Readers React: Studying the humanities is in decline in the era of Donald Trump. Coincidence?

To the editor: After 50 years teaching philosophy in a college classroom, I have found an almost universal ignorance of the historical settings necessary to any understanding of the great thinkers of the past, including those whose ideas made our American system possible. This was why I welcomed James Grossman’s defense of the importance of the humanities as an integral part of higher education. (“History isn’t a ‘useless’ major. It teaches critical thinking, something America needs plenty more of,” Opinion, May 30)

I was even more impressed when I read theater critic Charles McNulty’s piece in the same issue, “Could Shakespeare have foreseen Trump?” William Shakespeare, who drew on actual events for his plays, understood the way in which a clever demagogue can command support.

Americans, no longer well versed in history and too likely unfamiliar with how in the past a democratic system has been subverted, applaud presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump’s simplistic answers. Trump blithely ignores the past and his followers, not even knowing the past, follow him blindly. It is a tragedy in the making.

Douglass McFerran, Woodland Hills

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To the editor: Is Grossman really trying to assert that the teaching of critical thinking in our colleges and universities is reserved solely for humanities students? Does he think that engineers, scientists, mathematicians and doctors have been denied this skill when it is, in fact, one of the very first things they learn in classrooms and laboratories?

I would contend that Grossman, in writing his article, has misplaced the very asset he bemoans has been displaced in higher learning. Certainly, while complaining of political “simplicities,” he has, with very little critical thinking, drawn one of his own.

Mike Harvey, Irvine

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To the editor: The reason more people don’t take history is because it seems boring, a perception that this essay perpetuates.

The first thing any college professor will tell you is to forget everything you learned in school heretofore; it more aptly falls under the category of patriotic reinforcement.

Historians will not make the mistake of calling any World War II battle in the Pacific “one of the bloodiest of the war,” when hundreds of actions in China and Russia were more so. They remember that the freedom fought for and won at the Alamo was the right to own slaves. Who else will be able to point out that the murderous excesses of Stalinism were balanced by genocidal repression by regimes we supported?

To not know history is to be fully at the mercy of those who would write the past to suit their own agenda and thus our future.

John Stevenson, Ramona, Calif.

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