Who Killed the Liberal Arts? | 5 Minute Video
What in the world happened to the liberal arts? A degree in the humanities used to transmit the knowledge and wisdom imbued in the works of great Western artists, writers, musicians and thinkers like Shakespeare and Mozart. But today, that same degree stresses Western racism, sexism, imperialism, and other ills and sins that reinforce a sense of victimhood and narcissism. So, what happened? Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute explains.
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Script:
Here’s a tragedy, in its way, on the level of King Lear or Hamlet.
To get a bachelor’s degree in English literature at the University of California at Los Angeles, one of the most prestigious colleges in America, you must take courses in Gender, Race, Ethnicity, Disability or Sexuality Studies; in Imperial Transnational or Post-Colonial Studies; and in Critical Theory. But you are not required to take a single course in Shakespeare.
In other words, the UCLA English faculty is now officially indifferent as to whether an English major has ever read a word of the greatest writer of the English language, but is determined to expose students, according to the course catalogue, to “alternative rubrics of gender, sexuality, race, and class.” Sadly, UCLA is not leading a movement; it is following one.
That movement seeks to infuse the humanities curriculum with the characteristic academic traits of our time: narcissism, an obsession with victimhood, and a relentless determination to reduce the stunning complexity of the past to identity and class politics.
In so doing, the modern professoriate has repudiated the great humanist tradition on which much of Western Civilization — and the Western university — has been built. That tradition was founded on an all-consuming desire to engage with the genius of the past.
The 14th century Florentine poet Francesco Petrarch triggered the explosion of knowledge known today as the Renaissance with his discovery of Livy’s monumental history of Rome and the letters of Cicero, the Roman statesman whose ideas would inspire the likes of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.
Petrarch’s burning drive to recover the lost cultures of Greece and Rome was widely shared and propelled the Renaissance humanists to search for long-forgotten manuscripts in remote castles and monasteries across Europe.
The great universities spread this new knowledge across the Western world, teaching it to students who in turn taught it to the next generation.
Now compare the classical humanists’ hunger for learning with the resentment of a Columbia University student, who had been required by Columbia’s freshman core curriculum to study Mozart. “Why did I have to listen…to this Mozart?” she complained. “My problem with the core is that it upholds the premises of white supremacy and racism. There are no women, no people of color.”
These are not the idiosyncratic thoughts of one foolish student. They represent the dominant ideology in the humanities today. This student learned to think like this at the university itself.
Rather than encouraging students to engage with the great minds of the past, today’s humanities professors seek only to confirm their own worldview.
The annual gathering of America’s literature faculty put at the top of its 2014 agenda the discussion of “embodiment, poverty, climate, activism, reparation, and the condition of being unequally governed,” all in order to “expose key sites of vulnerability and assess possibilities for change.”
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Why would you think that Petrarch would care about Shakespeare? This idiosyncratic obsession with a common playwright of an island far from Athens or Rome is not what the Enlightenment taught. What happened to the liberal arts when we could substitute local modern texts in the common tongue for the actual writings of Rome and Greece in Latin?
I was just assigned to write a paper on the rhetorical fallacies being used in this video hahahaaha
Can’t believe that this was 8 years ago! No wonder the dark ages are coming now, as we speak. 😢
Imagine taking a useless degree and making it more useless.
I needed 120 credit hours to graduate from Oklahoma State University in the late ‘60s.
Four hours of humanities was required. I took the humanities of the ancient world. OSU’s Humanities Department was so excellent that I took four more hours of modern humanities.
I have forgotten most of what I learned at OSU but taking eight hours of humanities was the best thing I did academically!
It IS A TRAGEDY that UCLA students are being cheated out of the real humanities experience.
Heather Mac Donald’s assertion in this video seems so bazaar I question its validity. I cannot believe “educators” can possibly be that ignorant.
College degrees are essentially worthless today in terms of true education; not to mention, most colleges and universities are actually “selling” them, i.e. show up, pay the ridiculous tuition, and get a degree. It’s quite sad.
I majored in English and philosophy during the 1980s and never had ro take those classes. Times have indeed changed. College should teach one how to think, but not what to think .
