and that liberal arts college leaders fear hurts them: money. He noted that his research does back the common belief that liberal arts graduates earn less than others, but only for the first few years after graduation.

He said that his study shows a high relationship between a broad undergraduate education and financial success. Those who take more than half of their course work in subjects unrelated to their majors (a characteristics of liberal arts colleges but not professionally oriented colleges) are 31 to 72 percent more likely than others to have higher-level positions and to be earning more than $100,000 than are others.

Detweiler said that his study not only suggests that the liberal arts college experience prepares students for a life well lived, but for a life of financial success.
Preserving the Right Qualities
While Detweiler said that his data (which he hopes to turn into a book) should bolster the case for liberal arts colleges, he also said that these institutions should not rest on their laurels.

He said that he worries when he hears about colleges trying to eliminate their smallest courses or increase the average size of sections when his findings show so much positive impact from close relationships between students and faculty members.

Further, he said that the findings show why it's important for liberal arts colleges to think more than perhaps some do about what happens outside of class. And Detweiler said that too many colleges are engaged in "a facilities arms race" rather than thinking about the student experience.

Finally, he said that the challenge for liberal arts colleges is to start changing the way people talk about their institutions. "How do we communicate to others how and why this approach actually matters?" he asked.

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Research documents life impact of attending a liberal arts college

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ORLANDO, Fla. -- Talk to presidents of liberal arts colleges and they are proud of how their institutions educate graduates and prepare them for life. But ask the presidents to prove that value, and many get a little less certain. Some cite surveys of alumni satisfaction or employment.

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The Power Of Literature Against A World That Feels Toxic | Cognoscenti

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The Power Of Literature Against A World That Feels Toxic | Cognoscenti

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The Power Of Literature Against A World That Feels Toxic

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Our public language is often used to demean and distort, writes Janna Malamud Smith. But literature's truth can sustain us against dishonesty and vitriol.

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Why STEM Majors Need the Humanities - The Chronicle of Higher Education

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Why STEM Majors Need the Humanities - The Chronicle of Higher Education

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When I was a freshman, half a century ago, I asked one of my professors - an eminent mathematician named Lars Ahlfors - for advice on my academic program. As a budding mathematician, I knew about a lot of math courses I should take and some...

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When I was a freshman, half a century ago, I asked one of my professors - an eminent mathematician named Lars Ahlfors - for advice on my academic program. As a budding mathematician, I knew about a lot of math courses I should take and some...

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We all ask each other a lot of questions. But we should all ask one question a lot more often: "What are you reading?"

It's a simple question but a powerful one, and it can change lives.

Here's one example: I met, at a bookstore, a woman who told me that she had fallen sadly out of touch with her beloved grandson. She lived in Florida. He...

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We all ask each other a lot of questions. But we should all ask one question a lot more often: "What are you reading?" It's a simple question but a powerful one, and it can change lives. Here's one example: I met, at a bookstore, a woman who told me that she had fallen sadly out of touch with her beloved grandson.

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Use Data to Make a Strong Case for the Humanities - The Chronicle of Higher Education

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Use Data to Make a Strong Case for the Humanities - The Chronicle of Higher Education

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Commentary

Martín Tognola for The Chronicle

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Leaders in higher education often ask us how they might make a case for the humanities, when students and parents are so deeply concerned about their economic futures. The answers lie in the very numbers that are so often cited as admonitions against...

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Use Data to Make a Strong Case for the Humanities

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Commentary Premium content for subscribers. Subscribe Today Leaders in higher education often ask us how they might make a case for the humanities, when students and parents are so deeply concerned about their economic futures. The answers lie in the very numbers that are so often cited as admonitions against...

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Without liberal arts and sciences, America's foundation crumbles | TheHill

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Without liberal arts and sciences, America's foundation crumbles | TheHill

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Two hundred and forty years ago this Monday, in the midst of the American Revolution, five college students at William & Mary met at the Raleigh Tavern in Williamsburg, Va., and founded The Phi Beta Kappa Society. They were driven by a pursuit of personal freedom, scientific inquiry, liberty of conscience, and creative endeavor through liberal education and intellectual fellowship.

These five students believed that the colonies needed new institutions, cultural as well as political, to make their nascent country great. For them, the liberal arts and sciences - the natural sciences, mathematics, social sciences, and humanities - served as both a grounding force and an elevating influence in turbulent times.

Today, there are those who have challenged the liberal arts and sciences as a pathway to the American ideals of freedom, equality, and opportunity. The pursuit of knowledge grounded in free inquiry is either dismissed as "elitist" or as "nice for those who can afford it."

On the contrary, the literacy and intellectual sophistication that underpinned the founding of our country remains essential to our future. They enable both America's external impact on the world and the internal functioning of our economy and our democracy.

America is the strongest nation in the world not just because we have had the most disciplined military and the most robust economy. We gained our position in the world from our drive to innovate, our ability to generate path-breaking ideas, and our freedom to create. The source of our creativity and innovation is an educational model justly recognized throughout the world for its excellence, openness and breadth.

Our colleges and universities receive applications from the most talented and promising students around the world. Last year our campuses educated over a million international students.

The case for studying the arts and sciences is compelling.

The arts and sciences prepare people for a lifetime of success by developing inventive employees and thoughtful, engaged citizens.

Students majoring in the liberal arts and sciences see bigger increases in "critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills" than those in other majors, as noted in Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa's " Academically Adrift." These are skills that are essential for all productive members of a modern economy, from entry level employees to the highest levels of management.

The CEOs of American Express, Bank of America, General Dynamics Corp., Logitech, Pinterest, Slack Technologies, and YouTube, among many others, all have an arts and sciences education.

An arts and sciences education also inspires students to know themselves and the world around them. This cultural and global awareness is increasingly important as our world grows more interconnected. Technological advancements will not solve our most pressing problems without a strong base of human understanding behind them.

Presenting one's own rational claims, based on provable truths, as well as being prepared to listen thoughtfully to those of others, is the hallmark of a liberal education.

As Benjamin Franklin correctly noted, ours is a republic, if we can keep it. Actively engaged citizens are a requirement for an effectively functioning democratic republic.

An engaged citizen must weigh the actual merits of an argument, not merely its emotional appeal, and take part in reasoned debate with others. With a background in the arts and sciences, people are better prepared to contribute to society, participate in our democracy, and effect positive change. Higher education increases volunteerism, political knowledge and participation, electoral turnout, and democratic attitudes.

As we undertake a consideration of investment in American infrastructure, there is no more significant investment that could be made than in our colleges and universities to further their teaching and research missions in the liberal arts and sciences.

Our first president understood the need for this investment. Almost 20 years to the day after Phi Beta Kappa's founding, in his 1796 address to Congress, President George Washington underscored the importance of the liberal arts and sciences to the country:

"The assembly to which I address myself is too enlightened not to be fully sensible how much a flourishing state of the arts and sciences contributes to national prosperity and reputation."

As a country we must re-commit ourselves to President Washington's vision, and to the values embraced by those who gathered in Williamsburg 240 years ago today: pursuit of personal freedom, scientific inquiry, liberty of conscience, and creative endeavor through liberal education and intellectual fellowship.
Frederick M. Lawrence is the Secretary/CEO of The Phi Beta Kappa Society and is the former president of Brandeis University. He is also a senior research scholar at Yale Law School. The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the views of The Hill.

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Without liberal arts and sciences, America's foundation crumbles

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Two hundred and forty years ago this Monday, in the midst of the American Revolution, five college students at William & Mary met at the Raleigh Tavern in Williamsburg, Va., and founded The Phi Beta Kappa Society. They were driven by a pursuit of personal freedom, scientific inquiry, liberty of conscience, and creative endeavor through liberal education and intellectual fellowship.

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Philosophers eager to write for popular audiences are finding readers who want answers science can't offer.

Associated Press; Wikimedia Commons; nserrano

When I was 21, I was trying to decide whether to become a doctor or a philosophy professor. My older brother, whose advice I usually followed, asked me why I wanted to study philosophy. I was evasive. Finally I admitted that a lot of the books I loved had been written by philosophers and philosophy professors. Plus, one of my favorite books at the time, a book I'd read and reread since I was a teenager, was Hermann Hesse's Magister Ludi: The Glass Bead Game, which unabashedly romanticized the life of the professor.

"Be practical. Books are dangerous things," my brother warned me. "Just because it's on paper, you think it's true. Moneylove was one of the most damaging books I ever read. Not to mention How to Win Friends & Influence People." (I should probably mention that my brother is a very successful luxury jeweler, who continues to love money and, as Dale Carnegie instructs, to "make the other person feel important-and do it sincerely.") This wasn't what I wanted to hear, so I called my dad, at that time a broke New Age guru and sex therapist living in Jupiter, Florida-not exactly the oracle of Delphi, and not someone whose advice I usually followed. "Every doctor I know is miserable, son," he told me. "They work all the time and complain about insurance companies." (Not much has changed since 1988.) "Be a professor. You'll never be rich, but you'll be doing what you love: reading and writing. You get summers off. It's a good life."

Note that my father didn't say the good life, which is how a philosophically minded adviser might have put it to me-except that philosophy in America in the 1980s and '90s seemed to be losing its way in dry, scholastic debates about the most lifeless of topics (what is the meaning of and?). But he told me what I wanted to hear, and a quarter century later, philosophy is making the kind of comeback that leaves a Hermann Hesse groupie glad to have headed for graduate school and ended up with tenure. Amid hand-wringing about the decline of the humanities, the philosopher (and novelist) Rebecca Newberger Goldstein can write a book like Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away, confident that she'll find readers eager to turn to philosophers for help in thinking about the meaning of life and how best to live it. Books like Sarah Bakewell's wildly popular study of Montaigne, How to Live, and the successful New York Times blog The Stone, back her up, as does the Harper's column Ars Philosopha (full disclosure: I am a frequent contributor to the last).

We are deluged with information; the scientific method produces new discoveries every day. But what does all that mean for us?

But Goldstein wisely doesn't take philosophy's revival for granted in a culture committed to an increasingly materialistic worldview-materialistic in the philosophical sense, meaning convinced that the scientific study of matter in motion holds the answers to all our questions. The impetus for Goldstein's ingenious, entertaining, and challenging new book is the theoretical version of the very practical problem I confronted when I graduated from college: Now that we have science, do we really need philosophy? Doesn't science "bake bread" (not to mention make money) in a way that philosophy never has? Science is responsible for the grand upward march of civilization-so we are often told-but what accomplishments can philosophy claim?

