because something is important, it doesn’t follow that we should require everyone to study it

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  • According to a report by the Southern Poverty Law Center, “Across the country, state educational standards virtually ignore our civil rights history. … Thirty-five states [get] an F because their standards require little or no mention of the movement, [the report] says.” (New York Times, 9/28)
  • “Most states do not include in their social studies/history standards a direct mention of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, according to a new study [released by CIRCLE], and only four states actually name Osama bin Laden or al-Qaeda.” (Washington Post, 9/9)
  • “California will become the first state to require public schools to teach gay and lesbian history. As expected, Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill on Thursday that mandates that the contributions of gays and lesbians in the state and the country be included in social science instruction and in textbooks ” (New York Times, 7/14)

Like everyone else, I have opinions about what Americans should know. I think, for example, that the Civil Rights Movement should be understood by everyone. It is not only a story of race in America (which is an essential topic), but also an example of democratic participation.

Yet it seems crucial to distinguish among several issues:

  1. Which bodies of knowledge we wish everyone would know.
  2. Whether lasting knowledge will result if we teach any given topic for a limited amount of time in school.
  3. What kinds of educational experiences we want students to have, e.g., in-depth research projects on a few topics, or a lecture on a different topic every day.
  4. What are the effects of any given state law or mandate, considering not only its content (e.g., “Teach gay history!”), but also the carrots and sticks that the law imposes.
  5. Whether it is wise to standardize the curriculum across a whole state.
  6. Whether states, districts, schools, communities, teachers, or teachers-plus-students should make curricular decisions.
  7. Which signals we wish to send as a society about the topics we consider important.

I think almost all the discussion is about #7. If we don’t require the teaching of 9/11, civil rights history, or gay history, the lack of a mandate is interpreted as a sign of unconcern–hence disrespect. The result is a default presumption that everything important should be included in state standards. And the standards become voluminous lists.

But the other questions listed above also deserve consideration. We found, for example, that whether the First Amendment was included in state standards had no effect on whether students could answer survey questions about the First Amendment. It did matter whether they had studied the topic, but not what their state law or policies said. Presumably, statewide content mandates do not encourage teaching that leads to lasting knowledge.

All in all, I would prefer that some of our students do in-depth research projects on the Civil Rights Movement and really learn it, rather than require all our students to memorize a few key facts about the Movement that may show up on a standardized test. I make that choice with some reluctance, because I really do think the Movement has transcendent importance. But I would bet that kids will forget almost everything they cram for a test, especially if it covers a long list of topics, whereas they will benefit permanently from a deep experience wrestling with a complex topic that they and their teacher find interesting. I am not in favor of unilateral disarmament–dropping the Civil Rights Movement but leaving 9/11 and the Mayflower Compact in the standards. Instead, I’d like to see a radical shift from lists of topics to core skills and concepts.

does naturalism make room for the humanities?

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On the New York Times “The Stone” blog (contributed by philosophers), the Duke philosopher Alex Rosenberg wrote recently that he is a naturalist. He explained, “Naturalism is the philosophical theory that treats science as our most reliable source of knowledge and scientific method as the most effective route to knowledge.”

Near the end of the article, Rosenberg asks whether history and literary theory “provide real understanding.” He acknowledges that these disciplines can be valuable even if they don’t. Maybe we human beings need them for psychological reasons or simply enjoy them–much as we enjoy fiction. But that doesn’t mean they offer knowledge. He doesn’t quite say whether they do or not, but he writes, “if they seek arbitrarily to limit the reach of scientific methods, then naturalism can’t take them seriously as knowledge.That doesn’t mean anyone should stop doing literary criticism any more than forgoing fiction. Naturalism treats both as fun, but neither as knowledge.”

By the the last clause of this passage, Rosenberg seems to be saying that history and literary theory do not generate knowledge. (In a reply piece in “The Stone,” William Egginton simply says, “Professor Rosenberg’s answer is as unequivocal as it is withering: just like fiction, literary theory can be ‘fun,’ but neither one qualifies as ‘knowledge.'”)

But that can’t be right. Here are two examples of findings from the humanities. From history: “George Washington was the first president of the United States.” From literary criticism: Dante’s character Francesca da Rimini speaks almost entirely in misquotations from earlier literature. These are verifiable (or falsifiable) claims.

Indeed, if we had no naturalistic information about literary texts or about the past, it would very strange. Ordinary documents (novels, poems, etc.) would be mysteries, and we would be like amnesiacs, with no access to the past. Rosenberg can’t mean that.

