Humanities Education: Can We Teach Without Apologizing?

This essay examines attempts to save humanities education by making it instrumental to other ends. Although the humanities can be locally useful, they serve their own end as well. That is, they reveal the agency of persons in history and they help to humanize students. This purpose is itself enough to show the importance of teaching the humanities. Thus, we humanities teachers should embrace this challenge without apologizing for not being more useful and relevant.