Humanities Matter

Robert Menzies’ ideal of a liberal education was far removed from the utilitarian approach widely practiced today. By David Furse-Roberts

In a 1968 address to the Kings School in Canterbury, UK, Robert Menzies observed that the greatest problems in our society today were ‘essentially moral and spiritual’.  The former Australian PM delivered this diagnosis in a speech calling for a broad, generalist approach to the education of future professionals.  For Menzies, it was all very well to produce the best-trained chemists or lawyers, but this needed to be done against the essential backdrop of ‘human knowledge, human philosophy and human experience’.

To realise this outcome, what approach to higher education did Menzies favour? In a 1939 speech to the Canberra University College, the embryo of the future ANU, Menzies outlined what he saw as the seven-fold purpose of the university. The first purpose of the university was that it must be ‘the home of pure culture and learning’. For Menzies, the primary disciplines through which this ‘pure learning’ could be pursued would indeed be the arts and humanities.

With humanities subjects frequently derided as impractical and of limited vocational value, Menzies defended so-called useless scholarship on the grounds that ‘it represented a sanity badly needed in an insane world; that it stood for a due proportion in life and living’. According to Menzies, the humanities could develop the humane and imperishable elements in men and women, ‘pointing to the moral that the mere mechanics of life could never be the soul vocation of the human spirit’.

In practical policy terms, this esteem for the humanities meant that governments needed to support the study of English, history, philosophy, religion and other liberal arts disciplines at schools and universities. Speaking on a 1945 motion on education in federal parliament, the recent founder of the new Liberal Party of Australia explained again why the humanities mattered:

‘the study of humanities in the schools and universities can at least develop a sense of proportion – the balancing of all special knowledge against general knowledge of the world, of the men in it, and of its problems. ‘Useless learning’, as it has been described, must, I believe, come back into its own in this world if we are to produce a really civilised point of view. The first function of education is to produce a good man and a good citizen. Its second function is to produce a good carpenter or a good lawyer.’

If, on the other hand, the purpose of school and university was to enable ‘our sons and daughters’ to earn money and nothing else, then this was a woefully stunted and ‘pitiful conception of education’. For Menzies, the trainee carpenter or lawyer would be all the better at their respective crafts if a humanities education could furnish them with a humane understanding of the world and their obligations towards their neighbour and to civil society.

Throughout his lengthy post-war prime ministership, Menzies’ affirmation of the humanities was sustained. He envisaged that the 1957 Murray Report he commissioned into universities would buttress the faculties of arts as well as the sciences. In addition to Australia having the best scientists, he appealed for ‘people of humane letters, who can remind us that the most important thing in the world is not the machine, but the human being’.

With Menzies’ advocacy for the humanities, there are salutary lessons for us today. The first is that universities must recover their original purpose. Instead of being mere commercial enterprises or utilitarian degree factories fixated on churning out the greatest number of graduates, they need to return to their founding purpose as being cultivators of character and culture.

Critical to this, is the importance of investing in liberal arts faculties that offer studies in disciplines such as history, anthropology, philosophy, literature, languages and theology. Menzies understood such disciplines as critical to advancing human understanding and nurturing civilisation, so Australia’s governments should follow his example of investing in ‘pure learning’ as well as in vocational training.

Now with many of the liberal arts faculties in today’s universities succumbing to Critical Theory and postmodernism, widely seen as giving rise to political correctness, identity politics and intellectually conformist ‘group think’, many on the centre-right, understandably disturbed by these developments, have supported a reduction in funding support for universities and arts faculties.

The proper path forward, however, is not to starve the arts faculties but to redeem them and to help them recover their original purpose of inculcating students with the traditions and values that built our civilisation. In this vein, the establishment of the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation at selected public universities and the flourishing of new liberal arts colleges such as Sydney’s Campion College are welcome developments. By reviving the relevance and appeal of the humanities, these initiatives will help draw more students to the intellectual and spiritual riches of our civilisation that can nourish both their minds and character.