Humanities Humanize

In “The Last Professor” (NY Times, January 18, 2009; http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/), Stanley Fish writes:

“In previous columns and in a recent book I have argued that higher education, properly
understood, is distinguished by the absence of a direct and designed
relationship between its activities and measurable effects in the world.This is
a very old idea that has received periodic re-formulations. Here is a statement
by the philosopher Michael Oakeshott that may stand as are representative
example:

‘There is an important difference between learning which is concerned with
the degree of understanding necessary to practicea skill, and learning which is
expressly focused upon an enterprise of understanding and explaining.’

"Understanding and explaining what? The answer is understanding and
explaining anything as long as the exercise is not performed with the purpose of
intervening in the social and political crises of the moment, as long, that is,
as the activity is not regarded as instrumental – valued for its contribution to
something more important than itself.”

On the one hand, we may applaud the argument against instrumental learning—necessary for heart surgery, less so for the humanities. On the other hand, doesn’t this “education for education’s sake” argument smack of the same snobby meaninglessness as “art for art’s sake”? I don’t buy it; it reeks of false purity. The humanities (“Geisteswissenschaften,” or “spiritual sciences,” in German) are the studies that have the "function" of humanizing us, if only we don't lose sight of our own humanity. This is instrumental in the highest possible way, and produces measurable effects in the broadest, most multivariate way.

We may drive the hermeneuts and humanitarians out of instrument-minded universities and underground, and we may see ourselves into a new dark age. (Irony of ironies—universities started as cathedral schools, when all there was was humanities, and brought us out of the dark ages.) But let’s not lose sight of the highest function of education, beyond job prospects, life skills, degrees, civic awareness, dumbing-down for corporate tooling—the creation of human beings.

Oakshott is right, but Fish is wrong (too tempting--and too strong a statement--to write, "Fish stinks").