Humanities

y daughter Frankie loves to study and earns top grades. But when I tell people that her post-graduate work is in literature, they look embarrassed. It's true that if Frankie eventually gets a teaching job in Italy, it's likely to be low-paying and unreliable, what Italians call precario. She'll probably need a second job to make ends meet.

Societies pay for what they value, and these days it's not literature teachers. In the United States, there are 50 percent fewer liberal arts majors than a generation ago.

Wasted time?

The reduction of humanities programs in favor of math and science reflects the dominance of whatever can be quantified over whatever cannot. A representative of OCSE, an organization for cooperation and economic development among 31 democratic nations, warned Frankie and her student colleagues that their studies were in essence a waste of time in that they would have no bearing on their future earnings. Time is money. Ours is a culture that weighs the cost benefits of getting an education, of having children, of treating cancer and of maintaining clean air and water.

Frankie told me about the distinction Socrates made between the lawyer and the philosopher. In ancient Greece, the time a lawyer had to make his case was finite and strictly measured by water clock, or clepsydra.

The philosopher, on the other hand, could take all the time he wanted — years if necessary — to pursue the truth. Socrates says that those in the constant press of business have their souls stunted. They're compelled to do crooked things. Philosophers, free from the constraints of time, are also free thinkers. They disregard social convention, rank and inherited privilege and do not adhere to a religious persuasion or political party. This makes them politically dangerous.

In fact, Socrates was charged with impiety and corrupting the youth of Athens. When obligated to defend himself against the water clock, he ran out of time and was condemned to death.

British novelist Ian McEwan said of literature: "Imagining what it is like to be someone other than oneself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion and it is the beginning of morality."

Mariastella Gelmini: Limited resources.

Writing in Harper's, Mark Slouka argued recently that the value of teaching arts and humanities is civic. He says what rules us is "less the material world of goods and services than the immaterial one of whims, assumptions, delusions, and lies." Only by studying this inner world can we shape how it shapes us.

In a democracy, we must teach students to think critically, to ask questions and to resist manipulation and demagoguery. They must be knowledgeable about the world so they can make decisions that are compassionate and broadminded.

Democratic freedoms are not automatically associated with the free market or a growing economy. They must be nurtured and protected. When the humanistic subjects that nourish democracy are diminished, whether by political force, by funding cuts or by indifference, democracy itself is at risk.

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