Asking the Right Questions: The Role of the Humanities

How many times have you heard someone say "There's no such thing as a dumb question."? I'd venture to guess it's far too many. Actually, I know it's far too many because if you've heard that phrase even once, you've heard it more times than its absolute lack of veracity warrants. The idea that all inquiry is good is a myth that plagues our society.

For example, the sociologist who asks about the average SAT scores of people from different races. The answer to such a question is useless. Consider the other relevant questions that could be asked: we could assess childhood malnutrition and childhood healthcare by race and how it influences brain development. We could examine the distribution of race in the best schools around the country. We could examine the the rates at which students of different races consume the services of private tutors. While the first question leaves you with a simple answer that SAT scores of Whites and Asians are higher than those of Blacks and Latinos, the answer to any of the subsequent questions demonstrates the racism inherent in our society - that certain groups of people are systematically denied access to the same goods and services of others.

In a society that is inherently unequally raced, asking a question about race that fails to take into account the factors that produce the answer is not merely idiotic, it is dangerous. It leads us into a minefield of half-truths (or non-truths) and assumptions out of which it is impossible to extricate ourselves. A society as complex as our own commands answers worthy of such complexity. To make certain that we ask the right questions to get these necessarily complex answers, there must be some safeguard to ensure that we do not ask the wrong questions. That safeguard is the humanities.

Much has been made over the past few decades of the benefits of interdisciplinarity. The great benefit of the liberal arts, of course, is that one learns across a multiplicity of disciplines. The combination of the enterprises of the different disciplines is, I believe the goal. Yet too often the definition of interdisciplinarity is too narrow, particularly when talk about broad interdisciplinarity (the sciences and the humanities, for example). Ted Toadvine has pointed out six such myths of broad interdisciplinary study in Volume 1 of Thinking Nature.

Toadvine's brief article merits a full reading, for his conclusions are prescient and insightful. He argues that great interdisciplinary work doesn't come from having a poet and chemist study electrons or having a physicist and a painter produce a painting. Rather, the best interdisciplinary work comes when the different disciplines work together to perform the tasks to which they are best suited. And the scientific task to which the humanities are best suited is to help scientists ask the right questions.

As Toadvine rightly points out, "If our typical way of framing environmental problems privileges the kinds of 'solutions' that empirical approaches will provide, it does so precisely by occluding other ways of framing the problems, say, in terms of justice or value or freedom or self-identity." The humanities, then, provide us with the opportunity to ask the meta-level questions, the questions about our questions. How do the questions we ask prevent us from getting comprehensive answers to the problems we perceive? Or better stated: what other questions should we be asking to ensure that we do not overlook essential pieces of information?

At present, the humanities are coming under ever more intense pressure to justify their continued existence (read: funding). No cellist is going to produce a cure for cancer, and no novelist is going to invent a cheaper form of space travel. But critical training in the humanities provides a check against the type of inane question-asking that continues to guide the curiosity of eugenicists* even in our own time.

*This is fairly reprehensible. The comments are particularly ugly.

Homework Limits in NJ; A Ban on Gothic Cats in PA; Race-Related Deaths in AL

Having gone through the newspapers and various online sources earlier today, I found it to be an exceptionally odd news day. Three particularly absurd stories caught my attention, and so I thought I'd bring them to yours.

1.) The first story comes to us from Galloway, New Jersey where the school board will vote later this summer on whether or not to limit homework to 10 minutes per night per grade level as well as whether or not to ban homework on school vacations, weekends, and holidays. While homework can certainly be taxing on young students and is sometimes not helpful to the learning process, placing limits on homework of this variety is akin to throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Some homework, after all, is helpful. I'm also puzzled as to why the school board thinks it should have such oversight over teachers.

Further befuddling is how the time limits will be measured. It's no secret that it will take different students different amounts of time to complete the same assignment, so is the limit measured by the slowest student in the class, the fastest student in the class, or an average? Before you suggest that I'm being pedantic, what if the parents of the slowest student in the class complain because he is having to do 35 minutes of homework a night in 2nd grade? Almost all the other students in the class get their assignments done in 20 minutes, but it takes this guy a bit longer. Will the teacher be forced to reduce the homework for everyone to ensure that the slowest guy doesn't exceed the limit? The teacher may fear retribution from the school board if she doesn't.

At a time when American education keeps losing ground on the rest of the developed world, it seems the absolutely wrong decision to reduce the amount of work we expect of our children. Rather than limits, we should have minimums. Everyone should be expected to do at least 'x' amount of homework each night. A limit on homework addresses a symptom (useless and too many assignments) of the larger problem that the education system is broken. We need homework and lots of it, but we need it to be the right type of homework. We need homework reform, not homework repeal.

2.) The funniest of the three absurd stories today comes from the lovely state of Pennsylvania, where a panel of judges hearing an appeal have ruled that a woman who pierced cats and bound their tails to give them a gothic look is guilty of cruel treatment of animals. While I think many would agree that binding the tail of a cat is probably cruel, the piercings represent a bit of a gray area. Is this just another area in which we insist upon more "humane" treatment for animals than for humans (as with euthanasia)?

In her defense, the defendant argued that the statutes were vague, and that such veterinary procedures as declawing cats or cutting a dog's vocal cords could also be reasonably seen to fit the criteria of "acts that maim, mutilate, torture, or disfigure the animal." So you can give your daughter a piercing at the age of five, but if you try and do it to your cat, you'll be convicted of a crime. Somebody has to explain this one to me.

The best thing about this bit of news is that I get to reference one of the greatest historical articles ever written - "The Great Cat Massacre." I've posted a link to the chapter in a book available through Google Books, and I highly recommend having a look. The long and short of it is that a few apprentices is 18th century France, fed up with their masters' cats who received better treatment than the apprentices themselves, staged a mock trial and execution of a couple dozen cats. Imagine what the reaction to such a scene would have been today!

3.) On a more serious note, the NY Times published a piece today about a black woman and her son who may have been denied entry to a church that was being used a shelter during a tornado in Cordova, Alabama. The son survived; the mother did not.

The amazing thing is that the son who survived was told by a number of people not to tell his story. He was told that it would give Cordova a bad name. The people of the town know what happened was wrong. I'm sure almost none of them would have turned away anyone asking to come inside. Unfortunately one person made that lethal decision. The town has brought the disrepute on itself by not confronting the issue head on, by not demanding that the truth come out and that the person who denied them entry be investigated.

The sad story from Cordova serves as a parable for the country as a whole. The sooner we start acknowledging the problems that plague our society - racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, Antisemitism, income inequality, climate change, etc. - the sooner we can begin to fix them. When we live in the dark, constantly pretending that the problems don't exist, they will continue ad infinitum.