‘We sense in our students a narrowing materialism’ means that our students’ concept of education…

  The preparation which a study of the humanities can provide stems from three observations about education in our world of accelerating social and technological change. First, with the rate of change, we cannot hope to train our student for specific technologies. That kind of vocational education is obsolescent. By the time the specific training will have been completed, the world will have moved on.

  If our education consists of narrow training, we will not be prepared to change. Second and paradoxically, what our student desire from their education is preparation for specific careers – business, engineering, medicine, computer programming and the like, but we will not be able to train them for a life-long career. Their confronting the depressed job market gives our students a certain anxiety, but the solution they seek in vocational training is not sufficient. Third, we sense in our students a narrow materialism, with the good life defined in terms of material comforts. Education then means learning to do a job which will make money. I see in this definition a limiting sense of what education and thus life offer, a definition which excludes joy and meaning. Our narrow approach to the study of the humanities responds to these three related problems. In our changing, yet narrow world, the teaching of the humanities finds one powerful justification – it teaches student how to think.