China will rule the world with A.I
The purpose of humanitas (or humanities) was to lift oneself above the cares of the world to learn to become or even what it means to be human. The trouble with post modern philosophy is that it rejects this end as merely a narrative and due to its atheistic underpinning, focuses the mind on the here and now. The term liberal arts is derived from the concept that education is for a free person who is not bound to economic concerns. It was abandoned by the progressive model, which focuses on getting a job or social change. Liberal arts, however, focus on the permanence of truth and the desire to lift oneself up to what is true, good, and beautiful. Unlike the Marxist paradigm, liberal arts and humanities focuses beyond the material to the infinite and eternal immaterial. So when you are sitting there wondering what algebra or geometry is for, remember you are playing with truths that will exist long after you are gone. You are looking into a universe that only the mind can perceive and yet affects all things touching the senses.
Dead 6 years Liberal Education Woe
Another fun fact: Petrarch's contribution to the humanist subject it's pretty marginal, and Renaissance got it's golden age in the 400s. All the works of Petrarch's "latin" period are hugely dismissed by most people as for it's pompous content, as what got really popular was instead his sonets contained in the Canzoniere, which himself admitted he absolutely hated as he didn't find them ambitious as his other works. He was also a priest that married and got a son, and obviously fell in love with a minor like all poets of that period did, but I'm not here to judge. Italians find it important as italian language is mostly composed of the language written by Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, and that was the call of Manzoni in the 800s as people did actually forget the importance of these work at that point, most people in that period read garbage books like Sherlock Holmes or something, and it was 500 years after that light was put on again on these works.
Anyways, humanism as an ideology spread in the 400s for the influence of Lorenzo De' Medici, and it was based off from early Hellenistic ideology that praised occasional sex, orgies and getting absolutely trashed on alcohol as getting older sucked and you needed to be alive beforehand. That's when artists started to illegally paint nudes, as Michelangelo notoriously clashed with the Pope that commanded all of his nude figures on the Sistine Chapel to be covered on the genitals by mediocre artists. That's also the period when Florence notoriously became the gay capital of Europe, and it was greatly supported by the Republic of Florence that took the power as an outcome of a hilarious three way election campaign after the autistic son of Lorenzo was exiled with all the Medici household, and Savonarola being sent to stake by an order of the Pope himself because he literally was too much of a radical franciscan bigot.
Fun fact: first humanists in Renaissance embraced every single aspect of the greek philophers' methods, looking more like weebs of a sort, even going to the lenght of practising pederasty to very, very young students
Hilarious. We only finally see a woman at the 4:40 mark, a woman who couldn't use her real name back then because of patriarchy. You know, that thing we're never supposed to talk about, according to MacDonald? lol
Heather is AMAZING. We need more thinkers like her .
Now, the question is how do we fix it? Well, here’s what I am going to do: read those great works and listen to those great musical pieces in a personally-motivated humanities study. The Academy of Ideas has a great video about The Benefits of Reading the Great Books that I highly recommend a watch of.
Hi, a Liberal Arts graduate from Asia here. It's funny because you mentioned that the current Liberal Arts curriculum specifically in the US, is governed by "Narcissism, Obsesssion with Victimhood, and Identity & Class Politics." But I see all three of them in your argument.
You lament that kids nowadays aren't encouraged to learn about the 'past great minds' of the European societies, and instead are encouraged to learn about more inclusive writers and artists, even if the 'past great minds' created–in your word–"the most stable and free republic in world history" which in this video I guess refers to the United States of America, and which "led to the West's rule of law and unparalleled prosperity".
Well, isn't it narcissistic to think that US is the most stable and free republic, not only in this era, but the whole world history? Is there an evidence to back up the "most stable" and "free" arguments to describe the United States of America, a country of which other countries in different continents mostly hears about divided political agendas, and black versus white political arguments; where even the simple issue of whether the COVID-19 exists divided the country? A country where people who wear masks for, not only their own health and safety, but also for other people, are criticised? And feel free to argue (because that's what's free learning and Liberal Arts is about) of whether the COVID-19 exists or not, but I have had my own conviction because I have had family members, friends, and family of friends got the illness.
I haven't even started how much of a narcissistic and self-centered the statement "the West's rule of law and unparalleled prosperity" is. It's like you live on your own little island, easy to make generalist and superlative arguments about your island because the ocean to other lands is covered with fog. The truth is, there are countless cultures and races and ethnicities in this world, unless someone really does visit them all and make a study and thorough comparison between one and each culture and open a discussion based on their findings with their peers, could one really call one culture the best out of them all?
The lamentation itself is an expression of victimhood and identity politics where what you feel to be your culture and your class' important heritage is forgotten and not taught formally anymore in the classrooms, where now a more inclusive curriculum takes their place, to encourage students to be more inclusive as well.