I think the nub of the issue arises in this sentence:

If semiotics, existentialism, hermeneutics, formalism, structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction and post-modernism transparently flout science’s standards of objectivity, or if they seek arbitrarily to limit the reach of scientific methods, then naturalism can’t take them seriously as knowledge.

Earlier, Rosenberg had mentioned history, literary criticism, and literary theory as disciplines that may not be naturalistic and that may not produce real knowledge. But his specific examples are all approaches to literary theory that arose in Germany and France  after 1900 and have powerfully influenced humanists at Duke University. They are approaches to reading texts–but more than that, they are philosophical doctrines. Most of them are explicitly critical of naturalistic philosophy in the tradition of David Hume.

Rosenberg is entitled to criticize those philosophies: they are in conflict with his own. (So are some views taught and studied in philosophy departments.) But his apparent identification of particular theories, such as structuralism and deconstruction, with the whole disciplines of literary criticism and history seems problematic. It reflects, I think, some lingering bitterness between particularly influential postmodernists and analytical philosophers at institutions like Duke.

Perhaps he means that the humanities are inherently untrustworthy because some of their most prominent practitioners have endorsed theories incompatible with naturalism, whereas hardly any biologists or chemists have done so. But Rosenberg doesn’t make that point explicitly and instead seems to raise doubts about our knowledge of the past (“history”) and of literary texts. Strangely, his skepticism seems to resemble post-structuralism. Or perhaps all he wants to do is endorse forms of history and literary criticism that make verifiable claims. So would many humanists. Unless I misunderstand him, Rosenberg is operating with stereotypes about humanists that are no more fair than some stereotypes that one hears about analytical philosophers.

why we are choosing to abolish the jury system

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According to Richard Oppel in today’s New York Times, just one in 40 felony cases goes to trial, down from one in twelve in the 1970s. Mandatory sentencing laws have given prosecutors the ability to threaten long prison terms that can’t be limited by juries or judges. Almost all defendants plea-bargain to avoid those sentences. As one federal judge told Oppel, “We hardly have trials anymore.”

The mandatory sentencing laws were passed by referenda or by popular votes in state legislatures. Influenced by Albert Dzur’s work, I would say that the people (using the ballot box) have chosen to remove the people (convened as jurors) from criminal law. This choice perfectly illustrates my greatest worry: that we have lost trust in both institutions and one another.

A majority of Americans distrust the criminal justice system, and they are mainly concerned that the guilty will go free. Crime remains high, by comparative standards. People are afraid of it, in part because of media sensationalism. And attitudes toward crime are infused with race. Thus majorities vote to impose simple, understandable rules on the whole system, like “Three Strikes” in California. One ironic result is to transform criminal cases from transparent public events (full of explicit moral rhetoric) into bargaining sessions managed behind the scenes by lawyers. That is a recipe for even lower trust, which encourages even more draconian sentencing laws. Meanwhile, at least some American are angry because we have incarcerated 2.29 million of our people, with terrible effects for their lives and communities and high costs to society. People (like me) who are angry from that direction get outvoted but contribute to low confidence.

The old system for ensuring that the public trusted the law (dating to Anglo Saxon times) was to empanel members of the public to hear actual cases. We could go back to that system. But there is no groundswell for such a remedy because Americans trust one another about as little as they trust major institutions, like the courts.

The results are very bad: not only is our incarceration rate unconscionable, not only do innocent people have reasons to plea-bargain to avoid draconian sentences, but democracy is distorted. We the people are wisest when we gather to discuss with others and when we focus on complex cases in their particular contexts. Then our everyday experience, diversity of backgrounds, and human sensitivities improve our thinking. We the people are least wise when we make simplistic decisions in the ballot box, without expertise and under the influence of advertising campaigns. But because we distrust the government and ourselves, we are substituting our most foolish mode of thought for our wisest one.

more information, less trust

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I have argued here that experts and policymakers think of accountability in terms of information, whereas citizens think of it in terms of relationships. Giving people more information about things like public employees’ salaries, students’ test scores, or federal spending will not increase their trust if what they are looking for is contact (or a feeling of contact) with human beings.

That hypothesis has political implications: it suggests that if you want government to be important and trusted, you’d better make it interactive–which, in turn, requires decentralization (because hardly anyone can interact with a behemoth). By the way, I am not assuming that citizens are correct and experts are wrong. Sometimes information is a more valid basis for trust than relationships are. Sometimes a distant agency that discloses data is more trustworthy than a local sheriff or principal whom you happen to know. But citizens’ preference for relationships has some merit and is certainly an important political fact.

