bad humanists

N. Ángel Pinillos asks, Why Are Humanists So Bad at Defending the Humanities? — and his answer is that humanists’ defenses of the humanities fail when they argue that the humanities have any kind of intrinsic, as opposed to instrumental, value. Now, Pinillos says that he happens to believe in the intrinsic value of the humanities, but people outside the humanistic disciplines don’t, so the intrinsic-value argument, “deployed as a public argument, has lost us the public. It has lost us the legislatures, the parents, the donors, the students, and — most painfully — many of our own colleagues.” So what we need to do instead is say things like this: You will, at some point, need to advocate for your child at her school. You will need to read a teacher’s email carefully enough to notice what it is and is not saying, and write a response that is firm without being inflammatory, and recognize when an administrator is performing concern rather than offering it. You will need to talk to a…