What Education Forgot
The humanities matter because they prepare us for judgement, attention, and self-confrontation.
Deep Life Reflections | Essay 167 | James Gibb
We have become very good at preparing people for work, and very bad at preparing them for life.
In the 2017 film, Columbus, a young librarian, Gabriel, offers some thoughts to his friend Casey on attention spans. They’re both teenagers. He’s just read something interesting: that instead of the much-declared crisis of attention, there is instead a crisis of interest. “Kids pay attention to things that interest them” he says. “The real question is what interests them. Or us. Are we losing interest in things that matter? Are we losing interest in everyday life?”
What consistently holds our interest forms our habits, our standards, and our sense of what matters. This formation happens in the ordinary substance and minutiae of life. It’s where character is formed. This is a lifelong struggle, a constant battle between our noblest aspirations toward the common good and our natural inclination to be thoroughly absorbed in ourselves. We know as human beings we are flawed. At our worst, human beings are capable of the most inexplicable acts of cruelty and malevolence. But at our best, our yearnings to experience and create beauty, love, fairness, and truth can lead us to remarkable acts of compassion and feats of accomplishment.
The humanities matter because they are one of the few places left where that deeper formation is still taken seriously. The humanities concern themselves with the parts of human culture that endure through the ages: literature, history, philosophy, art, religion, and languages. Civilisations across history have tried to pass down the best of their way of life from one generation to the next. At their best, the humanities continue that work. Those who teach them do so because they believe such studies change lives, not least by fashioning judgement, character, and purpose.
However, what education increasingly offers is much narrower. Students are increasingly seen only in economic terms rather than as social and moral beings too. Students are trained to specialise, optimise, and make sure they get a return on their investment. A long-running annual study by a U.S. university found that in the 1960s, more than 80% of freshmen said they hoped college would help them “develop a meaningful philosophy of life.” Today, more than 80% say its purpose is to help them become “very well off financially.” Education has a practical purpose of course—to prepare the next generation for work and economic contribution—but that preparation is stronger when it sits inside a wider effort to form judgement and character by learning from the wisdom of the past.
When I was at university, I studied English Literature, Political Science, and History in my first two years. In all these classes, there were serious questions: Who am I? What is this world? What is true? Who writes truth?What should I do next? Reading Sophocles and Dante, learning about different political systems, and understanding the conditions that created fascist and totalitarian states helped develop in me an allergy to ideology and certainty. They taught me the value of self-doubt and the habit of scrutiny.
While there are far fewer people majoring in subjects like History and English Literature today, I contend that the real loss is that fewer people are being initiated into the struggle of becoming a serious person. By serious, I don’t mean joyless. I mean someone awake to the difficulty and responsibility of being here; someone less likely to drift, sneer, or treat lightly what others fought hard to build. This is what these studies help forge. History and literature deepen our understanding of how human beings think, behave, suffer, believe, and deceive themselves in a complicated world. Whatever career someone chooses, this is invaluable knowledge.
The study of the humanities is not about creating aloof intellectuals. It is about forming good people: people who are responsible and generous. They take others and the world they have inherited seriously. A mind properly educated—whether through an institution or by its own effort—is not simply filled with information but awakened, even ignited, with a desire for originality and a desire for truth.
To study the humanities is to confront tragedy, beauty, conflict, morality, power, love, doubt, destiny. We learn that life usually is not a series of crises calling for huge and heroic moral deeds, but a series of smaller, seemingly insignificant decisions and nondecisions. Being a good and serious person isn’t about being the most read or having the ability to quote at will. It’s more about having the right perceptions, intentions, and emotional responses toward others in the many and varied circumstances of life we are thrown into.
That’s why there remains a hunger for this kind of education, even outside the university. The author Ted Gioia recently created a 52-week course in the humanities on his Substack as an accessible entry point for anyone willing to begin. For each week, he recommends something to read, something to listen to, and a work of art. In the first week, he offered Plato’s The Final Days of Socrates, Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier, and Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Socrates.
When asked why he created such a course, Gioia said many people still want this kind of immersive education in the humanities, especially at a time when apps, social media, and digital culture degrade attention and make deep thought harder to sustain.
“People want to learn how to think more deeply, not just via soundbites and scrolling videos… Our brains feel under attack… it’s not surprising that a growing number of people are asking if these books, so rich in tradition and influence, might hold the key.”
Gioia also embodies that humanistic principle of avoiding certainty: “At every step, you are encouraged to fight with these authors. Even when you disagree, you will learn how to think more deeply, more clearly, by confronting viewpoints from outside your comfort zone.”
It’s not that books have all the answers. They clearly don’t. Writers, however brilliant and however much they move us, are as human and therefore flawed as the rest of us. Dostoyevsky was a lifelong gambler; Kafka ended a long-term relationship because he was too afraid of rejection. The point of books is they demand a response. We wrestle with them. They plant seeds.
There is still a hunger. Gioia is right. People still want help thinking deeply and choosing well. It comes back to that crisis of interest. The interest is there, even if much of modern life works to obscure it. The humanities persist because they answer a need that productivity cannot.
The humanities fail miserably at making life easier to optimise. They fail miserably in giving us a tidy view of the world and everything in it.
But they make life harder to waste.
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