>> William Craig Rice is the Director of the Division of Education Programs
at the National Endowment for the Humanities, which sponsors seminars for
college and school teachers on subjects as diverse as Shakespeare's plays,
Mayan civilization and the Civil Rights Movement.
Bill's remarks today don't represent the views of the National Endowment for
the Humanities, but are simply his as a teacher, writer and scholar.
Bill previously served as the 12th president of Shimer College,
the Great Books college of Chicago and he taught writing seminars for
many years at Harvard University.
He's the author of public discourse and academic inquiry and
of essays and verse in cultural periodicals.
He was recently given a life time achievement award for
contributions to the humanities by Utah Valley University.
It's a pleasure to speak here today with Bill Rice.
Bill, I've seen you in action, reading difficult material.
For example, Adam Smith's Rhetorical Discourses.
You seem to be able to synthesize and
chunk the essential ideas in difficult reading material like that very easily.
Do you have any suggestions for
us mere mortals about how we can do something a little similar.
>> I don't know that I'm any better at this than another reader would be,
because what I start with is just noticing.
I was taught this a long time ago that you don't need to be ready to analyze or
make an argument or otherwise elaborate.
Just read and when you notice something, mark it.
Just noticing is a neutral act,
it's giving your own mind credit for being alive.
That's really important and I mark with a little vertical sign on the margin.
Other people could use other methods, but I think that's the starting point.
Once you do that, you may notice that you're noticing the same thing over and
over again.
In which case, I call it a pattern an original idea, but you look for patterns.
And that's related to the idea of chunks, except that I guess
chunks can also be sections of, of argument that you begin to detect.
I find too is something that's potentially really dry, like rhetoric and written.
Basically, what we were reading was lecture notes taken by someone else of
a man who's mainly famous for other things,
namely inventing the modern science of economy, but also as a philosopher.
So, I found that the best thing to do was to notice and watch for patterns.
>> Well, probably early on here, we should define what do we really mean.
What, what are the humanities?
Don't people get confused about this?
>> Well, they do.
People think it means humanitarian as in humanitarian aid.
They think it means humanity as in some great cause for
saving the world from ourselves.
And actually, the humanities are a number of academic disciplines.
Philosophy, the study of religion, literature, history, art history.
To some extent, anthropology when it's most
concerned with should we say, the human nature.
Those are the fields and there, there are others that creep in,
classics certainly, archeology.
They're actually called the humanities,
because what happened was when the fields were being divided,
you had the natural sciences, like physics and astronomy and chemistry.
And then you had the social sciences, the hard kind of social sciences,
like psychology, sociology.
And when they were done with those that,
everything that was left was called the humanities.
So, it was a process of elimination and they got left on the table.
They're, it, that's the definition, but it's strange, because people don't get it.
Similarly, people often don't understand the term liberal arts.
They are, some people, I remember one fellow saying to me.
Well, what about conservative arts?
And, you know, with liberal education, what about conservative education?
You get, people understand the basic, ter, misunderstand the basic terms.
Perhaps, because thy haven't been taught them.
It's not deliberate.
But we're saddled with terms that are unfortunate in a way,
because people don't understand them.
>> Well, good approaches to learning, often involve transfer from one field,
for example, mathematics to another field, like music or language.
But each field has its own special challenges.
Are there approaches that you reco, would recommend that are applicable,
particularly applicable for the humanities?
>> Yes. One broad point is that in chemistry.
Although in the theoretical realm, there are lots of ambiguities and
uncertainties among those who are doing pioneering work.
For the, for a large part, for those of us who are studying at a relatively
introductory or intermediate level there are answers to be arrived at
through methods that are, will help illuminate how a field works.
This will be true in chemistry or astronomy.
There are measurements to be taken.
There are all kinds of re, reasonably objective,
repeatable exercises that determine what knowledge is.
And this isn't, I don't mean to over simplify the sciences, but
that's broadly true and it's not broadly true in the humanities,
which are are concerned with questions more than with answers.
