Rather than respond to the current regrettable disregard of the humanities in both public and governmental circles, I thought I would draw up a utopian scheme for education in the humanities in American schools. The vague notion of “The Humanities” is in part administrative (“studies that are neither sciences nor social sciences”), in part historical (“studies of the ancients”), in part moral (“elements of a liberal education”), and so on. These definitions have not persisted very well, nor have they ever played a role in American elementary and secondary instruction.

Most countries want students to know about their own national achievements. Only America is silent, in its public elementary and high schools, about its own cultural glories. Most American students graduate from high school knowing the names of only a few American authors and, of those authors, hardly any works; they rarely can cite by name even one American painter or architect; they know of no American philosopher, no American composer. The vacuum in the schools abandons our children to contemporary pop culture. We have deprived students of their own national heritage: we are not giving them much of anything to be proud about.

When America, with an understandable Whitmanian self-assertion, dropped classical languages and European humanistic works from secondary school instruction, it lost the languages, poems, novels, and philosophical works on which our own earlier American authors drew, without replacing them with strong works in English produced in the United States themselves. The vacuum was complete. And the cultural vacuum has recently produced the idea that students should read, for the most part, factual and informational prose rather than works of art. There have been efforts, by E. D. Hirsch and others, to create a viable cultural curriculum, but one that seems more informational than aesthetic. The public schools have not adopted such a cultural obligation.

The humanities are usually considered material for college education. But students enrolling in college tend to pursue what they already know—and there is, in the schools, no preparation for the study of the humanities, as they are commonly conceived. We think of the humanities as studies reacting to classical philosophical and religious texts, and enterprises of critical and scholarly investigation of the arts (in musicology, literary criticism, art history, theater studies). There are no SAT subject tests of these pursuits. We can hardly expect these subjects as such to enter the primary and secondary school curriculum—yet there are no more delightful and provocative areas of study, not only for pupils with verbal and aesthetic interests, but for all.

At present the humanities are a blank space in our younger students’ intellectual maps. How can we change that ignorance so that students will come to their post-secondary studies eager for more of what they have already found arresting, unsettling, and beautiful? The National Humanities Center took a step in the right direction by creating “toolboxes” for use in secondary schools: these were supposed to provide integrated study of history, the history of ideas, literature, and art. I had great hopes for the toolboxes, but when I viewed several of them, I was disappointed. Literature and art were brought forward chiefly in utilitarian and instrumental ways, as illustration of some historical person or affair or epoch. History was the Procrustean bed to which the humanities were to be fitted, era by era.