A major basis of my argument was some preliminary data that has now found its way into a published report by Public Agenda and the Kettering Foundation: Don’t Count Us Out: How An Overreliance On Accountability Could Undermine The Public’s Confidence In Schools, Business, Government, And More. One paragraph from the executive summary is particularly pertinent:

More Information ? More Trust. Perhaps Less!

Typically, people know almost nothing about specific [disclosure] measures, and they rarely see them as clear-cut evidence of effectiveness. Many Americans are deeply skeptical about the accuracy and importance of quantitative measures. Most are suspicious of the ways in which numbers can be manipulated or tell only half the story. Many members of the public feel confused and overwhelmed by the detailed information flying past them in the name of “disclosure” and “transparency.” Many fear they are being manipulated by the complex presentations. More and more statistics do not reassure, so in fact, more information can actually lead to less public trust.

the future of classics

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(in Washington, DC)

Just as maiden, standing on the shore of the ocean, follows with tearful eyes her departed lover with no hope of ever seeing him again, and fancies that in that distant sail she sees the image of her beloved … we too have, as it were, nothing but a shadowy outline left of the object of our wishes, but that very indistinctness awakens only a more earnest longing for what we have lost, and we study the copies of the originals more attentively than we should have done the originals themselves if we had been in full possession of them.

–Johann Joachim Winckelmann, “Greek Art Under the Romans,” ca 1764.

The desire to recover and imitate aspects of Greco-Roman civilization has been one of the great motivating forces–not only in what we (quite arbitrarily) call “the West,” but also in the whole Islamic world and in the Orthodox nations from the Baltic to the Pacific. People have sought to emulate a great range of Greco-Roman models. Charlemagne tried to patch together a semblance of late Romano-Christian law and religion. English gentlemen thought they lived like Pliny the Elder under a new Augustan empire. Wordsworth believed he would “rather be / A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn” (a wild Greek savage) than a modern consumer or trader. Czars imagined themselves Byzantine emperors; New England patriots saw themselves as plain-spun citizens of a new Athens.

My father, Joseph M. Levine, wrote several books about encounters with antiquity. He argued that efforts to recover the classical world generally had practical–political and cultural–motivations. Whether you were a citizen of an Italian Renaissance city-state, finding models in classical oratory, or an English Whig politician, admiring the Roman Republic, you had forward-looking reasons to recommend the study of something called “classics.”

Because of these practical projects, the discipline of classical philology became the first and most ambitious form of professional scholarship. But classical scholars discovered the diversity, fluidity, imperfection, and sheer alienness of ancient civilizations. They showed that classical models could not work for the present or future. Thus, repeatedly and especially in the 19th and 20th centuries, classics made itself irrelevant.

I have some classical training, and still prize it because of the insights I believe it offers into the history of post-classical civilizations. Writers as diverse as Ayatollah Khomenei, James Joyce, and Thomas Jefferson were steeped in classical sources; knowing those sources and the languages in which they were written helps us to understand our predecessors. But we should not long mourn the decline of an enterprise designed for large-scale, practical purposes once it no longer serves those purposes.

Classics today can seem a discipline with an immensely long apprenticeship, a vast array of prior literature to sort through before one can write anything original, a limited set of original sources, ethnocentric biases, a modest audience, and a diminishing market share. Yet my classicist colleague Gregory Crane, editor-in-chief of Project Perseus and a pioneer in the digital humanities, has shown that classics offers excellent opportunities for diverse people to construct new knowledge together. For example, Crane enlists Muslim seminary students in the Middle East to help annotate the classical Arabic texts that are essential for our understanding of Greek sources. Beginning students in the US can collate Greek manuscripts (via images); and travelers can record geographical information.

Crane notes that Greco-Roman civilization “remains a major source for every form of popular medium – fiction and non-fiction, film and prose.” People who enjoy Percy Jackson or HBO’s Rome may want real historical information and context. But

the sources about the ancient Greco-Roman world are particularly challenging to work with – the original sources are in Classical Greek and Latin, and our knowledge about the Greco-Roman world has appeared in every written language from areas spanning from Morocco to Afghanistan. The physical world of Greece and Rome has left impressive remains behind to this day but we must reconstruct our understanding of this physical world from archaeological finds spread across thousands of miles.

Fortunately, we now have “open content collections,” such as Project Perseus; and a “new decentralized culture of intellectual life has taken hold among students of the Greco-Roman world, with student researchers emerging as key participants in colleges and universities in the United States and Canada.” These scholars and students can serve the broad public by providing information and background to complement popular versions of classical civilization.

I think that Project Perseus represents the bright future of classics, not only because of its content, but especially because of the collaborative process that feeds it.