It is long and rambling and I took to skimming after a while.<p>The <i>liberal arts</i> are called such because they are <i>liberating.</i> They are freeing and empowering. They teach you how to get things done.<p>As a homeschooling parent, I gave my sons a humanities education defined thusly:<p><i>An education in the art of dealing with the inconvenient, inescapable fact of your own humanity and that of the people you are surrounded by.</i><p>Language, poetry, expressing yourself, dealing with your feelings and that of other people, knowing the wisdom contained in classical stories, having some background information on the foundations of the society you live in. These are some of the pieces and purpose of a humanities education aka liberal arts.<p>If you don't really understand what the humanities are about, reading up on The Clemente Course in Humanities is eye opening. They set out to teach humanities to poor people and found that it allowed many of them to escape poverty.<p>Here is their website, though I read a book about the origin story years ago:<p><a href="https://clementecourse.org" rel="nofollow">https://clementecourse.org</a>
A summary of the article's thesis (in my view), since it seems most lost the patience to read it:<p>The humanities is a culture based around the activities of reading works, thinking deeply about these works, then constructing criticisms of these works. The humanities should not have to justify their existence. They do not exist as some wish they did to further activist ideologies or to further traditional church views. The humanities should not have to justify its existence for its secondary or tertiary qualities (cognitive benefits, discipline). The humanities have created a class of people with similar tastes and ideas, and expulsion from universities won't make the humanities go away. Humanities exist because historically people have found value in this form of inquiry and these tastes, and people will continue to find value in these activities, so the humanities will continue whether universities accept them or not.
As a sometime English major, I’m biased, but the main objective (or perhaps side-effect) of the humanities, in my experience, was to teach one how to write. Regardless of “truth,” “values,” pottery, or poetry, modular, well-structured arguments were the main thing I got from that degree. Attempts to justify the actual content of humanities studies seem futile, if valiant, and nobody has been good at articulating deeper aims for English, at least. (I found anyway that I was able to write A papers without reading the material.)<p>(At any rate, this author might have taken a more Orwellian pen to their monograph.)