The River Tales is one of the projects the Humanities Ladder students completed this year! It is a compilation of stories each student created.

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Interested in learning more about the Humanities Ladder?

Check out our website:
www.humanitiesladder.org

​Poems today do not get the recognition they deserve. Science, art and literature are a large part of the humanities. Poetry comes from the extensive languages the human race obtains.

Literature in itself is like poetry. There is beauty and meaning in the different way words can be intertwined.

Language is one of the main ways the human race communicates. Words hold a depth of emotion and meaning, and poetry is a powerful tool in which language can be expressed as an art form. The following poem is an excellent example of the power of the humanities:
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Humanities
by Julie Lumsden
 
A frog is always a frog, a moth
is a moth, swallows
flying in their own manoeuvre.
Watch how it works.  Insects
in and out of these garden petals
as Mum talks about my birthday
and how 1966 was the year
they stopped giving any girl –
Mum’s own name, Myra.
 
Only people can break, change
or mix the rules.  We’ve seen
that young woman smiling
on Saddleworth moor. In prison,
her Open University essay
on the banquet scene in Macbeth
was ‘a pleasure to read.’
Look at the photograph of her
gowned in her graduation pose.
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Want to learn more about the Stone House Center for Public Humanities and how the humanities are helping our community? Click here to learn more.

​Sources:
http://poetrysociety.org.uk/poems/humanities/

The Humanities Ladder is a unique program that introduces college-level humanities to low-income and under-represented high school students through weekly sessions with Slippery Rock University professors.

Check out this Afro-Colombian dance activity on our NEW YouTube Channel!

Each month, The Stone House Center for Public Humanities interviews a humanities scholar or community member and asks them everything from why they believe the humanities are important to what they're currently binge-watching. We hope that our new blog series, Coffee & Questions, will inspire you, introduce you to a variety of people and fields, as well as create new conversations.

Our guest this month is Dr. Joshua F. Drake, Professor of Music and Humanities at Grove City College where he teaches a range of music and art-related courses.  His Ph.D. research, at the University of Glasgow (UK) was on 15th century motets.  He is co-author of Art and Music: a Student’s Guide (Crossway, 2014).

What inspires you in your current position/role?
People believe beauty is in the eye of the beholder.  This would be very convenient, in some ways, because it would make our tastes unimpeachable.  We could no more be held responsible for our tastes in art or music than we could be held responsible for our eye color.  But on the other hand, we would have little reason, and even less ability, to change our tastes.  Even more alarming, we could hardly congratulate ourselves on them, as we tend already to do. No teenager who has taken an interest in a new independent rock band thinks that his delight in that music is a mere byproduct of his brain chemistry.  He thinks it is very good music and, if you ask him to, he may actually take pains to show you why.  This suggests that tastes may actually be the sort of thing that we change based on influences from outside. But not all influences are good.  My hope—perhaps a fool’s hope—is that my influence is a good one. 

By confronting my students with beautiful things with which they have had little or no experience, and demonstrating how and why these things are beautiful, I can help them like what is more likable.  This saves them from being condemned to whatever tastes they haphazardly have formed and gives them the skills to continue to evaluate their leisure wisely.  This will hopefully mean more pleasure for them since they will have chosen their leisure based on more than raw impulse or the brute force of popular advertisement. 

Why do you believe that the humanities are important to everyone, and not just people in academia?
The popular scientists are often reminding us of the narrow gap between humans and animals.  I cannot help but think that part of their incitement to do so is to lift from humans some of the terrible moral burden we expect of ourselves but do not expect of the beasts. But the consequences of these comparisons are often more harmful than might be imagined.  If we link our behavior to that of the beasts, we may forego pleasures that are distinctly human. Now, I well believe that animals have intense pleasures.  Everyone in the house knows when the dog is scratching a good itch.  But the pleasures are mostly sensual.  Of the pleasures that come when sensations combine to form meaning—of the delights of a Euclidian proof, of the return of a symphony’s opening theme, or the denouements of Aeschylus—the dog can know nothing.  Sensation offers tremendous pleasures to be sure.  No human would wish to be without them for long.  But it is the distinctive blessing of being human that we can have pleasures that come from meaning and not just sensation.  Everyone, therefore, should study the humanities because it is there that we are offered so many examples of meaning made especially to please us. 

The natural world is full of meaning too, but it is touching to meet meaning made by our fellow humans—and for our fellow humans.  Here I should be careful.  After all, the animals make things for one another too, as any bird’s nest will testify.  But our inventions are sometimes of a sort that please only us.  I too may make a nest—of blankets and sheets—but I can also make a string quartet.  The dog may nestle up in the first but he will fall asleep during the second.
 
