CIDRAL Public Lecture: Sander Gilman (Emory): ‘The Humanities Make You a Better Person! A Foundational Myth About Higher Education’
| Dates: | 26 February 2019 |
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| Times: | 17:00 - 19:00 |
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| What is it: | Lecture |
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| Organiser: | School of Arts, Languages and Cultures |
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| Who is it for: | University staff, External researchers, Adults, Current University students, General public |
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This event is part of CIDRAL's Spring 2019 programme, 'Work, Leisure, Culture'.
Sander Gilman (University Professor in the Liberal Arts and Sciences, Emory University) will deliver a public lecture entitled ‘The Humanities Make You a Better Person! A Foundational Myth About Higher Education’.
The debate about what function the humanities should have in higher education seems to have been resolved. They have no value at all and should simply be phased out, even if, for the moment, they continue to be taught by low paid part-time workers, whose economic status reflects the status of their subjects. Certainly this is not true across the world, but it is a hyperbolic summary of the way that politicians and even some academics (usually not humanists) argue in today’s neo-liberal university. Learn (and teach) only those things that will get you a good (meaning well-paying) job! The lecture will look at one of the sources of such a dismissal of the humanities as a central aspect of higher education, the claim, rooted in the 19th century university, that the humanities actually make you a morally and ethically better person, while the sciences and technology are ‘merely’ crafts, indeed perhaps not at all appropriate subjects for students at universities. And will propose an alternative for the 21st century.
Travel and Contact Information
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Samuel Alexander Lecture Theatre
Samuel Alexander Building
Manchester
