NORMAN F. CANTOR
565
It would be unfair to have expected from a commission even of
such well-informed people, who concluded their work in the spring
of 1980, that they should have had the prescience to have foreseen
the federal electoral outcome of November, 1980. The Report's rec–
ommendations assume the continuation of the National Endowment
for the Humanities not only at the same substantial level of funding
it had reached in the last year of the Carter Administration, but at a
significant increase. The Commission can scarcely be faulted for
not having foreseen then that within less than a year the announced
policy of the President of the United States would be to decrease sub–
stantially the funding level of NEH, as well as to eliminate the sup–
port rendered to the social and behavioral sciences by the National
Science Foundation. Thus, the Report, which proposes various ad–
ditional funding commitments for the National Endowment for the
Humanities, particularly in the area of elementary and secondary
education, already has about it a sad air of obsolescence. That the
Report appears to have been overtaken by political trends, which if
they are realized in the image of the Reagan-Stockman policy for
NEH would undoubtedly lead the same Commission today to recon–
sider many of its recommendations, is not, however, the main prob–
lem with this report. The problems are far more fundamental.
The Commission's Report is based upon the following basic as–
sumption with respect to the nature of the humanities :
The humanities do not impose arry single set
of
normative values,
whether moral,
social, or aesthetic; rather, as a record of the ideals that have guided
men and women in the past,
they give historical perspective.
Students made
sensitive to what it might be like to live in a different time, place or
culture can make value choices without automatically assuming that
contemporary reality has no precedent, or that quick scientific or hu–
manistic prescriptions can remedy every problem.
The humanities bring
to life the ideal of cultural pluralism
by expanding the number of perspec–
tives from which questions of value may be viewed, by enlarging
young people's social and historical consciousness, and by activating
an imaginative critical spirit. (Emphasis added.)
The Commission has imposed a severe limitation on itself by consid–
ering the humanities so extensively within the context of undergrad–
uate education, rather than within the much broader context of the
building of distinctive intellectual systems and the possible impact of
these systems upon American culture and society. There is, how–
ever, a deeper issue.
