The fight over liberal arts education in Japan. The humanities and liberal arts are under pressure from the government, but have allies in the business community. From the article: the national government wants to focus national resources for higher education on fields that nourish students’ skills that are immediately adaptable to the needs of the labor [...]
Scholars bulldozing history. How Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study will demolish an important site of the American Revolution: the Battle of Princeton. From the article: In today’s academia there are many scholars against scholarship, including historians hostile to history — postmodernists who think the past is merely a social construct reflecting the present’s preoccupations, or [...]
Computers transform our knowledge of the past. According to the author, computerized quantitative analysis offers insights that traditional historical study cannot. From the article: Huge swathes of our past are slowly but surely getting digitised as old books and scanned and organised. It stands to reason that surely once the historians get to work it [...]
How the humanities teach us the art of life. A professor of literature asks about life's greater meaning, which the humanities may provide. According to the author, "The humanities interrogate us. They challenge our sense of who we are, even of who our brothers and sisters might be."
What employers want: employees with liberal arts and humanities sensibilities. What employees lack: these sensibilities .... The article states: that "employers overwhelmingly endorse broad learning and cross-cutting skills as the best preparation for long-term career success. However, employers also give students very low grades on nearly all of the 17 learning outcomes explored in the study, including [...]
A 1535 Latin Bible, owned by Henry VIII, contains annotations from the "great" English Bible written between 1539 and 1549, and were discovered recently by Dr. Eyal Poleg, a historian at the University of London through 3-D X-Ray imaging. "The book is a unique witness to the course of Henry's Reformation. Printed in 1535 by [...]
Her sonnet meditates on human degradation, and self-degradation, in the new Iron Age. From "Epitaph on the Race of Man" Here lies, and none to mourn him but the sea, That falls incessant on the empty shore, Most various Man, cut down to spring no more; Before his prime, even in his infancy Cut down, [...]
We become better scientists, the more we value the liberal arts. The author recounts how the liberal arts "unlocked" for her the true value of education, and her students in turn became more adroit at their science and their ability to communicate their ideas to others. She writes: Our culture has drawn an artificial line between art [...]
Obsessing about STEM: America seems entranced by STEM education, at the expense of our future, which requires more agile ways of thinkings that the humanities and liberal arts provide. "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 [...]
Why read the classics: Italo Calvino (1923-1985) explains the nature of a classical literary composition, which has various means of speaking to us throughout the different times of our lives. If the books have remained the same (even though they too change in light of a different historical perspective), we ourselves have certainly changed, and the encounter [...]