In praise of Plato, the 20th-century philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once wrote, "The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato." But this, as Goldstein points out, is precisely what might make us worry about philosophy as a discipline:

Those predisposed to dismiss philosophy-some of my best friends-might hear in Whitehead's kudos to Plato a well-aimed jeer at philosophy's expense. That an ancient Greek could still command contemporary relevance, much less the supremacy Whitehead claimed for him, does not speak well for the field's rate of progress.

Or does it? The question that Goldstein's book sets out to consider is what we mean by progress, and also what we mean by meaning. Her goal is to do more than prove how relevant philosophy still is. She aims to reveal how many of our most pressing questions simply aren't better answered elsewhere. Much of what we take for progress delivers answers that miss the point, distort issues, ignore complications, and may be generated by badly formulated questions in the first place. Goldstein also wants to show us that figuring out how to live a meaningful life is something very different from understanding the meaning of special relativity or evolution. We are deluged with information; we know how to track down facts in seconds; the scientific method produces new discoveries every day. But what does all that mean for us? As the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard observed:

Whatever the one generation may learn from the other, that which is genuinely human no generation learns from the foregoing ... Thus, no generation has learned from another to love, no generation begins at any other point than at the beginning, no generation has a shorter task assigned to it than had the previous generation.

Another way to put it might be that every generation could use a Plato to tackle those genuinely human lessons. That is the creative, verging on wacky, premise that has inspired Goldstein's approach to demonstrating why philosophy won't (and had better not) go away. She transports Plato into the 21st century and, adopting his own preferred literary form, puts him into fictional dialogue with a variety of contemporary characters. As Socrates was for Plato-the great philosophical interlocutor, living in literary form-so Plato becomes for Goldstein. She ratchets up the entertainment value (this isn't ancient Athens!), eager for drama and topical issues. Plato is put through his paces with an array of in-your-face conversation partners, from a smart if smarmy young employee at Google, to several experts on child-rearing, to a "no-bull" cable-TV talking head, to a neuroscientist. This sounds dangerously facile and cute, but Goldstein mostly pulls it off, cleverly weaving passages directly from Plato's dialogues into her own.

Goldstein's Plato, like Socrates before him, is less interested in teaching those with whom he converses than he is in helping them see that they don't know what they think they know. In sending Plato to Google, Goldstein deftly exposes the conceptual presumption at the heart of what looks like the latest high-tech methodology. On his visit with the new masters of gathering human knowledge, Plato considers a (fictional) algorithm they have developed called the Ethical Answers Search Engine, or EASE, which does just what its name suggests: it crowdsources answers to ethical problems, the same way businesses now employ crowdsourcing to predict political outcomes and stock-market fluctuations, or to select marketing strategies.

But ethical solutions are not as, well, easy as the search engine might have its users believe. Plato points out that EASE uses a preferential ordering system, so its designers have already begged the philosophical question: they have built into their design their own ideas about what the good life looks like. Furthermore, EASE assumes that the crowd will collectively possess greater knowledge about moral matters than an expert will-but when it comes to the hardest questions, is that the case? After all, most of us would admit we don't know what the good life is-that's why we turn to philosophers-so why would we trust a crowd of strangers who are likely just as confused about morality as we are?

Philosophy, at its best, probably doesn't have to progress that much, because the most-difficult and most-important human problems don't change that much.

Plato certainly did not think the crowd was a reliable source of ethical insight. It was the crowd, after all, who put Socrates to death. And one of Socrates's favorite moves in Plato's dialogues is to expose moral amateurism for the confused amalgam it is. Plato never managed to say exactly what counted as ethical expertise, but in Theaetetus and elsewhere, he has Socrates successfully undermine the moral relativism that was as popular and incoherent in fourth-century-B.C. Athens as it is today. In a similar spirit, Goldstein has Plato reduce his Google interlocutor to a sweaty, defensive mess after 30 or so pages. The whiz kid realizes that behind his clear-cut, EASE-derived answers lie dilemmas that demand a kind of pondering his sorting program can't begin to manage. At one point, for example, Plato's media escort remarks, "We don't do slavery," a view that any crowdsourcing approach would endorse. EASE might get it right sometimes: the moral prohibition against slavery that emerged in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries is surely an example of philosophical progress. But EASE can't explain why it gets it right. And we expect more from truth than just collective agreement-because we often collectively agree in morally mistaken ways.

Like Socrates in the dialogues, Plato emerges from the Googleplex unflustered, looking "more than ever like he was carved in marble, sitting so still and staring so intently," eager to investigate further. At first it struck me as odd that Goldstein's Plato didn't experience more culture shock in his American travels, but his aplomb is crucial to the point she's trying to make-which echoes Kierkegaard's. Philosophy, at its best, probably doesn't have to progress that much, because the most-difficult and most-important human problems don't change that much. The quest for answers bumps up against obstacles that don't seem to diminish. And now as ever, the quest benefits from-as Goldstein's Plato says, cribbing from Meno when he joins a panel discussion on the topic of "How to Raise an Exceptional Child"-"the teacher who [knows] how to ask the right questions and awakens in his mind a love for the beauty of logical connections."

Goldstein, like Plato, is at her strongest when showing us that some questions just won't go away. But she's not about to deny philosophy plenty of credit for coming up with its share of answers, too-and for setting scientists on their way in searching for theirs. The list of philosophical leaps is impressive: most notable, perhaps, is the 17th-century idea of individual rights. Goldstein reminds us that virtually every scientific area of inquiry began with a question or an insight from a philosopher. Democritus proposed the atom; Ionian philosophers invented what we now think of as the scientific method; Aristotle founded biology. In mathematics and physics, she observes, the metaphysical problems considered by Plato are still being debated.

My brother was wrong, of course. Books often do tell the truth, as I learned long ago when I read Magister Ludi and was seduced by sentences like this one: "This same eternal idea, which for us has been embodied in the Glass Bead Game, has underlain every movement of Mind toward the ideal goal of a universitas litterarum, every Platonic academy ... every effort toward reconciliation between science and art or science and religion." The eternal idea here is philosophy. Goldstein is with Hermann Hesse. Philosophy doesn't merely tell us about the subjective, leaving the objective world to science. For Goldstein, who has also written splendidly on such highly abstract thinkers as Spinoza and Gödel, the finest scientific thinking will always be driven and informed by the philosophical spirit. The grand forward push of human knowledge requires each of us to begin by trying to think independently, to recognize that knowledge is more than information, to see that we are moral beings who must closely interrogate both ourselves and the world we inhabit-to live, as Socrates recommended, an examined life.

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Philosophers eager to write for popular audiences are finding readers who want answers science can't offer. When I was 21, I was trying to decide whether to become a doctor or a philosophy professor. My older brother, whose advice I usually followed, asked me why I wanted to study philosophy.

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A Liberal-Arts Education for Business Majors - The Atlantic

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A Liberal-Arts Education for Business Majors - The Atlantic

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American undergraduates are flocking to business programs, and finding plenty of entry-level opportunities. But when businesses go hunting for CEOs or managers, "they will say, a couple of decades out, that I'm looking for a liberal arts grad," said Judy Samuelson, executive director of the Aspen Institute's Business and Society Program.

That presents a growing challenge to colleges and universities. Students are clamoring for degrees that will help them secure jobs in a shifting economy, but to succeed in the long term, they'll require an education that allows them to grow, adapt, and contribute as citizens-and to build successful careers. And it's why many schools are shaking up their curricula to ensure that undergraduate business majors receive something they may not even know they need-a rigorous liberal-arts education.

They're trying to solve a rapidly growing problem. Almost one in five bachelor's degrees earned in the United States is a business degree, according to the latest statistics from the Department of Education. And that may actually understate the growth of business education-it doesn't account for undergraduate minors, nor for the students who major in economics at schools where business degrees aren't on offer. But a panel of educators moderated by Samuelson at the Aspen Ideas Festival, which is co-hosted by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic, emphasized the need to ensure that these degrees provide a robust education. (The panel was drawn from participants in the Aspen Undergraduate Business Education Consortium, an initiative that's promoting the tighter integration of the liberal arts into business curricula.)

There's good reason for their concern. Put simply, business majors seem to be graduating with some of the technical skills they'll need to secure jobs, but without having made the gains in writing or critical-thinking skills they'll require to succeed over the course of their careers, or to adapt as their technical skills become outdated and the nature of the opportunities they have shifts over time.

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Why America's Business Majors Are in Desperate Need of a Liberal-Arts Education

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American undergraduates are flocking to business programs, and finding plenty of entry-level opportunities. But when businesses go hunting for CEOs or managers, "they will say, a couple of decades out, that I'm looking for a liberal arts grad," said Judy Samuelson, executive director of the Aspen Institute's Business and Society Program.

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Examining art’s role in advancing disability rights | University Affairs

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Examining art’s role in advancing disability rights | University Affairs

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Ryerson's Eliza Chandler looks for what culture can do for disability that legislation can't.

"We typically tolerate disability. That's the capacity of legislation, to tolerate disabled people," says Eliza Chandler, speaking to the limits of the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act. While the aim of the AODA is to help make public buildings and businesses more accessible, Dr. Chandler's teaching practice and research as an assistant professor at Ryerson University's school of disability studies is more interested in the ways cultural production furthers disability rights. "We need access to art galleries, and art studios, access to being understood as desirable, sexual - all of these things that can't be protected by a human rights framework," she says.

As an artist, Dr. Chandler says she didn't always make the connection between her own disability and her practice. She says not articulating that connection during her studies in film and sculpture at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design put limitations on the kinds of work she could produce. It wasn't until she moved to Toronto in 2001, and found the Abilities Arts Festival (now called Tangled Art + Disability) that the connection became clearer.

Tangled is a disability-led initiative to mobilize the disability arts community in Toronto. Dr. Chandler says it opened her up to the creative and cultural benefits of a disability aesthetic, both in her work and in the work of others. She describes the aesthetic as "[inviting] us to be satiated by the differences disability brings. If you as the audience are compelled, intrigued, interested, curious or made uncomfortable by it [disability art], then that changes understanding and can lead us from tolerating disabled people to desiring."

