It should be self-evident that a well-conceived and integrated high school program in humanities is not possible in practice unless the philosophy of education which prevails is based upon faith in the traditional moral, intellectual, social, and aesthetic normative principles of the liberal arts.
[This post continues my series on the essays in Educating for Virtue, edited by Joseph Baldacchino. You can find previous posts in the series here, here, and here.]
Peter J. Stanlis’s “The Humanities in Secondary Education: Practical Advice for the Classroom Teacher” is by far the longest essay in Educating for Virtue. It covers a lot of ground, and I’m afraid my necessarily brief treatment of it will be lacking, but I’ll do my best.
Stanlis (1919-2011) is best known for his pioneering scholarship on Edmund Burke in the 1950s. He rejected the received wisdom on Burke to argue that the 18th-century parliamentarian was a natural law thinker and not just a capable defender of British tradition. His most influential book is Edmund Burke and Natural Law (1958), to which Russell Kirk wrote the foreword. Kirk and Stanlis maintained a decades-long friendship, and Stanlis’s papers are now housed at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal in Mecosta, MI.
![Peter Stanlis, Author at The Imaginative Conservative Peter Stanlis, Author at The Imaginative Conservative](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F583f4210-1b24-4f04-bab2-358497b9a166_749x425.png)
Like the other contributors to Educating for Virtue, Stanlis endorses Irving Babbitt’s educational vision, and his proposals for humanities instruction can be seen as an attempt to translate Babbitt’s ideas from the college to the high school level. Early in the essay, he declares, “It should be self-evident that a well-conceived and integrated high school program in humanities is not possible in practice unless the philosophy of education which prevails is based upon faith in the traditional moral, intellectual, social, and aesthetic normative principles of the liberal arts.”
Stanlis calls for a four-year program of humanities instruction laid out in the following manner:
9th grade: survey of Western civilization
10th grade: survey of European history
11th grade: survey of English history; survey of English literature
12th grade: survey of American history; survey of American literature
(Recall that multiculturalism was not really a thing until the 1990s, so few would have batted an eye at this exclusive focus on the Western world when the essay was published in 1988.)
Stanlis embarks on an extended digression of five or more pages to recommend that teachers of literature get their foot in the door with students by devoting serious class time to the “two cultures” of science and literature. He posits that the general public has a superstitious awe of science and envisions an “iron curtain” between the “practical” world of science and the “impractical” world of literature that is even more impenetrable than the Iron Curtain separating the West from the Soviet bloc. Undeterred, he speculates, “Perhaps the primary function of the humanities, both in high school and college, is to enable students to know, understand, penetrate, and remove that cultural iron curtain.”
Stanlis recommends that the teacher first establish the different domains of science and literature to students and explain how they provide different ways of interpreting the same reality. Then the students must discover the difference between scientific and linguistic symbols; whereas the scientist is limited the one-to-one correspondence between terms and their precise denotations, the poet engages in metaphor and open-ended, ambiguous meaning. The lesson Stanlis draws from this contrast is bracing:
From these necessary limitations of science in dealing with human nature students can learn that any attempt to reduce complex human affairs to any quantitative formula is fraught with dangers and difficulties, and ultimately doomed to failure. This is a very valuable lesson in an age dominated by science. It is important in the intellectual development of high school students that they should acquire a healthy skepticism toward any claim that man’s discursive reasoning processes—inductive, deductive, or analytical—can arrive at final answers to anything that involves the human spirit. Once a student understands that excessive rationalism is not reasonable, that we can’t translate simple logic into complex life, he can more readily learn to appreciate the unique role of literature and the humanities in his education.
Much of the remainder of the essay consists of Stanlis’s description of his ideal literature class, one based on a college course he actually took at Middlebury College in the 1940s. Classes consist of Socratic discussion. Students submit written work three times per week and must respond to readings before they are discussed in class so that they are not unduly influenced by the professor or classmates. Each student has a regularly scheduled one-on-one conference with the professor.
We must never give students the false impression that a prose summary of a poem, however accurate and thorough, is the equivalent of the poem. A poem is always more than the good prose it might have been.
The representative selection of readings from Beowulf to T.S. Eliot clearly communicates to students the rise of the conflict between the “two cultures” in the 18th and 19th centuries. It also shows that the relationship between religion and science was not seen as adversarial until anti-religious figures such as Diderot decided to wage war on orthodoxy. Stanlis singles out Gulliver’s Travels as an essential work to be taught in high school.
Stanlis makes several interesting observations along the way. For example, he calls for a recovery of the pursuit of objective norms of literary criticism such as those described in Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism. This endeavor “has been wholly lost to contemporary men and women who believe that all literary judgments are wholly private, subjective, arbitrary, and solipsistic.”
Elsewhere he echoes Robert Frost’s sentiment that an essential goal of a literature class is to cultivate “disciplined enthusiasm” for poems, short stories, novels, and plays in the students. Another nice passage: “We must never give students the false impression that a prose summary of a poem, however accurate and thorough, is the equivalent of the poem. A poem is always more than the good prose it might have been.” He spends several pages providing a case study of poetry analysis by discussing Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”
Stanlis seems to be under no illusions about the likelihood of the widespread adoption of his recommendations. He lists several obstacles to the full embrace of humanities education at the high school level:
A loosey-goosey elective system (my term, not his) that allows many students to graduate without cultural literacy or basic skills in reading or writing
A teacher-certification system stressing methodology over subject mastery and technical specialization over “a high level of general literacy and knowledge”
Administrators who fail to make educational quality their primary concern
Vocationalism stemming from a utilitarian-materialist philosophy of life and education
Ideologies that seek to hijack the schools and make them vehicles of radical social transformation
Near the end of the essay, Stanlis considers and critiques the attempts by social scientists to subject discussion of human questions to the methods of the natural sciences. I was glad to see this acknowledgment, having partaken in many similar debates over the years. He concludes the section by saying, “Until there is a return to the humanistic tradition of political and social studies we can expect the dehumanizing of mankind to continue.”
I think I have hit all the high points of Stanlis’s essay in this summary. My evaluation of it similar to what I’ve said about other essays in the volume. There’s a lot of good, foundational content here in terms of recommendations for high school curriculum. Most of the critique of the obstacles in the way of humanities education are the same as they were 35 years ago. The major area where the essay could be updated is a reckoning with the abandoning of pretended objectivity in favor of social activism by large swathes of the humanities profession today.
I liked this essay and feel as though I ought to read Edmund Burke and Natural Law, which I have never read before, sometime soon.