Best practice, liberal learning

Humanities for Life is a forum for the advocacy of classic humanities practices: in particular the close and immersive reading of a wide range of critical, foundational texts. On this model, students are introduced into the ‘great conversation’ of humanity; they gain depth of historical perspective, range of evaluative understandings, and facility with language.

We take inspiration from times and places where this kind of study has been done best. Globally, St John’s Annapolis and Santa Fe remains the outstanding ‘great books’ course, while earlier iterations of the Columbia ‘core curriculum’ have inspired generations of students, and recent variations on the liberal arts model bode well for the future.

Regarding Australian experience, the founders of Humanities for Life have drawn upon their own familiarity with such examples as:

• the flourishing of Campion College Australia, currently our country’s only liberal arts college
• the success of the Ramsay Centre-funded degrees and majors in three Australian universities
• the synoptic English literature courses that were a staple of Arts degrees into the 1990s, attracting first-year student enrolments in the 1,000s at the University of Sydney alone
• the provision of courses in classics, history of philosophy, and English literature, amounting to at least the option of assembling a ‘great books’ education, in the 1970s and 1980s
• in the Federation era, the deep historical roots provided in university courses on literature and language, philosophy, and history; and humanities professors’ leadership in setting the secondary-school curriculum.

As we begin to convene conversations about the future of education in the humanities we will draw on best practices worldwide. We will also seek to foster and transmit a sense of those traditions and models of liberal education that helped to form Australia’s institutions. We are preparing the way for students who flourish, who sustain a pluralist society with deep roots in the best of the past, and who meet tomorrow’s challenges with flexibility, imagination, and conviction.

Our beginnings:
teaching, the workforce, public engagement, curriculum

Humanities for Life began as a collaboration intended to broaden the constituency for the humanities, led by a teacher celebrated by two generations of students, Professor Will Christie, FAHA; and businessman and strategy consultant, Tony Golsby-Smith, whose career proved the value of humanities attributes, and of employing humanities graduates.

Dr Kate Flaherty, a Senior Lecturer in English and Drama at the ANU, believes that the meaning and value of scholarship in the humanities is realised at the public interface. She is a leading proponent of the live-and-public humanities, including collaborations with the National Library of Australia, Bell Shakespeare, and Sport for Jove. She is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and winner of the ANU Vice Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Education.

Their friend and colleague, Professor Simon Haines, FHKAH, FRSN, has been a humanities teacher in Australia and overseas for thirty years. He was the inaugural CEO of the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation. In realising Paul Ramsay’s generous bequest—the largest gift to the humanities in Australian history—he negotiated and oversaw the establishment of three new programs in Australian universities, created dozens of academic jobs, and offered hundreds of student scholarships.

Dr Jon Lane, while working for the Australian Academy of the Humanities, met Simon on his departure from the Ramsay Centre, and they resolved, with Kate, to develop Will and Tony’s initiative as a permanent forum dedicated to humanities education.