Dr. Chandler continued her studies, getting a PhD in social justice education at the University of Toronto. In 2014, she was named the Ethel Louise Armstrong Post-Doctoral Fellow at Ryerson's school of disability studies, a position created specifically for a disabled woman. That same year she became artistic director at Tangled (a post she held until she joined Ryerson's faculty full-time this past fall).

As a grad student, Dr. Chandler's growing interest in the local disability arts community led to working with Carla Rice, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Care, Gender and Relationships at the University of Guelph. The initiative, called Mobilizing New Meanings of Difference in Disability, gave artists with disabilities the chance to work together in an art project that challenged the dominant medical conceptualizations of disability. She has paired up with Dr. Rice again to co-direct Bodies in Translation: Activist Art, Technology and Access to Life, a project focusing on the potential for art to disrupt conventional understandings of non-normative embodiments, including disability, deafness, madness, aging, and fatness. The project was recently awarded a $2.5-million partnership grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

Dr. Rice explains that Bodies in Translation builds on Mobilizing New Meanings of Difference in Disability. "It was through our work on that grant that Eliza and I realized we needed to scale up this initiative and be thinking more broadly about disability arts and studying [its] actual cultivation," she says.

Dr. Chandler says such research is imperative as the disability community, the body of disability art, and interest in those works are all growing rapidly. "Arts councils, galleries, theatre companies and audiences are all becoming interested in disability arts. Now more than ever it's important to reflect on where we're going, and how to maintain our politics."

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Examining art's role in advancing disability rights | University Affairs

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Ryerson's Eliza Chandler looks for what culture can do for disability that legislation can't. "We typically tolerate disability. That's the capacity of legislation, to tolerate disabled people," says Eliza Chandler, speaking to the limits of the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act.

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In difficult times, we turn to our poets | MSNBC

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In difficult times, we turn to our poets | MSNBC

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In difficult times, we turn to our poets

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For #GivingTuesday, Lawrence talks with Joyce Chisale, one of the girls in Malawi who received a KIND scholarship to finish high school and wants to be a doctor. She explains what the scholarship means to her. Also a poet, she recites her poem, "Little...

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Get the facts about humanities outcomes | EAB Daily Briefing

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Get the facts about humanities outcomes | EAB Daily Briefing

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A little over a year ago, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said in a debate: "Welders make more money than philosophers. We need more welders and less philosophers."

Rubio tapped into a national skepticism about the value of humanities degrees. Fortunately for me and my English-degree-holding fellows, the reality is that humanities majors go on to be very successful.

Data from the Census Bureau, Humanities Indicators, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), and Research Gate make a strong case for studying the humanities amidst recent rhetoric claiming the opposite.

Salary:

In 2013, the median income for humanities graduates with a bachelor's degree totaled $50,000-that's a full $15,000 higher than the median income for people without degrees, which was $35,000.

42.5% of humanities majors go on to get advanced degrees, compared with 36.3% of all graduates with a bachelor's degree, and their advanced education resulted in a 42% median earnings increase in 2013.

The income gap between humanities majors and other majors narrows as workers gain more experience.

Employment:

The unemployment rate for humanities graduates with terminal bachelor's degrees in 2013 was 5.4%, compared with 7.2% for graduates without degrees.

Medical students who study humanities-art history, in particular-go on to become better diagnosticians than their peers.

Happiness:

Nearly 90% of humanities majors report being satisfied with their jobs after 10 years, and 80% are pleased with the opportunities to use their education in their jobs. It's worth noting that education majors were most satisfied with their jobs out of all majors studied.

EAB Managing Director David Attis recently argued in eCampusNews that "Humanities majors are just as prepared to succeed in the workforce as their business major counterparts, although they tend to opt for less lucrative careers."

Attis says, "The skills that employers seek in candidates are often cultivated by a liberal arts education, such as problem solving, teamwork, and oral and written communication." There's data to support that, too-according to a report from the Pew Research center, employers want well-rounded candidates with soft skills. In 2015, there [were] more than 90 million jobs that require social skills.
Read more of Attis' defense
Writing for the Chronicle of Higher Education, Humanities Indicators principal investigators Norman Bradburn and Robert Townsend concluded, "The evidence is clear-majoring in the humanities is not a path to poverty" (Bradburn/Townsend, Chronicle of Higher Education, 11/27).
How to reclaim the value of the liberal arts for the 21st century

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A little over a year ago, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said in a debate: "Welders make more money than philosophers. We need more welders and less philosophers." Rubio tapped into a national skepticism about the value of humanities degrees. Fortunately for me and my English-degree-holding fellows, the reality is that humanities majors go on to be very successful.

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In the "hell" of incarceration, Cristina Domenech finds the raw material for poetry.

"It's said that to be a poet, you have to go to hell and back," says Cristina Domenech, who teaches poetry to prisoners. "They have plenty of hell," she says. "Plenty of hell." Domenech (TEDxRiodelaPlata talk: Poetry that frees the soul) runs a poetry writing workshop for the inmates at Unit 48 penitentiary in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Prisoners make for eager poetry students, she says, precisely because self-expression is so rarely practiced behind bars. She helps them to open up about their experiences and find a psychic escape from their confinement through the freedom of the written word.

Poetry is an outlet for unspoken thoughts. Domenech wondered why prisoners wanted to attend a writing class in the first place, so she asked them. "They told me they wanted to put on paper all that they couldn't say and do," she recalls. The restrictions that they were referring to were not just just physical, she learned, but psychological as well. "In prison, you can't dream," she says. "In prison, you can't cry. There are words that are virtually forbidden, like the word 'time,' the word 'future,' the word 'wish.'" In those stifled thoughts, Domenech saw the raw materials for poetry. "I gave them a moment of silence, then said, 'That's what poetry is, you guys. It's in this prison universe that you have all around you. Everything you say about how you never sleep, it exudes fear. All the things that go unwritten - all of that is poetry." There was just one catch. "Nobody had a clue what poetry really was."

To write poetry, read, read and read some more. Domenech assigned the prisoners a steady regimen of reading assignments. They began with short poems, which Domenech selected to show how a few words could alter their perspectives. "By reading such short poems, they all began to realize that what the poetic language did was to break a certain logic and create another system. Breaking the logic of language also breaks the logic of the system under which they've learned to respond." It dawned on her students that they too could break the unspoken logic of the prison system, which had conditioned them into a state of cowed silence. "So a new system appeared," Domenech says, "new rules that made them understand very quickly - very quickly - that with poetic language they would be able to say absolutely whatever they wanted."

The irrepressible pleasure of thinking freely. "Freedom is possible even inside a prison," Domenech insists. "The only bars we have in our wonderful [classroom] is the word 'bars.'" But first her students had to grope for words that would give meaning to the aimless experience of confinement. "We started appropriating that hell," she says, "We plunged ourselves, headfirst, into the seventh circle. And in that seventh circle of hell, our very own, beloved circle, they learned that they could make the walls invisible, that they could make the windows yell, and that we could hide inside the shadows." The words they found astounded Domenech. "I remember a verse by a tremendous poet," she says, "a great poet, from our Unit 48 workshop, Nicolás Dorado: 'I will need an infinite thread to sew up this huge wound.'"

In freedom, there is dignity. At the end of her course, she invited her students to read their poems aloud to a gathering of inmates, family and friends. It was an emotional moment. "Those men, some of them just huge when standing next to me, or the young boys - so young, but with an enormous pride - held their papers and trembled like little kids and sweated, and read their poems with their voices completely broken," Domenech says. " What I see week after week, is how they're turning into different people; how they're being transformed. How words are empowering them with a dignity they had never known, that they couldn't even imagine. They had no idea such dignity could come from them."
Illustration by Hannah K. Lee for TED.

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"It's said that to be a poet, you have to go to hell and back," says Cristina Domenech, who teaches poetry to prisoners. "They have plenty of hell," she says. "Plenty of hell." Domenech (TEDxRiodelaPlata talk: Poetry that frees the soul) runs a poetry writing workshop for the inmates at Unit 48 penitentiary in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

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Together, Art And Science Can Help Build An Understanding Of Transgender Struggles : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR

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Together, Art And Science Can Help Build An Understanding Of Transgender Struggles : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR

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For 13 minutes last Friday, I was entranced listening to the Moth Radio Hour when attorney, husband and father Chris Gilbert spoke about his son Brody. (Gilbert's segment starts at about 36:30.)

As a kindergartner, Brody - who at birth was assigned female status and named Amelia - started to identify as a boy. Gilbert and his wife knew this, but they didn't think their child's school did. When the school called home to request a parental meeting in two weeks, Gilbert spun into sustained anxiety, even fear, about what would happen - and about how he could protect his child the way that would be necessary.

On the appointed day, the kindergarten teacher, with an array of other school staff in the room said, with tears in her eyes, to Gilbert: "Tell us what you want to do. You have a beautiful child and we are here to do whatever you need us to do."

How beautifully human! From that point forward, Brody was Brody at school (as he was also at home). He lined up with the boys and he used the boys' bathroom.

Gilbert sought his son's legal name change, which went smoothly. He eloquently describes his pride in his son and his gratitude for the school's response and the judge's as well.

But Gilbert also takes pains to say that he feels guilt, because he knows his family's story is not typical. Many transgender kids don't have it so easy. This fact I know from living in the Virginia county where a brave teenager, Gavin Grimm, seeks the same right as Brody: to be the boy he is at our local high school, and to use the boys' bathroom there - and, in response, i s taunted as "a girl" and "a freak" by some adults in my community.

In fact, the rates of violence against trans people generally are disproportionately high - and against trans women and trans people of color, highest of all.

The day after I heard Gilbert on the radio, I screened the Swedish film , directed by Alexandra-Therese Keining and based on the novel by Jessica Schiefuerm. The film was released in the U.S. on DVD and Video on Demand Tuesday.

is a compelling and, at times, heartbreaking drama about the fluidity of gender, and the costs to children who express that fluidity. Though fictional - and even including elements of the supernatural - it embodies the reality of how tough trans life can be.

The movie's central character is 14-year-old Kim. We first meet Kim as a girl who struggles with her gender identity. We, the audience, understand that she longs to be a boy - or, as I might put it, she is becoming a boy who longs to be recognized as one.

Along with her best girlfriends, Momo and Bella, Kim is bullied at school, sometimes violently. When the three friends drink the sap of a strange black flower, they are physically transformed into boys - a transformation that is short-lived, requires repeated sap-drinking to recur, and means something quite different to Kim than to Momo or Bella.

