About
Humanities at Earlham
The nationally recognized
Humanities Program at Earlham calls upon students to read, discuss, and
write about texts in history and literature. First-year students meet
in discussion classes with faculty from Classics, English, History, Philosophy,
Religion and occasionally other departments. The three-course core of
the Humanities Program expresses our commitment to required courses across
the curriculum that provide students with a background of substantive
content and flexible skills that enable them to learn whatever they wish.
The Humanities Program
helps students to learn both individually, on their own initiative, and
cooperatively, in a community of inquirers. It has been important that
each first-year student has a series of vital intellectual encounters
with great texts that he or she encounters at the time of intellectual
and moral openness, and in a community supporting inquiry into the deepest
questions of human life. The faculty who teach in the program are deeply
committed to it and gladly make its teaching part of their normal schedule.
Students return
again and again to these texts and through them to themes that they encounter
in future courses and in their life outside the classroom. The program
thus serves to symbolize the nurturing of intellectual and moral flexibility
and vision that we know will be required of those who will face a world
as different from ours as any generation’s has been from those that
preceded it.
The program reflects
Earlham’s conviction that we must be respectful of the canon that
represents the best that has been written, while simultaneously preserving
an openness to the challenge and reinterpretation of that canon through
the voices of other cultures, other genders, other times, and other traditions.
The renegotiation that takes place each year as the teaching staff agrees
upon a reading list provides an open texture to our ideas of canon that
we hope reflects the responsiveness of our whole curriculum.
Humanities reading
lists are broadly multicultural and constructed to allow students to compare
and contrast history and literature within selected topics. Students themselves
pose and answer increasingly sophisticated questions, and gain practice
in writing analytically and responsively about the texts they read, as
well as in using library and network resources to supplement their readings.
The
Program
All first-year students
take Humanities A and B in their first two terms of study. Humanities
C, a third required semester of work, is to be chosen from a list of designated
literature and history classes taught by regular Humanities faculty. Students
normally take Humanities C during or after the sophomore year.
