人文学科日渐衰落 英语作文

人文学科日渐衰落 英语作文

In the past few years, I've taught nonfiction writing to undergraduates and graduate students at Harvard, Yale, and Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism. Each semester I hope, and fear, that I will have nothing to teach my students because they already know how to write. And each semester I discover, again, that they don't.The teaching of the humanities has fallen on hard times. So says a new report on the state of the humanities by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences， and so says the experience of nearly everyone who teaches at a college or university. Undergraduates will tell you that they're under pressure — from their parents, from the burden of debt they incur, from society at large — to choose majors they believe will lead as directly as possible to good jobs. Too often, that means skipping the humanities.In other words, there is a new and narrowing vocational emphasis in the way students and their parents think about what to study in college. There is a certain literal-mindedness in the recent shift away from the humanities. It suggests a number of things.One, the rush to make education pay off presupposes that only the most immediately applicable skills are worth acquiring. Two, the humanities often do a bad job of explaining why the humanities matter. And three, the humanities often do a bad job of teaching the humanities. What many undergraduates do not know — and what so many of their professors have been unable to tell them — is how valuable the most fundamental gift of the humanities will turn out to be. That gift is clear thinking, clear writing and a lifelong engagement with literature.Writing well used to be a fundamental principle of the humanities, as essential as the knowledge of mathematics and statistics in the sciences. But writing well isn't merely a utilitarian

skill. It is about developing a rational grace and energy in your conversation with the world around you.