Kim becomes drawn more and more into the world of teenage boys, with consequences that range from the joyful to the soul-crushing. The film is melodramatic at times but, in a way, that's entirely in keeping with the turmoil of what is happening as Kim experiences what life is like as his authentic self (a boy).

At one point at school, Kim, who in this scene appears to be a girl, observes the boy Tony, with whom Kim has fallen in love. But Tony only knows Kim as a boy. Standing there as an apparent girl, Kim says with great yearning, "Can't you see that it is me?"

That line, for me, stands right at the heart of Girls Lost.

It's at the heart, too, of what Gavin Grimm asks, as he tries to go about life in high school as the boy he is.

And it's at the heart of what Chris Gilbert's son Brody, as a kindergartner, was spared from having to plead - because he has loving parents and loving teachers and school administrators. There is an example to give us all hope.

After watching the film, I emailed director Keining, who was in Morocco doing work on a future film. I asked her to tell me more about her vision for the movie.

"To me, Girls Lost is ultimately a film about the right to discover your own identity as well as sexuality," Keining wrote. "I meet many transgender teenagers and adults who are really moved by the film. They say, 'You really nailed the feeling.' Others become very curious and ask 'Where can I buy this [magical, gender-changing] plant?'"

Keining said that Girls Lost is now regularly shown in schools across Europe and Scandinavia, "helping students to discuss and understand everything from gender, to sexuality, to friendship, transgender and bullying."

So far, I've been writing here about art.

Here's what we know from anthropology and biology - that is, from science:

Sex isn't fixed into male or female polar opposites determined at birth. Many intersex people exist. Gender isn't fixed into male or female polar opposites determined at birth. There are more than two genders. Gender identity isn't determined by one's genitals or only by biological characteristics.

Here, art and science intersect powerfully. Both can be used to advocate for transgender people's human rights.

Barbara J. King is an anthropology professor emerita at the College of William and Mary. She often writes about the cognition, emotion and welfare of animals, and about biological anthropology, human evolution and gender issues. Barbara's most recent book on animals is titled How Animals Grieve, and her forthcoming book, Personalities on the Plate: The Lives and Minds of Animals We Eat, will be published in March. You can keep up with what she is thinking on Twitter: @bjkingape

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Together, Art And Science Can Help Build An Understanding Of Transgender Struggles

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For 13 minutes last Friday, I was entranced listening to the Moth Radio Hour when attorney, husband and father Chris Gilbert spoke about his son Brody. (Gilbert's segment starts at about 36:30.) As a kindergartner, Brody - who at birth was assigned female status and named Amelia - started to identify as a boy.

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Why Tech Companies Need English Majors - Business Insider

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Why Tech Companies Need English Majors - Business Insider

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Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images
It's an increasingly tired meme that we need more STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) graduates. Of course we do. Research shows we need more qualified workers to accommodate an economy that's increasingly reliant on engineering skills.

But there's something else we need: English majors. Why? Because as important as the technology is that powers our lives, businesses also depend on liberal arts-centric communicators to articulate why the technology matters.

Indeed, every technology company, and certainly every startup trying to make its imprint on the world, needs English majors. Perhaps many.

Telling Stories

I work for an engineering-driven Big Data startup, so I understand the importance of engineering and I don't for one minute doubt that Silicon Valley's war over engineering talent is justified and will only increase. Small wonder, then, that an analysis of the salaries of University of Virginia graduates found that systems engineering and computer science graduates stand to make more than twice as much as their peers studying the liberal arts.

A strong developer is worth her weight in gold, but engineering is only half the picture in any tech company, and certainly in any startup. For every company that can develop an incredible hardware or software product, there are more companies who fail in the attempt to get someone interested in buying that product.

This is why former Twitter and Google executive Santosh Jayaram told The Wall Street Journal that "English majors are exactly the people I'm looking for" in building up his startup, Daemonic Labs.

English majors, according to Jayaram, can "tell stories," which is increasingly the difference between success and failure in a startup:

"Almost anything you can imagine you can now build, so the battleground in business has shifted from engineering, which everybody can do, to storytelling, for which many fewer people have real talent."

Vivek Ranadivé, chairman and CEO of Tibco and a hardware engineer by training, concurs with Jayaram's premise, arguing that "a liberal arts degree is more of an asset than learning any trade." Why? Because such graduates are trained in communicating - in storytelling.

Quality storytelling could be the difference between getting funded or not, and getting customers...or not.

You Think Hiring Engineers Is Hard? Try Marketing

I'm very fortunate to work for an awesome company with an exceptional product. We firmly believe our product can change the way developers interact with their data.

But too often, as I regularly tell my Marketing colleagues, we tell that story "too small." We focus on features, on the "what" of our database product, and not nearly enough on the "why" behind the technology. Answering that "why" question is something English majors do very well.

Gifted with the ability to communicate through writing, English majors, too, are worth their weight in gold. However, it's surprisingly hard to find good writers.

Really, really hard.

English majors, after all, have difficulty finding their way in technology. I should know: I'm an English major. I moved to Silicon Valley in 1997 - somewhat by accident, as I was working for a large Japanese trading company. And there hasn't been a day since that I haven't felt uneasy in the engineering-centric Silicon Valley, which prizes engineering prowess over almost everything else.

So even when we English majors are among you, we try to hide the fact that we're more Ernest Hemingway than Brendan Eich. I've only recently recognized the value I bring to tech companies after literally decades of feeling self-conscious about not being an engineer.

Help Wanted: English Degree Preferred

Now that I run marketing for a software startup, the need for strong communicators is obvious to me. Blindingly so. But I still find the English majors among us don't make nearly enough of their writing skills. Just as GitHub is the new résumé for engineers, so, too, should social media and blogs be the résumé for would-be marketers. If you can write, show it.

This is why my next marketing hire might not have a traditional marketing background. I care far less about familiarity with Eloqua or other marketing automation programs and far more about the ability to construct an interesting thesis and synthesize it in a few hundred words. With so much textual communication, and so much riding on the ability to distinguish one's product through that communication, the ideal marketing candidate may look more like a technology journalist or blogger and not at all like an engineer.

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Why Every Tech Company Needs An English Major

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It's an increasingly tired meme that we need more STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) graduates. Of course we do. Research shows we need more qualified workers to accommodate an economy that's increasingly reliant on engineering skills. But there's something else we need: English majors. Why?

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Do We Need to Rescue the Humanities? - YouTube

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Do We Need to Rescue the Humanities? - YouTube

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Is America turning its back on the humanities? The evidence seems real when we see declining enrollments in the studies of arts, history, literature, language, and philosophy at colleges and universities across the country. Declining enrollments preface limited budgets for broad areas of inquiry as the promise of STEM curricula woos students to jobs and career paths.

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Here's Why You Shouldn't Write Off English Majors - Hartford Courant

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Here's Why You Shouldn't Write Off English Majors - Hartford Courant

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'Oh ... so you want to be a teacher?" There is no question more irksome, and it always comes after I confess that I'm an English major.

Some people will go on to half-jokingly say how sorry they are for me. Others, those without even the slightest social skills, will tell me a liberal arts degree is purposeless.

That's where they're wrong. The significance of a liberal arts degree is not in the specific major or concentration that a student chooses, but rather the transferable skills that are learned, refined, polished and of lifelong use in the job market. We write essays that foster our ability to analyze, evaluate and critique literature, ideas and opinions. We refuse to take information at face value and constantly rethink and question what appears as plain fact to others. We challenge what many accept without considering alternative perspectives.

This gives us the inclination to constantly pursue anything that will educate us further and allow us greater insight into the complexities of human thought and its meaning. It is what makes us innovators, not with our hands but with a much more powerful tool - our minds. We can create new meaning from the original thought of others and can intellectually and emotionally engage with text and the people who write it. The repetitive use of these skills lets us work with people of various temperaments and work ethics.

Those hundreds of essays we write nurture our ability to articulate a point of view or an argument that is clear and concise. This discipline not only makes us well-written individuals, but well-spoken ones too. Our expansive literary experience trains us to note differences in tone, writing style and diction. We intertwine words as seamlessly as basket weavers do wicker - our prose is strong, durable and carries a lot of weight.

Stephen King said writers have the ability to perform telepathy. In his memoir "On Writing," he says writers have the power to create a mental image with the use of description, storytelling and figurative language that is so vivid it exists to readers. This creates closeness between reader and writer and brings us into the same space mentally, although we may be in different locations and time periods. Writers can make our readers see our images and feel our words without ever having to open our mouths. This power is what makes our words believable; it is what makes us sound confident and authoritative.

Companies look for students who think as individuals, have a creative edge and can tailor written and verbal communication to the audience they are addressing. They value liberal arts students who have mastered many transferable skills. We can tell you what to say and how to say it so that you will secure any business deal. We can write the emails that create connections between employees and employers across different companies and industries to provide a service, receive one or come together on a collaborative project. We have a heightened sense of communication; a sixth sense that can defuse tense situations and prevent them as well.

There is more to writing essays and reading books than English majors are given credit for. They make us effective communicators, help us accept constructive criticism and foster teamwork. They make us problem solvers, teach us initiative, planning and organization and, most important, how to always keep learning.

To those who count us out and believe that we are not equally valuable as you are to employers: Keep believing that we have no secure place in the job market. Keep doubting our ability, our worth and the multitude of skills and experience that we possess. We want you to. The greatest way to beat your opponents is to never let them see you coming. So, keep on.
Melissa Rodriguez, 21, of Bloomfield is a senior majoring in English at the University of Connecticut. The Courant invites writers younger than 30 to write essays of 650 words or less containing strong views. Please email your submission to freshtalk@courant.com, with your full name, hometown, daytime phone number, age and occupation (or your school's name and your level in school). You can also fax op-eds to 860-520-6941.

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Here's Why You Shouldn't Write Off English Majors

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'Oh ... so you want to be a teacher?" There is no question more irksome, and it always comes after I confess that I'm an English major. Some people will go on to half-jokingly say how sorry they are for me. Others, those without even the slightest social skills, will tell me a liberal arts degree is purposeless.

