"Humanitas" and the Triumph of the Machine

Abstract

It has become customary within recent years to ask the question: What should be the role of the humanities in education? In a society rushing from one crisis to another seeking quick, easy solutions to extremely difficult problems, it is not surprising that the humanities might be viewed by many as an easy-going panacea for all the ills which plague American life. However, the very fact that the question needs to be asked betrays a far deeper, more fundamental educational malaise than any easy panacea might resolve. It is reasonably clear that the humanities do not represent the vital center of American education. If, indeed, there is a vital center, it appears dominated more by social utility, control, and efficiency than by concerns which enhance those more uniquely human qualities. Although the educational literature in the post-World War II period was marked by expressions of concern for the individual,l the direction that American education took was more along the lines laid down by The Educational Policies Commission's report on Manpower and Education (1956).2 In the midst of cold war tensions, the Commission addressed itself to the problem of how education could more efficiently meet the needs of the rapidly expanding industrial-military complex. In this