You have to be interested and tolerant of at least ambiguity
the idea that a question remains unsolved for
pretty much the entirety of human history or at least of recent human history.
So, it's important to understand that controversies aren't settled in
the humanities.
They're more likely simply to be raised and explored.
That's the, those are the broad brush the broad brush need you have in the,
in humanities when you're approaching it particularly at the beginning.
That you're not striving for direct compete, final answer.
This is hard for students who have been trained to take exams and get, you know,
get to the right answers by whatever, by whatever means they can.
Instead in the humanities, what you admire in in the work of someone who's
just figuring things out, it's a kind of openness to contrary evidence.
That seems to me broadly, the way to go.
As to the specific fields there are lots of sub-que, sub,
sub-questions or, or second order problems to explore.
But broadly speaking in the humanities, it's about tolerance of ambiguity.
And at a certain point, a real love of ambiguity, which can of course,
become quite frustrating for people.
[LAUGH] Because you never feel like you're getting an answer from this guy at
the front of the class or wherever.
>> That's true.
That I think that's so true and it's such a different way of looking at things
than we, for example, in engineering and how we look at things.
But I think actually, both approaches can be so interesting and useful.
And I think for, for engineers and for those in humanities,
sort of getting an understanding and
a tolerance of both of our perspectives is probably worth while.
Students in the humanities, sometimes complain that they're expected to make
arguments, but they don't have anything to say.
>> Mm-hm.
>> So, it's not that they don't care, they do the reading.
They actually participate in all the discussions.
>> They wanna be involved, it's just they can't come up with a position to defend.
So what advice would you give in this circumstance?
>> Well, [LAUGH] I was in that position myself for many years.
I thought it was borderline preposterous to call on me to have anything to say or
to ask me to write a, an eight or ten or twelve or twenty page papers
when I really hadn't read enough to have anything legitimate to say.
I was I found this to be one of the problems in classroom education and
perhaps one of the ways in which online education could begin
to untangle a problem of the, the given time in a semester.
So I remember, again and again, feeling like the best thing I could do would be
was to read and to take notes, which I think is absolutely essential, by the way.
If you, you have to read and be content with being alone.
We talk a lot about group work, but a lot of it's solo.
Reading and taking notes.
In any case, back to the question.
I found that I was in again and
again faced with a problem of finding something to say.
So what I, the advice I give is ask for, if you don't find,
conflicting interpretations of the thing you're studying.
It might be two scholars who disagree on what Machiavelli meant when he said,
the prince should be more concerned about being feared than about being loved.
People different, differ on that and authorities differ.
If you can, if you don't find that in the materials that you're assigned
as it were seek them out.
What are the, what are the flash points?
Where are the major points of contention?
And instead of thinking, well, I agree with this side or the other side,
instead say gee.
How is this argument a stronger argument than another?
Not whether it's right or not, but whether it's stronger.
It's who has the better evidence.
Who is pointing to evidence that is harder to understand?
Who's taking on the more difficult questions?
That's the first thing that I would recommend is, is looking for
conflicting interpretations.
Another is to look at,
particularly when you're studying what we call a primary source.
I would cite Mary Wollstonecraft's work on,
on the in the late 18th century on the education of women or
Thomas Jefferson's statute for religious freedom in Virginia.
Reading that, you feel a real rhetorical power.
These people are making an argument.
What are they arguing against?
It's not often clear in the given text what the argument is.
Who, who, who and what they're aiming at?
And if you can read carefully, sometimes you can make a, what we ca, inference.
Because Jefferson is so concerned about the government giving
special treatment to members of the Anglican Church.
What we, well, why was that an issue?
It prompts one to want to know more.
So, if you have the rhetorical flashpoints in view,
you can then ask questions of an objective nature.
What was it that got Wollstonecraft or Jefferson or anyone else worked up?
What was it that got Machiavelli worked up?
Those are, those are what questions and
they send you back into historical information.
So those are some of the ways I would approach the problem of having
nothing to say.
But in the end, I wish we had a system of education that was described
to me by young woman I knew who had gone to an English University, Cambridge.