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What I Learned from My “Liberal” Arts Education, by Emilee Rosell | Corrigan Literary Review

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What I Learned from My “Liberal” Arts Education, by Emilee Rosell | Corrigan Literary Review

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What I Learned from My "Liberal" Arts Education, by Emilee Rosell

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Corrigan's Editorial Note: Emilee Rosell took her very first (English Composition II) and very last (World Literature) college classes with me as her professor. She's now graduated with a BA in English. In this reflection essay, she looks back on what she learned in that last class, and throughout college.

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Teaching kids philosophy makes them smarter in math and English — Quartz

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Teaching kids philosophy makes them smarter in math and English — Quartz

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Schools face relentless pressure to up their offerings in the STEM fields-science, technology, engineering, and math. Few are making the case for philosophy.

Maybe they should.

Nine- and 10-year-old children in England who participated in a philosophy class once a week over the course of a year significantly boosted their math and literacy skills, with disadvantaged students showing the most significant gains, according to a large and well-designed study (pdf).

More than 3,000 kids in 48 schools across England participated in weekly discussions about concepts such as truth, justice, friendship, and knowledge, with time carved out for silent reflection, question making, question airing, and building on one another's thoughts and ideas.

Kids who took the course increased math and reading scores by the equivalent of two extra months of teaching, even though the course was not designed to improve literacy or numeracy. Children from disadvantaged backgrounds saw an even bigger leap in performance: reading skills increased by four months, math by three months, and writing by two months. Teachers also reported a beneficial impact on students' confidence and ability to listen to others.

The study was conducted by the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), a non-profit group that wants to close the gap between family income and educational attainment. The EEF tested the effectiveness of the philosophy intervention through a randomized controlled trial, similar to the way many drugs are tested.

Twenty-two schools acted as a control group, while students at the other 26 took the philosophy class (which met once a week for 40 minutes). The researchers tried to control for school quality: in each one, at least a quarter of students received free lunch and many had significant populations performing below grade level.

The beneficial effects of philosophy lasted for two years, with the intervention group continuing to outperform the control group long after the classes had finished. "They had been given new ways of thinking and expressing themselves,"said Kevan Collins, chief executive of the EEF. "They had been thinking with more logic and more connected ideas."

England is not the first country to experiment with teaching kids philosophy. The program the EEF used, called P4C (philosophy for children), was designed by professor Matthew Lippman in New Jersey in the 1970s to teach thinking skills through philosophical dialog. In 1992, the Society for the Advancement of Philosophical Enquiry and Reflection in Education ( SAPERE) was set up in the UK to emulate that work. P4C has been adopted by schools in 60 countries.

SAPERE's program does not focus on reading the texts of Plato and Kant, but rather stories, poems, or film clips that prompt discussions about philosophical issues. The goal is to help children reason, formulate and ask questions, engage in constructive conversation, and develop arguments.

Collins hopes the latest evidence will convince heads of schools, who have significantly more power in the UK than in the US, to make room for philosophy in their budgets. The program costs schools £16 ($23) per student to run.

Programs like this "push you toward teaching up, not down, to disadvantaged children," Collins told Quartz. "It's not a reductionist, narrow curriculum, but an expansionist broad curriculum."

According to the EEF, 63% of British 15-year-olds achieve good results on exams, compared with 37% of disadvantaged students. The group hopes that by using evidence-based research and randomized controlled trials, schools will adopt the most effective policies to address the disparity.

Socrates said that "true knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing." But to close the gap in education outcomes, some teachers seem to believe that philosophy has an important role to play.

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Teaching kids philosophy makes them smarter in math and English

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Schools face relentless pressure to up their offerings in the STEM fields-science, technology, engineering, and math. Few are making the case for philosophy. Maybe they should. Nine- and 10-year-old children in England who participated in a philosophy class once a week over the course of a year significantly boosted their math and literacy skills, with...

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USC president's aim in teaching a classics course is to 'light a fire' for humanities - LA Times

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USC president's aim in teaching a classics course is to 'light a fire' for humanities - LA Times

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C.L. Max Nikias hasn't taught a full-time course since becoming USC's president nearly six years ago.

But in his return to the classroom this semester, the former electrical engineer didn't focus on circuits or radar but on the ethical implications of the Greek tragedy "Antigone," demonstrating how one character in the play delivers a fatal, self-inflicted wound.

"The bloodiest way to commit suicide is to drive a sword into your liver," he said, plunging a fake blade into the left side of his abdomen.

The macabre presentation reflected Nikias' personal obsession with the classics. But more broadly, it was a display of his determination to boost interest in the humanities at a university best known for its business and film schools, not to mention football program.

USC has avoided the trend. The percentage of undergraduates majoring in humanities held steady at about 6% over the last five years, and this year's 25 classic majors mark a recent high. But Nikias said he would like to see those numbers increase.

"Humanities teach you to read and to think and to self-teach, which are the most important things," Nikias said. "I want to see if I can light a fire in the students myself."

Nikias' love of the classics began when he was age 10, after his godfather took him to see a staging of "Oedipus Rex" in Greek at a theater in his native Cyprus, a Mediterranean island with large ethnic Greek and Turkish populations. On the way to the show, Nikias' godfather told him the entire story of the Sophocles tragedy of the king of Thebes who would kill his father and marry his mother.

"It's not about being surprised by the plot, it was about the lessons and tensions in the play," Nikias said. "I became very passionate about them, and once you get [interested] at that age, it never leaves you.

Nikias earned his undergraduate degree from the National Technical University of Athens, and master's and doctorate degrees from the State University of New York at Buffalo, all in engineering. But he kept up with his interest in the classics, rereading many of them each year and filling book shelves with critical studies of the plays. He even watched Spike Lee's latest film, "Chi-Raq," because it was based on the Greek comedy "Lysistrata."

Another reason to watch the movie: "Spike is a big USC football fan," Nikias said.

Sixty-four students applied for the 30 slots in the class, which is restricted to freshmen and sophomores. Many students said they were excited to take a class with Nikias. But at the beginning of a recent class, the undergraduates seemed almost shy. No one dared to check his Instagram account or pull out her laptop.

"Nobody told us we couldn't, it's just that you want to bring your A-game to a class being taught by the school president," said Benjamin Williams, a sophomore.

Nikias stood at the front of the classroom, his sleeves rolled up, lecturing on his favorite play, "Antigone," the story of a princess who disobeys her uncle, coaxing students to read parts. "I need a Antigone, I need a chorus," he said.

The students were fully engaged, debating the importance of order in society and the obligations of family, as Nikias paced in front of the classroom, chewing on his eyeglass frames and occasionally offering his opinions.

He is drawn to Antigone, he said, because the main character is willing to stand up for herself, albeit with tragic results. (Spoiler alert: Just because you're the title character doesn't mean you live).

"I'm fascinated [the playwright Sophocles] chose a woman as a hero in a male-dominated society," Nikias said.

He said he sees parallels between Antigone's attitudes and modern life. When students protested outside his office last fall, Nikias said he was actually pleased.

"They're all Antigones," he told the class.

Nikias and the students have grown more comfortable in their exchanges. When discussing "Oedipus Rex," Nikias playfully rolled his eyes when asking students if they believed one of Habinek's interpretations of the tragedy.

Habinek suggested that Oedipus didn't actually kill his father and only confessed to the deed as a way to protect his plague-cursed kingdom from further punishment, a theory Nikias doesn't subscribe to. "He did it," Nikias said.

Sophomore Joseph Bae was emboldened to challenge Nikias, arguing that Habinek's position was valid.

Bae later said he might have been too shy to speak in front of the president earlier in the semester. "There was a little worry that you'd say something dumb, but now if I have a question, I'll ask it."

The course, he said, has broadened his perspective and stoked interest in taking more humanities courses, probably philosophy.

"I really like that there are two sides to everything," Bae said. "It's not like an organic chemistry class where there's just one answer."

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USC president's aim in teaching a classics course is to 'light a fire' for humanities

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C.L. Max Nikias hasn't taught a full-time course since becoming USC's president nearly six years ago. But in his return to the classroom this semester, the former electrical engineer didn't focus on circuits or radar but on the ethical implications of the Greek tragedy "Antigone," demonstrating how one character in the play delivers a fatal, self-inflicted wound.

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From Elon Musk’s love of “Hitchhiker’s” to Mark Zuckerberg’s fondness for Greek epics, literature directly inspires innovative technology — Quartz

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From Elon Musk’s love of “Hitchhiker’s” to Mark Zuckerberg’s fondness for Greek epics, literature directly inspires innovative technology — Quartz

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Mark Twain is best known for all-American novels like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. But he was also a forward-thinking futurist. Back in 1898, in his short story From The London Times, Twain described a gadget called the Telelectroscope-a "limitless-distance" telephone that connected people around the globe. "By grace of this marvelous instrument he was almost as free as the birds of the air... Now and then I would hear him say, 'Give me Hong-Kong'; next, 'Give me Melbourne' ... Sometimes the talk that came from those far regions through the microphone attachment interested me, and I listened."

Indeed, when it comes to technology, reality often plays catch-up to fiction. So it should come as no surprise that some of the people responsible for the greatest technological strides of the past decades cite literature as a source of inspiration. Here are a few of the books that have fired up the imaginations of our biggest innovators and fed their ambition to transform the world.

Dial F For Frankenstein

Internet inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee drew his inspiration from science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, who coined the famous quote "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" and described satellites in such detail he could have patented the idea 20 years before they became reality. Clarke's story Dial F For Frankenstein, s et in 1975, describes an automatic telephone exchange system with the equivalent number of switches as there are neurons in the human brain.

Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg reads a lot-in 2015, he even fit reading a book every two weeks in around his rather packed schedule. But his choice of favorite tome might raise a few eyebrows: by Virgil. It recounts Aeneas' quest after he escapes the ruins of Troy to build a city that "knows no boundaries in time and greatness." Some might say that his empire-building tendencies could have its roots in his penchant for Ancient Roman classics.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin named Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash as one of his favorite novels, and other tech innovators cite it as having directly inspired the development of Google Earth. He's not the only one to have been inspired by the 1992 novel and its description of online social networks and virtual worlds: Second Life creator Philip Rosedale is also a fan, and the platform's users routinely using the novel's term "the Metaverse" to describe S econd L ife. (In the book, the term describes a virtual-reality-based internet much like Rosedale's latest VR project, High Fidelity.) Appropriately, Stephenson is currently the " chief futurist " at mixed-reality (MR) company Magic Leap.

