A man can stand anything except a succession of ordinary days. —Goethe
The point of humanistic study is to make students human, that is, to allow individuals to realize some distinctively human abilities, such as having and understanding values, reflecting upon and understanding the past, cultivating aesthetic appreciation or achievement along the many dimensions that the world has offered us, and refining the intellectual tools necessary to understand, interpret, and interact with the broader world as something other than an automaton. Or, to borrow from Nietzsche, the point of disciplined humanistic study is to cultivate everything that “makes life on earth worth living–for instance: virtue, art, music, dance, reason, intellect–something that transfigures, something refined, fantastic, and divine” (Beyond Good and Evil, 188). The real scandal is that purportedly serious universities let students study “business” and “engineering” and other fields that have their uses–they make life livable, but not worth living.
Chattel slavery may be history in most parts of the world, thank goodness, but wage slavery is not, and these defenses of the humanities are, alas, depressingly realistic testimonies to that fact.
On Friday I finished my month-long English Language teaching course, the CELTA. It’s an entry-level course that lets you get a job in lots of places around the world. CELTA plus two years of experience lets you get a job teaching General English (as opposed to e.g. English for Academic Purposes) in almost any country you would like to go to, as I understand it. Doing CELTA was overkill for my job in Korea, but I wanted to do a proper training course involving lots of feedback on actual teaching so that I can do a really good job when I go.