Friday, April 12, 2013

Transforming Education According to the Needs of the Human Soul

My school of the future would be an institution which would transmit wisdom in the great challenges of everyday life and it would do this with rigor and intellectual seriousness. We need to reorder departments.  You know, why do we have a Literature Department?  This is a completely nonsensical demarcation.  The most interesting questions do not happen under the rubric of literature, or indeed, of history.  It’s time to rearrange departments and academic teaching according to the issues that they are dealing with.

So really, you know, literature is primarily dealing with relationships, so let’s have a Department of Relationships in which the literature people can dominate, but will also have help from psychologists and we’ll have some help from the historians, etc.  Or rearrange the university according to the needs of the human soul not according to the needs of academic tradition.


- Alan De Botton


No comments: