Word: european
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Another major element that a student requires in his study of the humanities is history. Without a good solid chronological framework it is hopeless to try to understand the history of Italian painting or French literature or any other aspect of European culture. Americans are notorious in Europe for having no sense of history. This means that they do not grow up, as an Italian does, bombarded with dates and monuments and biographies. Every Italian town is a patchwork of architectural styles that children learn to identify. They are spoon-fea Church history, the history of the communist party...
...numerous occasions. The worst example. I came across was a Government course that proposed to teach the political economy of France. Italy, Britain and Germany over a period of several centuries in one semester. Since the majority of the students taking the course didn't have a clue about European history, let alone European polities, the result was a shambles. Since this course also fulfilled the comparative politics requirement for government majors. I was left a little less mystified by the ineptitude of American policy in recent years...
...coincidence that most Europeans don't know that Harvard is a university, but think it is simply the Business School. For through the Business School Harvard has had an enormous impact on Europe, speeding up the destruction of the traditional society and culture on which European art depends. It is ironic that as an institution it has done so much to attack what it has always claimed, with flowery rhetoric, to defend...
These weaknesses in the presentation of European art would not be so serious if it were not for the fact that Harvard partakes of the general, worldwide confusion about art and what to do with it. For the artist his work is an approach to reality that is both different from, and entirely independent of other ways of knowing; science, language and so on. He believes, in the words of Ruskin, "that the greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people...
...European art of the more or less distant past, be it Dante or Giotto, Proust or Mondrian, cannot be properly appreciated without a great deal of study and contemplation. Harvard undergraduates in general do not think the art important enough to be worth the effort and devote most of their time to economics and biology. The faculty do little to convince them they are wrong...