I've read George Eliot, I've read Shakespeare. I've listened to Mozart, I've listened to Bach. I've seen Van Dyke's works, and I've seen many of the old European masters' paintings. While I appreciate them all (especially Eliot), most of the people in my life haven't read or listened or seen them, and they live through life just fine. They read, listen, and see what their culture brings them, and they are just fine. They don't miss a thing–it's not a way of life.
And you know what? I think George Eliot would disagree with your arguments, it's the opposite of what she wrote, which are about inclusivity and about empathy for the misunderstood, for the marginalised. She would encourage gender, race, ethnicity, disability and sexuality, imperialist transnational and post-colonial studies, and would agree with those curriculum taking the place of the more white Euro-centric studies.
This is embarrassing, the foundation of western philosophy and art is questioning why things are the way they are and therefore ask the question can we make it better
The presenter doesn't care to ask questions at all they blindly accept that they are stories that should be taught because they should be taught extracting no value nor the message of many of these stories
So liberal arts and humanities are like life advice and stuff right.
This video is the definition of feelings over facts. She provides little to no empirical evidenced attempting to debunk the premises of some of the more progressive thing she CLAIMS are being taught in university, and just vaguely gestures that they are bad.
This is ridiculous propaganda. Study what about Shakespeare exactly? The social conditions of his time which led to his work or just "Shakespeare".
The videos uses Shakespeare and Mozart as hierarchal symbols of knowledge. Ie. The majority, the liberal democracy.
Nevermind the video quite literally promotes an ideology of its own, learn what about Shakespeare? What about Mozart? Both were part of specific. movements in time, so how did we further understand their work? By applying a dialectic of course. They arts doesn't stay still, it is an ever changing conversation that we are all the beneficiaries of. This video is ridiculous.
Is this true?
You wanna learn about classic literature? Major in classic literature. Blamo, problem solved.
Lol man it's called "liberal" arts for a reason. It's progressive, students are learning about modern culture which is always changing. Of course they aren't gonna focus on pre-colonial literature that doesn't make sense. The world changes you gotta understand that.
Narcissism, Obsession with Victimhood… that sounds like Donald J Trump to me…
Like all Prager U "educational" videos this is incredibly biased and lacking in well established arguments. I have a Masters in English. She's talking out of her ass…we've had literary theory as a field of study for a long time…and it has changed focus and practice many times over the decades, much like how literature changes and evolves alongside society. Shakespeare is an optional course as UCLA requires multiple courses from multiple time periods on their curriculum… Shakespeare is not being "cancelled" here, conservatives. Y'all do love those buzzwords. While I greatly value Shakespeare, his works won't necessarily translate to every field of literary study. Someone wanting to focus on researching South American lit may not see much need to study Shakespeare personally. The funny thing is that y'all want to raise up Shakespeare, but if you bothered to learn how to read his works, you'd want to censor much of it. He takes stances and makes jokes that would trigger many conservatives. But all y'all grasp basically is that Hamlet held a skull once and it looked cool.
I highly recommend that anyone who wants to hear solid arguments go check out Big Joel's YouTube video on how fallacious and absurd Prager U videos are.
This video is ok 6/10
Why is the past full of geniuses but not the present? I think we idolize the past.
PragerU straight up lied.
If you look at the UCLA English major requirements on their website, there are not 1, but 4 historical language requirements. In addition, there are two more english-specific electives that one must take and a capstone course. And if you look at the course list, half of the courses of "Literature from 1500-1700 are on Shakespeare. I am currently a college student, and what I have learned from my education is to verify information and ensure that the truth comes out.
Also, why are people judging the curriculum when they haven't even taken the courses? Why is a gender studies course inherently bad? Why are courses on race bad? Why would these not be a valuable addition to traditional English courses? Shakespeare, Emerson, Whitman, and other great writers of the English language are in constant contact with racial, gender and philosophical questions of their time. Understanding that history with other supplemental classes would then strengthen a students knowledge of the context of the reading.
2:24 but not in Spain, isn't it?
Imagine a computer science course where you never actually so much as use a computer. That’s how stupid the universities have been for a very long time when it comes to humanities. Where they have become expert, however, is in denigration of those who disagree with their ideology. In this they excel without peer.
The bit about requiring to take a woke course is scary. Conservatives should go on offense and create anti-woke literature (and other) courses. The conservative version of gender studies/critical race theory/etc.