Humanities, Education, and the Cultivation of Inner Depth

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Abstract

We live in the age where quality of education is being reduced to the satisfaction of quantified learning outcomes. These outcomes are supposed to serve student’s educational needs and better prepare them for life-long challenges in modern society. I will argue that there is a contradiction at the heart of learning outcomes—to the extent that they measure anything, it is rote performance in a temporally closed environment. Thus, there is no way to measure whether or not a course cultivates in students the disposition toward critical engagement with the world that proponents of learning outcomes claim to value. That disposition, I will argue, is better cultivated through traditional, discipline-centred humanistic education. Learning outcomes mistake measurable performance with the inner ethical and political depth required for critical engagement with the world because they commit what McMurtry calls “the externalist fallacy.”