Public Schools: Humanities in High School

The normal high school curriculum is a daily kaleidoscope of unrelated courses: a class in English, perhaps followed by history, civics and then the arts, each session unrelated to the other. Emulating liberal arts colleges and the better prep schools, some public high schools are now offering broad-scale courses in humanities that seek to relate these disciplines, and to show their relevance to the kind of decisions students must make in their own lives.

A pacesetter in the field is the state of New York, where 100 high schools have developed experimental humanities courses, using a rough guideline prepared by state education officials. In most schools, English, social studies, music and art are linked in a common curriculum, taught either by a team of teachers or in individual courses that coincide in timing and theme.

Ethics & Alienation. At Dobbs Ferry High School, 20 miles up the Hudson from Manhattan, ninth-graders spend each morning in a year-long humanities sequence that starts with the contemporary world, then shifts back to primitive man, progresses through classical cultures, medieval times, the Renaissance, and returns to today. One recent morning began with a student-prepared exposition of Greek architecture, shown over closed-circuit television in five classrooms. After that, a social-studies class compared the quality of democracy in ancient Greece and in modern-day Mississippi; an art class took up classical sculpture; a philosophy class studied the thought of Socrates; an English class discussed Sophocles’ Antigone. In each course students tried to determine how the Greeks expressed their attitudes toward ultimate values.

A different approach is taken by Garden City High School on Long Island, where a group of 100 juniors and seniors take a coordinated program based on such major philosophical themes as man’s search for order and meaning in life, his adjustment to change and his yearning for self-expression. In an opening unit on “The World Today,” the social-studies teachers deal with man’s fears of nuclear war, poverty and lost identity. English classes analyze contemporary writings on violence, brotherhood, situation ethics and alienation. The art and music teachers seek to define the values implicit in modern painting, commercial art, jazz and even folk rock.

Hillbilly Opera. In discussing the search for order, teachers show how this theme is found in such works as Oedipus Rex, Hamlet, The Divine Comedy and Death of a Salesman. To help them understand the difficulties of achieving esthetic order, music students at Garden City have been assigned the problem of writing operas of their own: in one, a hillbilly, over his mother’s strong objections, goes to New York to pursue a career as a folk singer and becomes famous. Art students take a Vermeer masterpiece and, on a transparent overlay, convert his realism into a cubist painting, while trying to preserve the structure of the original.

For teachers used to rigid lesson plans, broad-gauge humanities courses are hard to teach. Parents, too, sometimes wonder about the merit of programs that are not designed to prepare students for conquering the dry, factual state Regents exams. But educators believe that in the long run such courses help students establish values and concepts that will hold good throughout their lives. “The goal is discovery,” says J. William Dodd, assistant to the Garden City superintendent. “We want to present issues and problems and let the kids solve them by themselves.”