Teaching the Humanities in a Fractious World: A Reply to Sceptics

This book confronts an ever more popular suspicion – that a university education in the humanities and social sciences is an ‘elitist’ indoctrination into ‘leftist’ or ‘liberal’ views. Having taught them for nearly 40 years, Gavin Kitching shows that, on the contrary, studying these subjects leads one to question all political and social views (left-wing, right-wing, ‘elite’, ‘popular’, religious, secular) and to be sceptical of all the beliefs about human identity (whether racial, gender, national, or class) to which they give rise. The book is divided into 34 brief sections which can be read as stand-alone discussions of some topic or as sequential steps in an argument. This modular structure makes it an excellent teaching text for students. It is written in an accessible, even colloquial, style which gives it the broadest possible appeal, and its arguments are illustrated by a host of ‘everyday’ linguistic, sociological and psychological examples. These not only enliven the book but demonstrate that philosophical ideas are most persuasive when used to illuminate non-philosophical matters. Accordingly, Teaching the Humanities… explores such issues as the climate crisis; individualism and postmodernism; nationalism; globalisation and its relationship to economic inequality and political polarisation; all of which are currently the subject of fierce debate inside and outside the university.