The title of my book is why teach in defense for a real education. That is a really hard question i would like to put on the shelf for a while. But in defense for a real education, thats why i want to try to work with a little bit. So let me ask this question what is this thing a real education . And i want to say against the disposition of the culture at large a lot of fellow scholars from the university of this point it is humanities based. The real the education is a humanities based education. Why . First of all the humanities based education is conducive to the development of citizens. Conducive to the development of citizens. Our founder Thomas Jefferson wanted to create a university that would help people become citizens independent republic. Its one of the reasons he brought us the university of virginia and one of the reasons we are here. It seems to me that there is no better preparation for becoming a citizen for the United States of america or citizen of the world than a humanities education. In the humanities we learn to express ourselves with clarity. We learn to write well and speak reasonably well. We learn to defend our positions and to take in the positions of other individuals. We learn to listen to them which is almost as much an art and maybe even more than the art of expressing ones self. We learn to render their arguments fairly, reproduce their arguments judiciously and then respond to them in a constructive and humane way. This is at the heart of citizenship it seems to me, and the education to humanities is conducive to this kind of human development. In order to be an effective citizen, it seems to me you also must command knowledge. You must command among other things the knowledge of history, command the knowledge of history. I talked to a lot of High School Students and High School Teachers and one of the things they frequently tell me is that until the u. S. History course is wonderful, they ran out of time at the end of the year just before they got to vietnam. I think thats not a good thing. And it strikes me that the iraq war may have something to do with it. You should study history to be a good citizen and study history all the way through to the presence as far as you can and need to know about religion, christianity and american christianity to be sure. You need to know something about judeas some within the current world coming nothing about islam isnt acceptable. Learn something about hindu and buddhism, have a sense of what most people build their lives around. Its absolutely critical to understanding them, sympathizing with them and being an effective citizen of this that is now becoming more and more a global kind of environment. So it seems to me that jefferson is entirely right to have created a university that is devoted to to citizenship. We in the humanities can help develop the citizens in ways that people dare i say in the Sciences Like my Apple Computer im glad ive got a polio vaccine. But nonetheless, nonetheless, we are in the position to do this. Its a particularly rich acquisition and it seems to me that it is worth in itself the only justification for the humanities the would be enough. Though we do more than that as well. We in the humanities help our students and help ourselves to do what socrates said we ought to do and that is quite simply to know ourselves. At the humanities are for the students what they like to call the great Second Chance. That is we all get socialized one time by our parents and teachers and by our religious instructors and we learn who is they think we are in for a while who we think we are. We learned about the world is, whats valuable, whats not valuable and how we ought to leave our lives. By the time youre 17yearsold weve been described multiple times by multiple people and those descriptions may or may not be accurate. But when you go to college and you get to study the humanities, you get what i would call the great Second Chance. You get to find out of those things that you have been asked to tell you are conditioned to value really are valuable or not. After you have read plato and thought about what justice and truth is and beauty or True Religion is, with the best kind of life might be coming your than in the position to evaluate your own life and youre own commitment and may be based on that evaluation to change to it may be based upon the devaluation to change. This is one of the greatest gift the world provides. The possibility of knowing ourselves and deciding who we thought we have been up until this point really is true for us over some kind of new trash description to be the order of the day. The process of self knowledge can be conducive to success in the world, too. But a lot of people who of difficulty succeeding in this world have difficulty because they are trying to pound a rail and round self into a square peg. They go into a wall when their heart is a Kindergarten Teacher come to grow up to the Kindergarten Teacher when their heart they are a wonderfully lyrical poet and its hard for them. Somebody whos studied and has had a great Second Chance has had the opportunity to see what he or she really values. And based upon that, to connect to a profession the becomes more than a profession. It becomes a vocation. Really bringing vocation is relatively easy because the work is a form of recreation. The work is a form of play. Most jobs work as a form of work. And you will have to slug it out very hard if you are not in the place where you need to be in order to realize that particular destiny that is latent in side of. Now, this sounds like a deal talking to the board of directors saying this is why the humanities are better because we create more successful students because they know themselves. It would be nice to see this to the various boards of directors by dont think it is entirely true. What i think is true is this, this opportunity to no ones self involves putting every single believe that we have if we are daring enough to do so into question. Putting all of our beliefs into question that includes the believe in religion and politics and families but it also includes the believe in success and said that after you have red who commands a life of a voluntary poverty and nature and art and you have decided that what he says is in some measure of truth, you walk away from the conventional success to the horror of some part of yourself and embrace something that is entirely different so there is a danger but i think it is a good danger of calling into question every single fundamental value with which we are socialized at the beginning of our lives. It is not necessarily so that the humanities will make you more of a success unless that is when you want. You may reject success based upon what youve learned as a humanities. Now how does this process took place . This takes place in many different ways. But one of them is being open to influence. The student comes to college and he or she reads and a certain point in a moment the classical figure this of reading and writing described so brilliantly very simply you are reading something, you are hearing something and suddenly it is as though you have created that which you are only here. Suddenly it is as though you have created what you are hearing and that is the moment when you say thats it. That is oddly enough what i believe. Now just to give you a quick example, one of the patron saints strangely enough since jefferson is the founder, one of the patrons is none other than edgar allan poe. Now everyone that has led him even if you havent know that if any stories of these lead to rest 6 feet underground at 10 00 in the morning, by 2 00 the next morning that person will be up and slamming hard at the door. Nothing in him ever stays buried. The past reaches out in the bony scales and cold hands and grabs you on the shoulder and effectively says i claim you. People read him with a sense of recognition. The past is never passed. Faulkner suggested a number of times and many people have this conviction when they see it realized it is a time of debate could have a less nightmare and they say thats it. Thats how it is and they learn something about themselves in that moment. What they do in that knowledge is another matter or they read ralf Ralf Emmerson the can be worked out of the imagination and the extemporizing mind. The act of writing can teach about your commitments to the past helped to create yourself a new. And within this possibility of the self creation. He broached to the past, present and to come there is no history to the only biography. In other words there are no determines. Its just you. Do your thing and i will know you. Some students read that with utter revulsion. Robert ted warren says he can only believe him when hes traveling 8,000 feet above the surface of the earth and even then he finds it a little bit beside the point. But there are others that read emerson and hear the clarion call and say within the instant why not the creators and i want to break loose from the past and believe in this complete self of invention. Once youve had that experience, i could have created that. That is a saying in spite of myself and then you have to figure out what to do with it. But that it seems to me is a moment of humanistic influence from which an individual young or old has a positive that the of growing. It allows him to know himself and allows her to know herself more truly than a moment ago. Its a wonderful moment in self knowledge. But self knowledge isnt the only gift and citizenship isnt the only gift. Theres also the simple gift of knowing the other. One of the phrases im proud of and i like a little quick phrases in why teach is this. A real reading i said in a moment of what i take to be his reincarnation. Real reading is reincarnation. By which i mean that certain forms of reading that dont involve the dynamics, certain forms of reading are the equivalent of being reborn as another person. You are reborn as Emily Dickinson and experience with her struggles with god you are reborn as walt whitman and experienced to attempt to struggle with nothing at all but to accept everything that he sees. You walk down the road with walt whitman and your mind is in march and your spirit is in march and youre sympathetic imagination and capacity to be another person is also enlarged. This is a spectacular gift and it is available not exclusively in the humanities, but it seems to me words have a certain magic that allow this to happen in amazing ways. Its hard to explain why that is so theres an in one nest and a community about the reading that allows for this kind of a sympathetic imagination. And i think i have to admit its rather wonderful. Another thing that the humanities get and we were just catching on in a moment ago. Another gift of the humanities get is very simple. I start with genex in the locomotive moment feeling deterministic and feeling the way of some force that reaches out its hand and controls. It says language speaks man to which i want to say it speaks some people but not all of them. Some people go around speeding business speak, sports, political and the effectively take the roots. To quote concord because they have not capitalized for that which they are expressing. Somebody who is not spoken by language but speaks language stands in a different relationship to work. He or she is able to express feelings that prize deep within the spirit, is able to put forward its own vision of the world come able to say what it is she wants with some clarity, is able to appreciate and may be summarized with someone else with that other person might want. So the use of language and the ability to inflict with your own interpretation of the world puts you in a place you can actually live rightfully. If you cant describe the world in terms of your own, its going to be hard to navigate because of the terrain that you see will be effectively someone else. Language, acquisition, through the study of the masters of language, the participants gives people a freedom in life that is difficult to obtain through any of the means. They can express themselves. It has got some heart in it. Citizenship coming the other language. One last thing i want to mention and i suppose it is a little bit for me than that we are friends and i hope but its quite simply pleasure. You have to live in your own head, think your own thoughts, be with yourself. And to the degree that you can appreciate the literary art and to the degree that you can appreciate fine art you live in the half year and a brighter