Integration in the Humanities

Abstract

H OW to make the fullest and most effective use of its disciplines, not merely to present facts and to develop skills but also to give students a living sense of values and a power of choice and decision which satisfy human needs, is today one of the most difficult and pressing problems in higher education. The democratic way of life, effectively followed, presupposes the emergence of the whole man and the whole woman within each individual citizen. Quite apart from the hue and cry against democracy which comes from adherents to competing ways of life, this nation has moved steadfastly toward the realization of its goal. Its power of self-criticism has given it strength. During the last seventy years, a new system of specialization has undoubtedly distorted its conception of liberal or general education. The highly specialized scholar has often warped or hidden the whole man. That system of specialization, however, is of known origin and development and is now clearly and rightly up for a thoroughgoing appraisal. Its effects are everywhere evident. As early as I899, in his Talks to Teachers, William James noted the limitations of the Germanic ideal of specialization which had been introduced in this country two decades earlier and had taken hold: *the explicitly avowed aim of the higher education is to turn the student into an instrument for advancing scientific discovery. . . . to grind out in the requisite number of months some little pepper-corn of new truth worthy of being added to the store of extant human information on that subject.'