The Humanities and Substance.

• Author: Ricci, Patricia Likos
• Position: Review

Defining the Humanities: How Rediscovering a Tradition Can Improve Our Schools, With a Curriculum for Today's Students, by Robert E. Proctor. Second Edition. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998. 264 pp. $35 cloth. $15.95 paper.

"For one man writing is the beginning of insanity," wrote Petrarch, "for another, the way out of it." The recent spate of books on educational reform can be divided into either of these categories according to one's values. Although there is consensus among them that the ivory tower is under siege by a variety of intractable enemies of Western civilization--usually liberals, feminists, and multi-culturalists--no clear battle plan has emerged. Instead there is name-calling or nostalgia for a mythical time when the academy was an unassailable fortress of unquestioned authority.

Consequently the reissue of Robert E. Proctor's calm and carefully argued book has come at the right time. Written in a scholarly rather than polemical style, the book debates the issue of a structured curriculum without resorting to jargon or rancor. Having originally published the book in 1988 as Education's Great Amnesia: Reconsidering the Humanities from Petrarch to Freud, Proctor changed his diagnosis when he realized that "you can't forget what you never knew"(ix). Although the humanities were once synonymous with the study of the languages and culture of ancient Greece and Rome, he found that the term now refers to a grab-bag of college courses without any historical connection. Proctor deplores the general notion of the humanities as "a group of disciplines, juxtaposed to other groups, such as the sciences, the social sciences, and the arts, and with no particular connection to Western civilization"(ix). Hence his new title, Defining the Humanities: How Rediscovering a Tradition Can Improve Our Schoo ls, With a Curriculum for Today's Students. A professor of Italian at Connecticut College, Proctor stresses the "precise content" of the original studia humanitatis which arose in fifteenth century Italy "as a cultural revolution calling for the imitation of classical, as opposed to medieval, Latin, and for the study of Roman, and to a lesser extent Greek, literature, history, and moral philosophy as guides to individual and collective behavior" (xxiv).

Published a decade before the battle of the books was in full force, Proctor's recommendations can now be reevaluated in light of the many volumes on curriculum revision that have followed. In a new preface he distinguishes himself from those reformers who would structure the curriculum around a canon of texts designated "classics" by aesthetic rather than historical criteria. Shakespeare's works, for example, are "classics" in the former sense but not in the latter. For this reason he rejects the "Great Books" approach advocated by William J. Bennett ("To Reclaim a Legacy: Text of Report on the Humanities in Education," Chronicle of Higher Education 29, November 28, 1984); Harold Bloom (The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1994); and David Denby (Great Books: My Adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996). While Proctor prefers "Great Books" curricula to "the fragmented, incoh erent programs now in place," he is convinced that "studying the tradition of the humanities is an even better approach to general education because it forces us to think historically, and thus critically, about our cultural inheritance, including Great Books programs themselves" (xi).

The masterpiece theory of education, based on the belief that contact with great minds will beget more great thinkers, is not easy to justify in the present intellectual environment. Because the notion of "greatness" is too subjective to define and the number of worthy authors too large for a single foundation program to encompass, a canon will necessarily reflect personal tastes. Assertions of the universality of particular books inevitably meet with resistance from students who do not identify with the authors' points of view. Moreover, the presumption that the texts that have inspired me will inspire others generates resentment because it denies the...