You might not have heard of Jack Cover, but you will be familiar with his most famous invention: the Taser. The NASA researcher was inspired to create the device first described in his favorite childhood book, Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle (which, we should note, was riddled with racist narratives including the fictional taser being used on "savages" while raiding Africa for ivory). In fact "Taser" is an acronym for Thomas A Swift Electric Rifle.

Neuromancer

Another book that paints a picture of what virtual-reality worlds might look like is William Gibson's Neuromancer. Jeremy Bailenson, founder of Stanford University's Virtual Human Interaction Lab, credits the book with inspiring him to become a scholar of avatars. The 1984 book about a washed-up hacker hired to pull out a risky hack against a mysterious employer also inspired films.

Greek mythology

Mythology has helped inspire the field of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics. Bristol University scholar Genevieve Liveley regularly lectures on the theme of "cyborgs and robots in Greek myth," and at the recent Love and Sex with Robots conference in London, she delivered a fascinating talk on how the myth of Galatea -the ivory statue which is brought to life by the sculptor Pygmalion-can be extremely helpful in informing how we think about human-machine interaction in future. "As a historian, I'm reminded that when we try to anticipate the future, our cognitive parameters and frames are shaped by the past," she said at the conference. "We are really, really bad at anticipating the future with any degree of certainty, so one of the ways we try and do it is by telling stories."

Hitchhiker's Guide To the Galaxy

In his book Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, tech journalist Ashlee Vance wrote that Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was a major inspiration for the entrepreneur. Musk says the books made him realize how "a lot of times the question is harder than the answer." The novels, which have been translated into more than 30 languages, follow the misadventures of the last surviving human following the demolition of planet Earth by an alien construction fleet. Plenty of other members of the tech crowd are big Adams fans, too. In fact, if you ask Google for the answer to the novel's central question-the meaning of life-the search engine will promptly return, in calculator mode, the story's answer: 42.

Correction: A previous version of this article stated that The Aeneid was written by Ovid, not Virgil.

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From Elon's love of "Hitchhiker's" to Zuckerberg's Greek epics: How literature has inspired technology

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Mark Twain is best known for all-American novels like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. But he was also a forward-thinking futurist. Back in 1898, in his short story From The London Times , Twain described a gadget called the Telelectroscope-a "limitless-distance" telephone that connected people around the globe.

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History News Network | What’s Wrong with the Way We Have Been Defending the Humanities

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History News Network | What’s Wrong with the Way We Have Been Defending the Humanities

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What's Wrong with the Way We Have Been Defending the Humanities

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We have misunderstood our critics. They in turn misunderstand us.

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From Elon Musk’s love of “Hitchhiker’s” to Mark Zuckerberg’s fondness for Greek epics, literature directly inspires innovative technology — Quartz

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From Elon Musk’s love of “Hitchhiker’s” to Mark Zuckerberg’s fondness for Greek epics, literature directly inspires innovative technology — Quartz

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Mark Twain is best known for all-American novels like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. But he was also a forward-thinking futurist. Back in 1898, in his short story From The London Times, Twain described a gadget called the Telelectroscope-a "limitless-distance" telephone that connected people around the globe. "By grace of this marvelous instrument he was almost as free as the birds of the air... Now and then I would hear him say, 'Give me Hong-Kong'; next, 'Give me Melbourne' ... Sometimes the talk that came from those far regions through the microphone attachment interested me, and I listened."

Indeed, when it comes to technology, reality often plays catch-up to fiction. So it should come as no surprise that some of the people responsible for the greatest technological strides of the past decades cite literature as a source of inspiration. Here are a few of the books that have fired up the imaginations of our biggest innovators and fed their ambition to transform the world.

Dial F For Frankenstein

Internet inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee drew his inspiration from science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, who coined the famous quote "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" and described satellites in such detail he could have patented the idea 20 years before they became reality. Clarke's story Dial F For Frankenstein, s et in 1975, describes an automatic telephone exchange system with the equivalent number of switches as there are neurons in the human brain.

Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg reads a lot-in 2015, he even fit reading a book every two weeks in around his rather packed schedule. But his choice of favorite tome might raise a few eyebrows: by Virgil. It recounts Aeneas' quest after he escapes the ruins of Troy to build a city that "knows no boundaries in time and greatness." Some might say that his empire-building tendencies could have its roots in his penchant for Ancient Roman classics.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin named Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash as one of his favorite novels, and other tech innovators cite it as having directly inspired the development of Google Earth. He's not the only one to have been inspired by the 1992 novel and its description of online social networks and virtual worlds: Second Life creator Philip Rosedale is also a fan, and the platform's users routinely using the novel's term "the Metaverse" to describe . (In the book, the term describes a virtual-reality-based internet much like Rosedale's latest VR project, High Fidelity.) Appropriately, Stephenson is currently the " chief futurist " at mixed-reality (MR) company Magic Leap.

You might not have heard of Jack Cover, but you will be familiar with his most famous invention: the Taser. The NASA researcher was inspired to create the device first described in his favorite childhood book, Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle (which, we should note, was riddled with racist narratives including the fictional taser being used on "savages" while raiding Africa for ivory). In fact "Taser" is an acronym for Thomas A Swift Electric Rifle.

Another book that paints a picture of what virtual-reality worlds might look like is William Gibson's Neuromancer. Jeremy Bailenson, founder of Stanford University's Virtual Human Interaction Lab, credits the book with inspiring him to become a scholar of avatars. The 1984 book about a washed-up hacker hired to pull out a risky hack against a mysterious employer also inspired films.

Greek mythology

Mythology has helped inspire the field of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics. Bristol University scholar Genevieve Liveley regularly lectures on the theme of "cyborgs and robots in Greek myth," and at the recent Love and Sex with Robots conference in London, she delivered a fascinating talk on how the myth of Galatea -the ivory statue which is brought to life by the sculptor Pygmalion-can be extremely helpful in informing how we think about human-machine interaction in future. "As a historian, I'm reminded that when we try to anticipate the future, our cognitive parameters and frames are shaped by the past," she said at the conference. "We are really, really bad at anticipating the future with any degree of certainty, so one of the ways we try and do it is by telling stories."

Hitchhiker's Guide To the Galaxy

In his book Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, tech journalist Ashlee Vance wrote that Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was a major inspiration for the entrepreneur. Musk says the books made him realize how "a lot of times the question is harder than the answer." The novels, which have been translated into more than 30 languages, follow the misadventures of the last surviving human following the demolition of planet Earth by an alien construction fleet. Plenty of other members of the tech crowd are big Adams fans, too. In fact, if you ask Google for the answer to the novel's central question-the meaning of life-the search engine will promptly return, in calculator mode, the story's answer: 42.

Correction: A previous version of this article stated that The Aeneid was written by Ovid, not Virgil.
You can follow Alice on Twitter at @AliceBonasio. Learn how to write for Quartz Ideas. We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com.

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From Elon's love of "Hitchhiker's" to Zuckerberg's Greek epics: How literature has inspired technology

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Mark Twain is best known for all-American novels like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. But he was also a forward-thinking futurist. Back in 1898, in his short story From The London Times, Twain described a gadget called the Telelectroscope-a "limitless-distance" telephone that connected people around the globe.

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Why literature matters in debate about race and immigrants

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Why literature matters in debate about race and immigrants

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The people who voted for Donald Trump did so for a variety of reasons, but chief among them was the sense of their having been economically abandoned for several decades. Trump has promised to restore their economic dignity. That is a laudable goal.

However, through his corrosive campaign rhetoric, Trump has also made it acceptable to speak in hateful ways about many groups of people including Mexicans, Muslims and blacks. These groups are now feeling extremely vulnerable: Their fears are about the safety of their bodies and their lives.

This is anxiety that most white Americans - regardless of their economic status - are insulated from.

In the United States, whiteness confers power and privilege even when undercut by economic destitution. As the nation prepares itself for a Trump presidency, it is important to remember that this power and privilege will intensify.

Feminist Peggy McIntosh enumerated 50 of the things white people can take for granted in her 1988 essay "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack," including:

"I can criticize our government and talk about how much I fear its policies and behavior without being seen as a cultural outsider."

Twenty-eight years later, this, it would seem, is one of the white privileges that is not being accorded to the black athletes who have chosen to kneel, sit or raise a fist during the playing of the national anthem before a game. Just consider this reader's email to USA Today and note the ease with which the rage is articulated:

"When these (expletive) take a knee they are spitting in the faces of soldiers ... They are spitting on the graves of everyone killed on 9/11."

The commentator's rage makes no room for the non-violent expression of the athletes' outrage at the injustice experienced by black males.

AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez

My research on empathy, antipathy and how we perceive those who are unfamiliar makes clear that there has been no meaningful acknowledgment by politicians or the mainstream media of the power and privilege of whiteness. And yet if we as a country want to ensure "equal justice for all" then it is crucial for groups with power to recognize the advantage they have and address that imbalance.

From discussions in my classrooms and from my research, I have learned that there is relative "safety" in using literary texts to practice "what if" scenarios about our own capacity for understanding the "pain of others" and for recognizing how our power and privilege can contribute to others' injury, whether that be material, political or emotional.

White on black justice

The first literary example I want to use broke ground at the time of its publication by drawing attention to the automatic and unexamined privileges conferred on whiteness.

In Richard Wright's 1940 novel "Native Son," the white attorney general tells the prisoner Bigger Thomas, a native of the south side of Chicago:

"I know how you feel, boy. You're colored, and you feel that you haven't had a square deal, don't you? ... I know how it feels to walk along the streets like other people, dressed like them, talking like them, and yet excluded for no reason except that you're black."

Farm Security Administration - Office of War Information Photograph Collection, Library of Congress

Despite the psychological manipulation of the prisoner that this superficial display of empathy demonstrates, even the limited acknowledgment that being black is a frustrating disadvantage is a rare admission.

But here is what the fictional attorney general does not do.

He does not acknowledge the historical and political forces that have created the institutions that automatically give the advantage to people like him.

Juries in the 1940s were entirely composed of white men. That did not, however, strike those in power as being inherently unjust, because white men were deemed capable of being able to weigh the evidence and make fair and unbiased decisions.

"Native Son" sold an astonishing 215,000 copies within three weeks of its publication. Its primary impact was that it offered white readers a searing look into the black protagonist's deep pain and fierce anger. But it did not lead to change, if we are to judge from the housing discrimination in Chicago in the 1940s that created deep and entrenched economic, social and political segregation.