and a more joyful place. There is just a sense of loving these kind of activities and that being a love of itself. If i live long enough and who knows, i would like to write a book called the metaphysics of the hangover. But if you think about hangovers we all know that they come from inebriation, toxicity. But it also it seems to me they come from certain kinds of entertainment, from watching the tv shows you leave it with a headache as though you have been intoxicated for a little while but then you come back down to earth. Real literature and art which is both difficult, challenging, dark and uplifting it makes you feel uplifted and reasonably happy. I spent the day running around reading in between errands. It made me feel pretty darn good be watching for that book. [laughter] so this is my thought about the real education. How are we doing in terms of providing real education . We need to up hour game just a little bit. I think it would be helpful if those of us that teach the humanities began to think of ourselves just a little bit more as teachers and less as scholars or founders. But affectionate. It seems as though the best thing we can do is to gather what has been known and preserve it and pass it on so far as we can to the future generations. I think we should back off a little bit but not completely on our professional lives and speaking our own private languages and on trying to work out the most sophisticated form of interpretation and take ourselves to be just a little bit more teachers not only to our students but also to the general public who is dying to know the kind of things we knew to be introduced to them. Just imagine what its like if youre outside of the Literary Academy and you have some curiosity. Where do i begin, what do i read, with shakespeare is the best. We know there are things that the hour fingers in so far as respect to people we spread what seems to me to the liberation. Im not saying that there are not wonderful difficult works out there. I admire them, but then that lives up to the difficulty of their idiom. How often is the level of inside not succeeded in living up to the difficulty of our idiom . How often would it makes sense to be a little bit more available and a little bit less professional . The other thing i think we might consider giving is posing the question of believe. Ive spent the summer talking to lots of colleagues in various disciplines. And i ask them it can down to a fundamental question. Do you care about what your students believe when the course is over . That this do you teach in order to give students the opportunity to change their mind . Generally, the answer was no. Thats too much like brainwash, people said. Thats to propagandistic. One teacher and particularly said we are shy. We dont like to assert ourselves in this particular way. But it seems to me that once we have given people the skills to read and understand the come to read and understand emmerson koret Emily Dickinson we should take the next step and ask them if in fact it is true. Ask them if in fact it is true what would it mean to live this out . Might you believe it . It seems to me that history needs to hear about the acquisition of the fact, develop and historical narrative, the awareness of the complexities of global configuration, but all tightly the question probably that needs to be asked as to what degree will to be an actor historical the and to what degree an interpreter of history. This isnt always or twice if you are in a small southern town in 1960 you may have thought youd be an observer of history that there are some people who havent voted for a while and decided it was their time to do some voting and you expressed it in the middle of history that many of us in the position we find ourselves at each place as to whether it will be historical actors or historical observers. There are still great causes out there and the student interested in history like all of us is well served by asking himself or herself willing be a participant . Well i join in with whatever force is at my disposal to make history . Even if it is any small way. The religious studies student should ask what will i believe . Not just what is hinduism and buddhism, fascinating questions. Ive been studying hindu for the last ten years and have no idea what it is which makes it wonderful from my point of view. I asked them what is this and they just said come in, relax have fun. [laughter] how many gods do you have . Who knows. [laughter] i loved it. The question isnt just what is buddhism and christianity but what does it mean . Is that a live option for you . What would you believe . The philosophers, there are people who are among the most brilliant people in the universities. I said to you ask them if what plato said is true . Sometimes they say they are not ready for it yet. They arent ready to go out and fight for the country. Ready to get married and have children but not ready to asked if he has a part in justice. It is as though we humanists have given our students a beautiful piece of cloth, beautifully textured, put it on their desks and said to them if you want to make a jacket out of it, go ahead, i dont care. Say to them how would you make something out of that . Said, posing the question of belief in a detached, friendly, kindly, skeptical but also supportive way seems to me a crucial in the process of the true humanistic education and i think we should be willing to do a little bit more. So, if a real education is humanistic i have set a couple words about how we might improve. How might society improve . How is the society doing in terms of endorsing a real education . Welcoming you know what society says at large. Its very simple. The society says it is too expensive. It costs too much. To which something inside of me and it seems to me here today wants to say this. We have the money to have two and a half Million People in jail. We have the money to fight three wars simultaneously around the globe. We have the money to allow people like a certain individual recently ran for president to 15 of his taxes, despite the fact that he makes millions every year. We have enough money to suspend taxes for him, but we dont have enough money to support humanities . Given that they create citizens and