My impression is that it is relatively easy, even today, for bright humanities students to find, or be led toward, Shakespeare, Proust and Tolstoy, even Plato and Aristotle—but they’ll never learn anything much about the last 500 years of science, technology and medicine. They wouldn’t know where to start. I don’t understand why the Ramsay Centre is not proposing to remedy this with a good dose of history and philosophy of science, and a recommendation of the great works of modern science. Now that truly would expand humanities students’ appreciation of the scope of our civilisation.

Perhaps the reluctance stems from the fact that many members of the Ramsay Centre board have—how to put this delicately?—an uneasy relationship with the Enlightenment and science. In his recent Quadrant article, Tony Abbott refers to the New Testament, Shakespeare and British history as the "rudiments of the Western canon". I know my mental equipment would be much diminished without the King James’ version of the Bible and the Bard, both rich sources of insight and quotation, as I learned from my father. But my "formation" must have differed from Abbott’s for I was taught to include also Darwin and evolutionary science as glories of the Western canon. Why does the Ramsay Centre not address such glaring omissions in the education of students in faculties of arts?

Charles Darwin's works are part of the Western tradition.

On the other hand, even the limited "great books" course the Ramsay Centre proposes in the humanities—perhaps somewhat redundantly—is more or less what we should be teaching in science faculties across the country. Why should science students be excluded from learning about full scope of their civilisational heritage? Admittedly, at the University of Sydney and a couple of other institutions there are programs in history and philosophy of science that offer some broad humanistic civilisational learning, but they need far more support. Why is the Ramsay Centre apparently shunning the scientists and medicos of the future?

My proposal, then, is to enrich our students’ understanding of the civilisation that made them by teaching more about science and medicine in humanities programs, and more history, philosophy, literature, music and art in the sciences. At least it would be a practical and relatively uncontroversial start, a means of beginning to fix our problems. It would help correct deficiencies in civilisational knowledge that are widely recognised.