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Could humanities help curb youth violence?
Dave Miner offers a strong argument for beefing up the humanities in our schools. We need to offer students a curriculum that will touch their minds and hearts, will offer them a reason to make positive contributions to our society. We need to help them to learn how to emphathize. The humanities do this in a way that science and math can't.
By Dave Miner
After church Sunday, I drove out Cortez to the Mexicali Café to have my car washed at the fundraiser to help pay the funeral expenses of Jazmine Thompson, the 17-year- old Bayshore High cheerleader shot and killed Friday night. Daniel Williams, 18, was accused of firing several rounds into the car in which Jazmine was a passenger. He reportedly had no motive for the shooting.
Black and white, young and old, washed the outside of my car and tears washed my eyes. Such a tragedy, and such a tragedy that it can no longer be considered an isolated event in our community. I don't have the figures at my fingertips, but it seems like our community is experiencing an epidemic of youth violence.
Only a month ago, recent Bayshore High graduate Dejuan Williams was gunned down and killed in his own backyard. Southeast High student Byron Galloway was charged. Williams is said to have sought to question Galloway about visiting Williams' sister.
Less than three weeks ago, at the new G.D. Rogers Gardens Elementary School, I attended the playground dedication to Stacy Williams III, a 9-year-old student at Orange-Ridge Bullock Elementary School who was fatally shot in May 2007.
Schools aren't responsible for all the behavior of children. But as a community we are in the public education business because we believe that not just nature, but also nurture, has something to do with turning (or failing to turn) children into responsible adults. (I read a recent study concluding that teachers could be credited with about 25 percent of a child's progress.) And it is obvious to me that, as a community, we need to do a better job at cultivating the ability of our youth to understand and empathize with others so that violence toward others in our community is not considered an acceptable course of conduct.
But it is not our community alone. Violence among youth seems to have escalated nationwide over the past 50 years. Fifty years ago many of us did not lock our doors -- even at night. Now, most of us feel the need to keep the doors to our homes locked all day and all night.
How come? Harper's magazine contributing editor Mark Slouka this month argues that a great deal of this escalating violence among youth is attributable to the de-emphasis of humanities in public education. Slouka argues that since the launch of the Soviet Union's Sputnik satellite 50 years ago, the focus of education has turned from producing good citizens to producing good employees, that math and science have ascended in importance at the expense of humanities courses that foster democratic values and empathy and understanding of other human beings. (Humanities are commonly defined as subjects such as literature and the fine arts which concern themselves with man and his culture as opposed to the sciences.)
"What is taught, at any given time, in any culture," Slouka argues, "is an expression of what that culture considers important." And, according to Slouka, education in America today "is almost exclusively about the GDP. It's about investing in our human capital ... It's about ensuring that the United States does not fall from its privileged perch in the global economy."
However, Slouka writes, "The case for the humanities is not hard to make ... The humanities, done right, are the crucible within which our evolving notions of what it means to be fully human are put to the test; they teach us, incrementally, endlessly, not what to do but how to be."
The humanities, according to Slouka, "complicate our vision, pull our most cherished notions out by the roots, flay our pieties ... expand the reach of our understanding (and therefore our compassion), even as they force us to draw and redraw the borders of tolerance. Because out of all this work of self-building might emerge an individual capable of humility in the face of complexity; an individual formed through questioning and therefore unlikely to cede that right; an individual resistant to coercion, to manipulation and demagoguery in all their forms. The humanities, in short, are a superb delivery mechanism for what we might call democratic values. There is no better that I am aware of."
I can't help but wonder if the deaths of Stacy Williams, Dejuan Williams and Jazmine Thompson, and last Sunday's car wash, might not have occurred if our school district's curriculum was more humanities-oriented and more focus was given to not what to do but how to be.
Dave "Watchdog" Miner is a Bradenton attorney and local education activist.
— Dave Miner
Sarasota Herald-Tribune
2009-09-12
http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/20090912/COLUMNIST/909121019?Title=Could-humanities-help-curb-youth-violence-
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