And she, I said, how did you get to be so knowledgeable and such a good writer?
And so careful in your, in your thinking.
As you said, well, all the way through four years as an undergraduate,
I was told I had to write summaries.
Summary, given an article, write a summary.
One page, one page, one page.
Pracies, they called them over there.
That was hugely helpful to her.
She wasn't asked to come up with something of her own to say, she was asked
to explain what other people had said and that was a real revelation to me.
And then from then on, when I was in the classroom I would assign summaries.
Because It wasn't, it was something you could do differently,
not all summaries had to be the same, but you would learn the material that way
without having to be invested in whether you had an argument to make.
Understanding other's thinking actually can open up one's own thinking and
my Dr. Vater Richard Marius the director of writing at Harvard
used to say, encourage your students not so much to be in, you know,
original thinkers, but to find their thinking in the thinking of others.
That's okay.
That's what, really what scholarship and learning and humanity is, is about.
It's about standing on the shoulders of others in order to understand,
perhaps a little bit better.
I know that when I'm doing writing, I often,
I think of writing as something I do to help me better understand my own thoughts.
>> Mm-hm. >> And
when I'm beginning to write something, I'm looking at the thoughts of others.
But it's, it's what I start trying to struggle with putting words in the paper
myself that I start to understand my own words.
But then observation of the woman that you knew about writing summaries,
that's such an exquisite approach to learning.
Because it, it helps neurally in code in a small chunk.
>> Mm-hm. >> What the main ideas are and
that actually does really help you to better understand your own thoughts.
And another thing I just have to bring up is that I,
I very much admire your, your thought in relation to it,
it is important to work alone sometimes.
>> Yeah. >> And we do have this enormous emphasis.
I mean, there's,
there are trends in education, in fads- >> Mm-hm.
>> So forth and they go in and out.
One of the current fads is to do a lot of group work.
>> Right. Mm-hm.
>> and I, I emphasize that myself and I think there's value in it.
But also too much group work and you start to think like other people,
instead of- >> Mm-hm.
>> Thinking independently.
>> Yeah. >> And part of what I
think we value in western society, in modern society is this idea to think
more independently as well as to understand the opinions of others.
>> Mm-hm.
>> So, anyway, with that,
what hinders students most from learning in the humanities?
>> Well, you know,
I think it gets back to this problem of being comfortable with ambiguity.
A feeling that there is some way of understanding that, that,
that they haven't got yet.
And that the teacher has and is in a very frustrating way,
insisting they find for themselves.
That I think is, is, is a psychological level and
at a level of interaction certainly in a classroom though, less so
online where one is working primarily in the solo context.
The another problem, though is that what we call discipline-specific learning.
It's not the same to play chess and play baseball to to,
to do many different things in life.
To cook well.
To To make furniture.
Not all skills are really transferable.
It's, there's discipline specific understanding.
And, in a,
it, there's a certain kind of reasoning that takes place with historians.
They go into archives, they find the a rare set of letters between a,
an early Nobel Prize winner and his editor and they look into that and
they find all kinds of issues of the day were boiling right beneath.
These letters have, have remarks on the outbreak of World War I
that are very hard to understand and that to a historian is fascinating.
Something distant, archival.
It takes a certain kind of thinking, what was it that was bothering people?
What, what were the arguments that are not being made?
What inferences can we make from a,
an old source that nobody's looked at in a long time?
That's what historical reasoning is partly about.
It's about other things as well.
In in, in other fields, say, take art history,
you have the notion of building on, on achievements.
The discovery of ways of accurately depicting
perspective which occurred in the 15th century.
That builds, that then builds to other achievements some achievements in the arts
were really, really advanced in the classical era, in sculpture the depiction,
accurate depiction of the human body is recovered later on in the renaissance.
So there's a notion of building on, on previous achievements.
That's a, a way of understanding that is particularly common in our history.
Where it's breakthrough, after breakthrough, after breakthrough.
Getting up finally to the influence of African sculpture on on European artists,
in, in the, at the turn of the last century.
And, and with Cubism.
