SUNY Geneseo, being the Liberal Arts college that it is, requires that students take courses that range from several different disciplines in order to expose them to something they may enjoy, and to simply open them to a field that is enlightening, knowledgeable, and intellectually challenging. This of course is crucial and necessary in breeding well-rounded academics that can graduate from Geneseo and have a wealth of knowledge that covers several different areas of study that will be useful to them in future career endeavors.
When I first looked at the general education requirements I would need to complete in order to graduate from SUNY Geneseo, the list looked taunting and slightly overwhelming. However, being a first semester sophomore now, I’ve completed all of my “gen. eds.” which spanned across the Sciences, Maths, Writing, and Cultural Studies. I’ve completed all of these except for the *dreaded* Humanities courses.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_mUFrUV2xM
The way I always imagined these classes when I was young, actually the way I probably imagined college in general, was a room full of smart young students sitting in a circle discussing magnificent and challenging works of literature that have so greatly influenced art and culture as a whole. We’d look at great works by Dante and Shakespeare and Aristotle and Plato and we’d all be enlightened in some way, having read words, words that certain wealthy white men of the aristocracy decided were great.
It was people like Matthew Arnold whose essays and studies influenced our modern education system today, the Humanities course revolving around his particular sense of taste in literature. Arnold claimed that all things written after the great works (Dante, Shakespeare, Aristotle, Plato) were all different arrangements of the same basic plot or story from these literary canons. “Good” works included these archetypical elements, “bad” works did not. His blatant disregard for other cultures and assumption that all of humanity lived the same way that he did steered him in the wrong path and Arnold’s incorrect premises led him to a false conclusion.
Arnold was English, white, and attended Oxford University. Based on his conclusions, literature published by African Americans would probably not make sense to him, having come from a different shared culture, and would be deemed “bad” because these works didn’t follow the same structure or plot as the canons. This nonsensical hierarchy is still being perpetuated by our schools that require us to feed into the belief that the best have already been written, these works are the best, and you must read them. The works certainly did influence generations to come, but fundamentally, it is distorted to imagine that these are the greatest works to have ever been produced, while failing to expose students of other disciplines of art that are generated from different cultures. Regardless, some of these canons have been studied for centuries and the material already thoroughly deconstructed. In this sense, I can only assume that Joe Moran would agree with the notion, stating that “…the canon seems over-researched and overwritten about, and therefore less open to new critical insights” (Moran 175).
My recommendation would be perhaps to have one required Humanities class devoted to important works in the canon and then another required Humanities class that provides insight into the equally important humanity of a society that wasn’t occupied by Western European regimes. This would encourage an acceptance of other forms of art and literature and would produce even more well-rounded individuals to leave the halls of SUNY Geneseo and represent our college as an institution that fairly depicts more than just one aspect of humanity. The conversation of the value of the very partial Humanities courses should continue.