What You’re Really Learning in the Humanities

A quick heads-up: we've just launched the second session of our members' workshop, and this month we'll give you a complete guide to analytical reading for you to tackle any non-fiction book with ease!

(1) The Idea: The Skill No One Talks About

This is a question that haunts anyone who teaches the humanities: What the hell am I actually giving to my students?

Unlike the obvious suspects like Law, Engineering or even Psychology, the humanities have always struggled to identify a clear skillset that they’re teaching their students. It seems like any skill we point to only covers a fraction of what learning entails in the humanities.

Even worse, if you go and buy a book like: How to Read Literature/History/Philosophy, these books rarely contain a list of cut-and-dry skills. They love to dance around the borders as they refuse to spell out what you’re getting out of it.

So, which is it? Are all of these educators in the humanities idiots, or is it the case that we’re expecting the wrong things from learning the humanities? I’m afraid the latter holds more water.

See, the humanities are really good at one thing: mapping out the human condition through history, philosophy, literature, etc. And given that being human is, let’s be frank, an unpredictable fucking mess, the education we’ll receive from this journey cannot be dissected and framed in an elegant formula.

Yes, there are skills you can learn like reading, writing and making arguments, but these are second-order skills governed by a master skill: developing an eye to detect the human condition and the language to articulate it. In other words, most of the learning in the humanities is retrospective. We must experience first, think later.

Take my bread and butter, literature, for example. Out of the entire 5 years of shuffling papers in academia, I’ve never found a single class that treated reading literature as a step-by-step technical skill. The main medium of teaching was demonstration, where a professor would parse an excerpt in front of the class. And over time, these demonstrations became different windows onto an otherwise mundane poem/story/excerpt. I was able to borrow my instructors’ eyes and internalise their perception of human nature, and now these lenses are the cornerstones of how I read.

This doesn’t mean that certain technical skills are useless, but they play secondary roles. Writing, for example, will teach you how to stress-test your perception of a text/event/artwork into a coherent line of thinking, and skills like Analytical Reading will widen the aperture of your lens onto human nature. But the endgame here remains the same: developing a keen perception of how complicated and fascinating it is to be human.  

So, next time when you listen to a podcast, read a book or watch a lecture on a topic in the humanities, don’t expect a bullet list of cut-and-dry skills. Instead, ask yourself: what is this instructor/writer/professor’s perception of the human condition, and how can I internalise this new lens onto the world? And over time, you’ll build a powerful arsenal out of these lenses, and begin to see beauty, tragedy and vibrant colours in the seemingly mundane.

(2) The Prompts

1: Choose a book you’ve read recently and complete this stem: If I see the world through this author’s eyes, I’ll start to see ___________________

2: Make a list of areas that you would love to explore and reframe your expectations. Instead of thinking: I want to learn about x, reframe the expectation as: It’ll be cool to look at the world through the lens of x. This will free up a lot of strain and permit you to explore.  

This Week on the Coffee Wednesday Podcast:

This week's episode is all about learning new skills. Why is it the case that we never feel ready to jump into something new? So with that in mind, I challenged the idea that we have to start from the basics and suggested an alternative way to acquire new skills rapidly through a key reframe. Listen to the episode here:

[Apple Podcast | Spotify | Anywhere You Get Your Podcasts]