Grammar Gazette- Issue 2, 2017

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THE HUMANITIES AND BEING HUMAN

Ms Alison Dare with her Year 12 Ancient History class reflecting on the nature of historical causation

AUTHOR Ms Alison Dare Director of Humanities

From an historical perspective all education was once more explicitly connected. The earliest schools in ancient Athens for example saw knowledge as integrated and the various subject disciplines such as mathematics, logic and geography as branches of the new humanistic curiosity in a world which offered endless possibilities for enlightenment. The famed ‘father of history’, Herodotus, embodied this curiosity in that it embraced a variety of inquiries and he may also be recognised as the first to write a major work on geography and ethnography. His interests ‘were omnivorous, from natural history to anthropology, from early legend to the events of the recent past and the nature of Greek liberty’ (Thomas in Strassler, 2008). In our own times, as knowledge has become more complex, it has also fragmented and perhaps lost some of this grand and unified vision. The concept of knowledge itself can seem quaint in a highly competitive environment of limited university places and an unstable employment market. Will the careers that students seek now still exist by the time they finish university? What new and unforeseen careers

While all true education is ultimately about enabling the individual to become more fully human, an education in the humanities is perhaps more explicit in this objective. This is attributable to the unique way in which a humanities framework conceives of the world. Recognising that humans are more than the sum of their parts is a distinguishing characteristic of humanistic study and it is this approach which sets it apart from many other fields of knowledge which focus on knowing ‘about’ humans — a process which is inherently reductionist. As its name suggests, humanities is about the human story in all of its complexity and richness — what we do and the forces that compel us to do both great and terrible things. As with all good stories, the human one relies on imagination and creativity, not just the bare facts. It provides context to a complex world and thus enables the individual to make sense of that world and find her place within it.

GRAMMAR GAZETTE