Save the Humanities by Flipping the Curriculum

James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal ^ | June 22, 2020 | Grattan Brown

[karpov]

For more than two decades, professors have been “flipping” classrooms to move course material online and use classroom time for student-centered activity and more complex, collaborative thinking. This flip strikes me as a good analogy for a needed reform: Flipping some required humanities courses from the first half to the second half of a college student’s education.

Higher ed leaders should replace lower-level humanities survey courses with an integrated series of upper-level courses that help students to think deeply about humanity and society. Moving most humanities courses to junior and senior years enables freshmen to declare a major and take its initial courses earlier. Students would have more time to explore different majors, settle into one, and prepare for a career in their field of study.

Why should students take any more than a few humanities courses and just train for a career? The humanities study the human being, and thus, the human context for every business deal and cultural activity, all scientific research, and every use of technology in communication, medicine, manufacturing, etc.

When we ponder new technologies like organ transplants in the 1950s and gene splicing today, we look at insights developed from the ancient world to the present. Those insights aren’t sound because they are old; they are sound because it didn’t take humanity very long to figure out certain characteristics of human success and failure and to explore fundamental human experiences. Great minds have found many ways to express those insights so that future peoples may use their works to sort out our aspirations, achievements, tragedies, and failures.

[Rurudyne]

In the hands of the Left they trend towards the inhumanities or scams to sell books no one would ever read for classes none would ever take without it being required.

[Starcitizen]

That’s what Coleman College of San Diego did when it was around (taught for them in 1998)

Taught all the computer science degree courses first then the junk, er humanities, later.

[Soul of the South]

The best thing the federal government can do for higher education is to end all funding for it. End scholarships, end research grants, end subsidies of any kind.

Take some of the savings and put it into assisting the states building strong vocational schools. Equip woodworking shops for instructing cabinet makers and trim carpenters. Equip automotive shops to train mechanics. Equip shops to teach HVAC repair, plumbing, and electrical wiring. Equip labs to teach methods and processes for laboratories. Equip computer labs to teach CAD and other computer skills.

If states or private institutions wish to fund social justice and ethnic studies degrees providing no marketable job skills so be it. If states and private foundations want to fund research into the mating habits of an obscure insect, or studies of racism in 16th century Great Britain, so be it. Stop spending federal education dollars on activity that does nothing to give students marketable skills.

[Hostage]

Excellent, timely, good points all around. Thanks for posting.