Several years after its publication, some black readers, most notably novelist James Baldwin, were infuriated at what they saw as the two-dimensional portrayal of Bigger's fury and enraged despair.

Yet, over the years since its publication, "Native Son" has continued to be reassessed and reconsidered - performed on stage in 2014 and re-reviewed in 2015 - so powerful has been its message of systemic and pervasive racism.

The privilege of being unaware

Unthinkingness is a central theme in the poem "To the Lady," by Mitsuye Yamada.

An anonymous woman (we don't know much about her other than that she is from the group in power) asks about the Japanese-Americans whose loyalty was questioned following the bombing of Pearl Harbor and who were incarcerated in camps:

"Why did the Japanese Americans let/ the government put them in/ those camps without protest?"

She is blissfully unaware of the political context that made it impossible for them to protest. Though two-thirds of the Japanese-Americans who were incarcerated during World War II were American citizens, they did not have the basic power to demand that their constitutional rights be upheld. They did not have the support of their neighbors, who were bystanders at best and hostile enemies at worst in this violation of their constitutional rights.

AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill

It is the power and privilege of the poem's lady that offer her the luxury of being unaware of the asymmetry of influence.

It is telling that after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, many Japanese-Americans came forward to offer support to Muslims, Muslim-Americans, and Arab-Americans so that their constitutional rights would not be violated in the same way.

Refusing to be willfully ignorant

Studying how power is hidden or revealed, understated or boldly displayed in the two examples above can set us on the path to introspection.

How does one become complicit in ignoring unequal power? What can we carry from literature into life?

Take the following instance in which an individual in a position of power appears to have engaged in introspective analysis and responded with nuance and complexity.

It takes place in an airport, a public space that has increasingly become associated with danger and where different groups of people are in different positions of power.

In a memoir essay by former sports broadcaster Varun Sriram that he submitted for a collection I edited, we learn of his airport experience.

Sriram, a young Indian-American man - looking, as he says, with his unshaven face and brown skin like everybody's stereotypical image of the "terrorist" - tells how he foolishly left his carry-on bag unattended at an airline gate while he went to purchase a pizza.

A white woman who had been giving him hostile looks summoned a security guard who picked up his bag and left the area. When Sriram returned, he was told by the white woman that she had called the guard. In a panic, he went in pursuit and luckily saw the guard at a distance.

AP Photo/Alan Diaz

Sriram apologized profusely for his carelessness and politely asked the guard if he could have his bag back. Sriram accurately described the contents of the bag, and the security guard returned it to him.

We will never know the exact reasons that led the guard to make the unusual gesture of returning the bag to Sriram and treating him as harmless rather than as a threat. But in "reading" this incident as one would a literary text, one can readily acknowledge that the guard, despite his obvious power advantage over Sriram, nonetheless appears to have used that advantage to make an empathetic decision.

Through literature to empathy and righteous outrage

Like airports, urban streets have been scenes of violence and danger. The merest gesture of a "wrong" move can mean death for an African-American male, as the recent events in Minnesota, Oklahoma and North Carolina have all too sadly revealed.

When we hear recommendations for training police officers, what exactly do we want?

I would argue that training must engage the imaginative capacity of those in power. It must lead them to acknowledge their power and privilege, and it must then give them opportunities to exercise their imagination in deepening understanding of themselves and of those individuals and groups over whom they hold this power.

Literature allows for such practice.

In the hands of a skillful facilitator, for example, it is impossible not to be outraged at what one can learn about the stranglehold of white power in an essay like "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow," in which novelist Richard Wright shows us how the simple act of riding an elevator as a black busboy in the presence of white men can be fraught with life-threatening danger.

The question to be asked then is how that situation compares to the one on our streets today - nearly 70 years later.

A recent initiative in New York City has police officers visiting the Museum of Modern Art and being trained, through looking at paintings, in how to observe carefully and critically.

That we don't similarly use literature to enlarge empathetic capacity and evoke righteous outrage is surprising and inexplicable. The times cry out, I would argue, for bold initiatives that bring literature into our courtrooms, banks, town halls, housing offices, police departments, health care centers and political venues to initiate necessary discussions about asymmetrical power and its corrosive impact. It will be particularly imperative in the times ahead.

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Why literature matters in debate about race and immigrants

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The people who voted for Donald Trump did so for a variety of reasons, but chief among them was the sense of their having been economically abandoned for several decades. Trump has promised to restore their economic dignity. That is a laudable goal.

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Innovation Skills for the Future: Insights from 4 Research Reports - Innovation Training | Innovation Program | Innovative Speaker Workshops

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Innovation Skills for the Future: Insights from 4 Research Reports - Innovation Training | Innovation Program | Innovative Speaker Workshops

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Innovation Training | Design Thinking Workshops | Keynote Speaker

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There are four prominent research studies whose findings highlight the most important 21st century job skills needed for the future (and the future is now) of work and organizations. In sum, employees at all levels need to develop their innovation skills. These include competencies like creativity, critical thinking, communication, strategic thinking, and problem solving to find and develop creative solutions for the complex world we live in. The reason these skills are becoming more and more important is because of the changing nature of work and the rapid pace of change.

The four reports I'll share and link to include:
The Bloomberg Job Skills Report World Economic Forum The Future of Jobs: Employment, Skills and Workforce Strategy for the Fourth Industrial Revolution IBM Global C-Suite Studies American Management Association Critical Skills Surveys
What if you were to focus on developing these most important 21st century skills in yourself? It seems like it would make sense to focus on the most important skills for your own development. How could you do it? Which skills are strengths for you that you could leverage? How? In what ways could your organization help develop employees to cultivate these skills in themselves and others?

The Bloomberg Job Skills Report

As part of their research to rank business programs, a Bloomberg job skills study asked 1,251 job recruiters at 547 companies about the skills they want in their professionals but can't find. The skills "sweet spot" included four skills that are less common but more desired. Across industries, these four skills are:

Other important skills (but not in the highly desired/less common sweet spot) included:

The collection of skills could be grouped together and described as "innovation skills" since all are vital to developing and launching an innovation. It takes creative problem solving, leadership, strategic thinking, and effective communication.

Bloomberg has an interactive tool where you can see which skills are more/less desired and common by industry. It looks like this:

The Bloomberg Job Skills Reports spoke more to what organizations wanted in recent MBA graduates in business. Other studies that I share below speak towards a wider variety of employees.

World Economic Forum Future of Jobs Research

In January 2016, the World Economic Forum published a report: The Future of Jobs: Employment, Skills and Workforce Strategy for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. "The dataset that forms the basis of the Report is the result of an extensive survey of Chief Human Resource Officers and other senior talent and strategy executives from a total of 371 leading global employers, representing more than 13 million employees across 9 broad industry sectors in 15 major developed and emerging economies and regional economic areas." This was the sample described in this analysis from the World Economic Forum.

From their earlier research, the top skills (in order) needed for 2015 were:

Complex problem solving

Coordinating with others

People management

Critical thinking

Negotiation

Quality control

Service orientation

Judgment and decision-making

Active listening

Creativity

From their more recent research about the future, the importance of creativity shoots up the charts. Here are the 10 skills most needed for 2020:

Complex problem solving

Critical thinking

Creativity

People management

Coordinating with others

Emotional intelligence

Judgment and decision-making

Service orientation

Negotiation

Cognitive flexibility

The "changing nature of work" was cited as the biggest driver for the change in what is needed for the future. As in the other studies, the top skills could be described as innovation skills...creativity, critical thinking, and complex problem solving. All three of these skills are essential to developing and bringing to life a new innovation that solves a real problem and provides meaningful value.

IBM Global C-Suite Studies

Over 10 years, 17 studies, and 23,000 face-to-face interviews, IBM has gained and published insights from executives. Of greatest note to those interested in the value of creativity, IBM conducted a study in 2010 of more than 1,500 Chief Executive Officers from 60 countries and 33 industries globally. The chief finding was that "chief executives believe that - more than rigor, management discipline, integrity or even vision - successfully navigating an increasing complex world will require creativity."

The study also found that "less than half of global CEOs believe their enterprises are adequately prepared to handle a highly volatile, increasingly complex business environment. CEOs are confronted with massive shifts - new government regulations, changes in global economic power centers, accelerated industry transformation, growing volumes of data, rapidly evolving customer preferences - that, according to the study, can be overcome by instilling "creativity" throughout an organization."

American Management Association (AMA) Critical Skills Surveys

In 2010, AMA conducted a survey of 2,115 managers and other executives about the critical skills employees need at every level in an organization for the current state and future of work. A similar study was conducted again in December of 2012 by AMA. 768 managers and other executives were a part of that second 2012 study that asked about the importance of the 4 Critical (4C) skills that were highlighted as critical skills from the first survey for their organizations. 74.6% of the managers surveyed believe these 4C skills will be even more important for their organizations in the next three to five years.
The Critical 4C Skills as defined by the American Management Association
Critical thinking and problem solving is defined by AMA as the ability to make decisions, solve problems and take action as appropriate.

Effective communication is defined by AMA as the ability to synthesize and transmit ideas in both written and oral formats.

Collaboration and team building is defined by AMA as the ability to work effectively with others, including those from diverse groups and those with opposing points of view.

Creativity and innovation is defined by AMA as the ability to see what's NOT there and make something happen.

Managers answered that their employees were currently average, at best, in terms of their development of these critical skills and competencies. These skills are needed because of the fast pace of change in business today.

The pace of change (61.4%), and global competition (50.9%) were the top factors selected for why the skills and competencies of critical thinking/problem solving, effective communication, collaboration/team building, and creativity/innovation were becoming more critical for organizations.

These 4 C skills from the AMA study can again be described together as innovation skills. These 4C innovation skills are similar to the top 4 skills from the World Economic Forum study which were:

Complex problem solving

Critical thinking

Creativity

People management

Innovation Skills

You've just read insights from four different prominent studies that highlight how critical innovation skills are for the future of work, organizations, and employees. How can you develop your innovative skills...integrating your skills of problem solving, creativity, collaboration, and communication together for the purpose of developing and taking action on an innovation that can have a positive impact? Can you put these skills to use to develop an innovation that seizes an opportunity or solves an important problem? Are you trained or prepared to do this? Doing this requires application of the important innovation skills you've read from the various research studies. What specific innovative learning and development initiative can you create for yourself?

