Word: without
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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...
...advances of historical studies in the century are fascinating, but trying to understand them without the facts is absurd. Harvard graduate students trying to wring "arguments" out of undergraduates concerning subjects of which they were almost totally ignorant was something I witnessed on 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...
...bucketful of scholarly interpretations of "Feudalism" or 'Development.' It requires a basic knowledge of what happened when and where, and this can only come from a sustained study of the sources. Doubtless the latest social scientific wizardry is more exciting than biographic of popes or medieval chronicles, but without the second the first is meaningless...
...people can talk for one who can think, but thousands think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion, all in one." I'm sure that a very small classroom would contain all the people at Harvard who share Ruskin's opinion, but without such a conception art is not worth bothering with. I met very few people at Harvard who really cared about art, who sought it out as a first-hand experience rather than accepting passively what was flashed up on the projector or dished out in the anthologies. The guardians...
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...