Humanities Unit 1

4DISCIPLINES The humanities are composed of separate areas that are referred to as disciplines. These include visual arts such as painting, drawing, and printmaking as well as other areas such as photography, fi lm, theater, dance, poetry, and architecture. These disciplines are creative expressions and achievements of the human imagi- nation that delve deeply into the soul and spirit of the human race. Past artistic expressions offer unique insights into culture that help people to understand their world. Through art, they learn how people lived in the past, which helps them to live better among themselves.

Each one of the individual areas or disciplines has elements unique to its own structure. The way in which those elements are organized makes up its style. By looking at the elements unique to each discipline, students become more aware of the style and learn to distinguish one style from another. It becomes an enjoyable exercise to see whether students can fi gure out how and why an artist organized his or her work. As they study the artistic elements, an awareness and sensitivity toward style and chronological time periods develop. For some students, this will come very quickly, and for others it may take longer. It may involve taking time out to actually study the historical background along with the elements of art because an awareness of time and place are factors that often infl uence an artist’s work.

The humanities are disciplines that differ from the sciences. They may change with time, but they also embody an element of the past that is different from chang- es in the sciences. Take for example a piece of equipment in a technology class that needs to be constantly updated for it to be useful. Think about how a computer that sat on a professor’s desk in 1998 would look and work in a classroom today. Compare a decade-old basic computer with a CRT monitor and a phone modem to today’s basic computer with a high-resolution fl at screen and DSL and imagine how obsolete the old one seems to be. That old computer would probably be sitting on a curb awaiting its fate on trash pick-up day. Now think about a great painting. It could be ten years old or a hundred years old or a thousand years old, and it would still be hanging on a wall and students would still be looking at it and admiring it. It will remain meaningful. It is not necessarily being replaced with a more contem- porary painting like the computer in the previous example. This is not to say that there are not other types and styles of paintings being painted in other ways and with new types of materials, but art serves a different purpose than technology.

16 What Are the Humanities?

QUESTIONS

Questions to Contemplate

What similarities and differences can you fi nd between the sciences and the humanities, and what are the characteristics that make each of them unique?

Do you utilize both of these in your daily life? Do you need both?

Which do you fi nd that you utilize more? Explain your answer and discuss your responses with a friend.

Discuss some of your own opinions and ideas about how the sciences and technology serve us in our society.

How are the humanities very different from disciplines such as accounting or an area of study that is highly technical? What makes those disciplines so different from the humanities?