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less, effective in enhancing students' primary experience of art works
than one that presents art as a set of "universal experiences that are
common to all people ."
The most telling weakness of the approach of Boyer and all the
others today who would consolidate the humanities around a com–
mon ground of values is that this approach makes the humanities
even more boring than many students already think they are. There
is nothing wrong with common ground if your community happens
already to have it. But once the common ground has become at–
tenuated, any inventory of shared truths is naturally going to be
bland and vapid. That is why universalist defenses of the humanities
always have the opposite effect from the one they aim at: by explic–
itly spelling out the common values, these defenses reveal how thin
and platitudinous these values are and why teaching the humanities
as a repository of them is a prescription for further alienating
students.
I believe the weakness of Boyer's book, and of all the others that
preach a return to educational and cultural universals, is a symptom
of the death throes of the modern ideal of General Education, which
is losing its standing among academic professionals. The present
conflict over humanistic education reflects the gulf between a lay
citizenry that still thinks of the humanities (insofar as it thinks about
them) as a repository of timeless universals and an academic profes–
sional culture which increasingly views such purported universals as
contingent historical and cultural constructions. The academic
culture is likely to win this conflict, partly because in the long run
professionalism always tends to overcome lay resistance, but also
because, in this case, the professionals are promoting a more demo–
cratic social vision than that of the traditional universalist alter–
native.
It
is becoming increasingly difficult to square democratic
ideals with the notion that some one form of culture, or way of
studying culture, deserves uncontested privilege over others.
This is what is poorly understood by those who attack the "rela–
tivism" and "nihilism" underlying the current historicizing and politi–
cizing trend in the humanities. Relativistic and nihilistic thinking do
indeed figure in this trend, but what is denounced under these
epithets is frequently nothing more than the recognition that art,
culture, and humanistic values are social products, that they have a
history, that they are subject to conflicting interpretations, that they
change under the pressure of the social conflicts which make and un–
make them.