What is something that people might be surprised to learn about you (hobby, skill, interesting story)?
I enjoy playing sailor songs on my concertina.  People imagine that they enjoy folk music when in fact they’ve likely never known it.  Folk music is the music that a discreet local group of people evolve and make for one another.  It is a music made by people you know personally, in an idiom that crops up in relative isolation, based on the various social and practical needs of the people who make it.  I should point out at once the irony:  I am not a sailor.  In fact, I have never been out to sea on a sailboat at all.  But by making a music that evolved for sailors (as opposed to a music that evolved to sell radio advertising space or to erect totemic pop stars) I feel myself a little bit more able to enjoy something that was once ubiquitous in human experience and is now nearly lost. 

What is your first thought in the morning and last thought at night?
My first thought in the morning is surprise and gratitude.  I am perpetually thankful to wake up in a world like this, next to a wife like mine, in a house full of children and a neighborhood full of life, with my books at my elbow and my work waiting for me.  It seems almost impossible, given what I know of my own wickedness, to be given such a life.

My last thought is variable and depends on whatever I was reading or doing before I fell asleep or whatever I was speaking with my wife about before we both switched off the light.  I suppose this is fairly normal.  It is the land of Queen Mab that follows, and the dreams I meet there are perhaps more interesting—though not at this juncture. 
What's a book you've always wanted to read but haven't gotten around to?
Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia.  Here is a book that delighted most of our English speaking predecessors and has fallen almost entirely into obscurity.  Sidney’s sonnets in Astrophel and Stella continue to delight, and his Apology for Poetry is a common enough text in literary criticism.  But the Arcadia is patently his most entertaining work.  I’ve taken it up several times and made it nearly halfway through but have never completed it.  It makes me wonder if there isn’t some deficiency in my literary abilities that keeps at arm’s length a work so obviously pleasant.

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Check back next month for more Coffee & Questions. In case you missed our previous interview with Dr. Jason Stuart, click here.    

Defining what the humanities are and its importance can be difficult. An article from the Stanford Humanities Center states, “The humanities can be described as the study of how people process and document the human experience.” This quote refers to the way humans use philosophy, literature, art, music, history and language as a form of expression. These subjects allow a stronger connection between themselves, others and the world.
 
The humanities are what make us human and help identify what it means to be human. Without humanity the basis of art or philosophy would be meaningless. An article by Sarah Churchwell states,
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​“If we agree that the humanities do not matter, or fail to challenge this assessment, we are colluding in the very practices that reduce our humanity, that impinge upon all the other ways in which we can enrich our lives, our abilities to express our creative individuality.”
 
This quote describes how if we as a people do not realize the importance of the humanities our lives will not be satisfactory and in a sense become less human. Essentially, without the involvement of the humanities in your life there is a high possibility of missing out on “the good life”.
 
Sources:
 http://shc.stanford.edu/what-are-the-humanities
 
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/comment/opinion/sarah-churchwell-why-the-humanities-matter/2016909.article#survey-answer

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Want to learn more about the Stone House Center for Public Humanities and how the humanities are helping our community? Click here to learn more.

Science gives answers to the way things work and provides never ending questions, and the world relies on science to function. For example, our society depends on devices such as a smart phones, which were created as a product of science. It is extremely difficult to live in our society without skill and knowledge of technology, thus making science a necessity to survive. This does not mean the humanities are a lesser necessity. In fact, the humanities encompass who we are as humans and the meaning of life.

Although science and the humanities are different in many ways, they provide the same quality of work to life. We simply could not survive with just science or just art. They work together in harmony. In an article by John Horgan, he describes the importance of science and the humanities combined:

"We live in a world increasingly dominated by science. And that's fine. I became a science writer because I think science is the most exciting, dynamic, consequential part of human culture, and I wanted to be a part of that. Also, I have two college-age kids, and I'd be thrilled if they pursued careers in science, engineering or medicine. I certainly want them to learn as much science and math as they can, because those skills can help you get a great job.
But it is precisely because science is so powerful that we need the humanities now more than ever. In your science, mathematics and engineering classes, you're given facts, answers, knowledge, truth. Your professors say, "This is how things are." They give you certainty. The humanities, at least the way I teach them, give you uncertainty, doubt and skepticism."

As Horgan explains, science teaches you facts, and the humanities teaches you uncertainty. We need opposites to function. Combined, they create a well functioning society. 
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​Source:
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/why-study-humanities-what-i-tell-engineering-freshmen/

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Want to learn more about the Stone House Center for Public Humanities and how the humanities are helping our community? Click here to learn more.

Thank you to all who attended Spooky Stories last Saturday at the Old Stone House. Over 100 people attended this annual event in Slippery Rock!

The guests were treated to a performance by SRU theatre students, face painting, candle dipping and more!