If you are not receiving training or development of these critical skills in your organization, how can you be a change agent to help make that happen for yourself and others so that your organization can respond to the rapid change of pace and thrive in the future? It will take employees at all levels with higher stages of development of their innovation skills. It may even take innovating simply for the purpose of learning innovation.

Innovation Skill Specifics

For me creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, and communication are very general skills that taken together are a part of a larger category I call innovation skills. There are many "micro-skills" that can make up these more general skills as there are many different modes of communication to master for innovation success. There is still opportunity to describe these more specifically. My favorite research zeroes right in on innovation skills...and what is happening in the mind of the innovator while innovating at their best. A study of "3,000 executives and 500 individuals who had started innovative companies or invented new products" is written up in this Harvard Business Review article on The Innovator's DNA. The key skills innovators were applying were Networking, Associating, Observing, Questioning, & Experimenting.
What specific skills do you think are most important for the future? How do you think individuals or organizations can develop them? About the Author:
Darin J. Eich, Ph.D. is the founder of InnovationLearning.org, a teacher of innovation and entrepreneurship, and developer of more than 10 online innovation programs designed to help people enhance their innovative skills through development of an innovation project.

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Innovation Skills for the Future: Insights from 4 Research Reports - Innovation Training | Design Thinking Workshops | Keynote Speaker

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There are four prominent research studies whose findings highlight the most important 21st century job skills needed for the future (and the future is now) of work and organizations. In sum, employees at all levels need to develop their innovation skills.

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What Can You Do with a Liberal Arts & Sciences Education? Anything You Want! | Joseph A. Brennan

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What Can You Do with a Liberal Arts & Sciences Education? Anything You Want! | Joseph A. Brennan

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What Can You Do with a Liberal Arts & Sciences Education? Anything You Want!

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Adapted from my address at the induction ceremony for the University at Albany's Phi Beta Kappa chapter, May 13, 2016 There are many people in America who question the value of a college degree in the liberal arts and sciences. They wonder "what can you do with a liberal arts and sciences education."

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Education And Activist Humanities, Now More Than Ever | The Huffington Post

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Education And Activist Humanities, Now More Than Ever | The Huffington Post

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Like many other Americans, I am stunned by the result of the election. Certainly every group that has been named directly or indirectly by our next president as being of lesser value or of suspect character as "Americans" has reason to be afraid. Speaking as an educator, and a professor of the humanities, I am sure that what I am about to convey is common at our colleges and universities--students, faculty, and staff, are depressed, fearful, and doubtful of the future of the educational enterprise. So many of the lessons we teach--about the value of culture, critical thinking, history, philosophy--seem now invalidated with the election to the highest office of the land of an individual who has expressed in word and behavior nothing but distain and contempt for these things. The implications of this devaluation are even greater when we factor in the impact of his dismissal of science on our increasingly fragile planet.

It is precisely under these conditions that we educators must set an example for our students, in staying even more firm in our commitment to education and knowledge, rational debate and civil discourse. But we also need to be both more explicit in voicing and acting on that commitment and more capacious in our understanding of the role of the humanities in the world. We need to develop a capacity for being more than advocates for education, we need to become serious activists for it, and in places beyond the campus too.

When we put forward any discussion of topics such as ethics, social justice, gender, sexuality, race, religion, culture, we need to place those discussions in the context of our new contemporary situation. In so doing we may often find ourselves taking a stance in opposition to the prevailing ideology. I recommend we embrace that oppositionality and form lines of solidarity with others. We need to see how rational and civil discourse and self-reflective contemplation are necessary tools when we increasingly hear that they are inconvenient and dispensable niceties. In so doing we make a renewed and intensified commitment to the very idea of humanity and the greater good. We must adapt our point of reference according to this new historical situation.

Similarly, we need to bracket our present institutional fixation on enrollments and majors. To read the value of the humanities as only measurable by those metrics, or by dollars earned, is to condemn ourselves to a state of perpetual failure. We will never be "good enough" because the presumption of value is skewed against us. We must put such measurements in perspective, and recognize what I have been calling the "invisible humanities."

By that I mean the arts, music, literature, philosophy, et cetera that circulate in the public sphere unattended to and unrecognized by academic measurements. We need now, more than ever, to connect our work to a public that is of its own accord vibrant with the humanities that are invisible to us because they take non-academic shapes and forms. We need to make bridges to that world. More than ever, the public needs to know that in the face of brutality and crudeness, the humanities in various manifestations can put us in touch not with elitism and snobbery, but with compassion and an aspiration to be better in ourselves and toward others.

The humanities can help us go some distance toward healing the wounds of this historical event, but along with the solace that is absolutely necessary for our mental and spiritual health, we need to regard the humanities as a strategic tool with which to fight against ignorance, bigotry, vulgarity, and cruelty. The vast number of people who voted against all those things were between the ages of 18 and 25. We should take hope in that, and also recognize our new responsibilities to them, and to the world.

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Education And Activist Humanities, Now More Than Ever

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Like many other Americans, I am stunned by the result of the election. Certainly every group that has been named directly or indirectly by our next president as being of lesser value or of suspect character as "Americans" has reason to be afraid.

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Why Poetry Is Viral in the Aftermath of Trump's Election - The Atlantic

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Why Poetry Is Viral in the Aftermath of Trump's Election - The Atlantic

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There are logistical reasons for all that, certainly. Poetry's succinct form often means that it lends itself especially well to being screen-shot and retyped and then shared on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram. But there are deeper reasons, too, why poetry is having, as it were, A Moment. I spoke with Don Share, the editor of Poetry magazine, about the role poems have been playing for people across the political spectrum as they've wrestled with the results of the 2016 election-and of the role poems might continue to play for us as we move forward. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Megan Garber: Why do you think it is that poetry seems to be resonating so deeply at this particular moment?

Don Share: Well, it's always been speaking to people-and it's always been speaking to people about the kinds of things they're taking about now, because one of the things poetry is really good at is anticipating things that need discussion. Poets are kind of like-it's a bad metaphor, but-canaries in a coal mine. They have a sense for things that are in the air. Partly because that's what they do-they think about things that are going on-but partly because they take their own personal experience and see how that fits in with what they see in the world. A lot of people might think that poetry is very abstract, or that it has to do with having your head in the clouds, but poets, actually, walk on the earth. They're grounded, feet-first, pointing forward. They're moving around and paying attention at every moment.

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And a poet wakes up and thinks, "You know, anything is possible." They imagine things before they're possible. The reach and power of the imagination means that poetry will always be with us, that it will always be important, that it will always be part of what goes along with our culture, our politics, our personal feelings and relationships.

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Why Poems Are Going Viral in the Aftermath of the Election

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There are logistical reasons for all that, certainly. Poetry's succinct form often means that it lends itself especially well to being screen-shot and retyped and then shared on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram. But there are deeper reasons, too, why poetry is having, as it were, A Moment.

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Donald Trump’s victory shows why we need philosophy students more than ever | Times Higher Education (THE)

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Donald Trump’s victory shows why we need philosophy students more than ever | Times Higher Education (THE)

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Donald Trump has been elected US president, and newspapers, Twitter and Facebook are blooming with suggestions about which voters are responsible for this unexpected victory.

It has been pointed out how the votes of uneducated white people, white women, Bernie Sanders and his supporters, liberals and even Hispanic voters, among others, played a crucial role in these elections.

Although some blame might not be misplaced, the fact remains that a republic changes only when the views of the people change. Finger-pointing is likely only to make Trump voters dig in their heels. As much as promoting a divided community paved the way for Trump's success, fostering divisions risks providing a breeding ground for strengthening "Trumpism" still further. So how can we avoid this kind of outcome in the future?

Perhaps education is part of the answer. Plato, one of the first great theorists of education in the West, offers us a model of how education can work. In his so-called Socratic dialogues, Plato depicts Socrates as a teacher who does not tell people what to think, but rather engages them in a dialogue that presses them to look for truth and think for themselves. The Socratic method is called the "elenchus", which means "examination". Philosophy, in its Socratic dispensation, doesn't presume to transmit indisputably correct views from teacher to student from above, but rather pushes for greater scrutiny of all views, whoever holds them.

The power of Socratic dialogue lies in its form, not in each of its particular results. And the same holds of democracy. If the "correct" organisation of a society were clear to anyone of sufficiently enlightened views, we would need not democracy but technocracy. The belief that reasonable people can disagree is essential to democracy, and our role as teachers in a democratic society is to be rigorous and vigilant in pushing for critical reflection on all views - including our own.

The importance of education to democracy brings with it the danger of misunderstanding its role. The danger of smugness and condescension from the educated elite. "As the most educated members of society", some might think, "we know what's best, and those who disagree with us are ignorant or at least less enlightened".

Implicit in elitist reasoning is a kind of commodification of education: it treats education as a resource that is unevenly distributed, where those more endowed must grudgingly give voice to those less endowed. The presumed solution on this view is a better distribution of resources - we should pass our enlightened views on to those who are unfortunate enough not to have yet had the opportunity to share them.

Education on this picture becomes a one-way street: those in the position of privilege confer their greater wisdom on the less privileged. Philosophical questioning can help us to avoid the elitism trap too.

For sure, philosophy can resolve into a series of intra-academic debates that bear no relevance to the world. Yet it doesn't have to. The current political circumstances suggest that if philosophy really is a tool for critically engaging with issues and understanding them better, this is a good moment for bringing it out of the ivory tower. Philosophical tools are not simply good tools for a flexible work-mindset. They are tools assessing things, and thinking of solutions.

Plato was clearly optimistic about the value of a philosophical education for society. "If we...educate them in it, even justice itself won't blame us, and we'll save the city and the constitution," he says in Republic.

His slogan today would probably be something that is also spreading on social media: "Make America think again".
Simona Aimar is a lecturer and assistant professor in the philosophy department at University College London, and David Egan is a collegiate assistant professor at the University of Chicago.

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Donald Trump's victory shows why we need philosophy students more than ever

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Donald Trump has been elected US president, and newspapers, Twitter and Facebook are blooming with suggestions about which voters are responsible for this unexpected victory. It has been pointed out how the votes of uneducated white people, white women, Bernie Sanders and his supporters, liberals and even Hispanic voters, among others, played a crucial role in these elections.