The Fate of Humanities in the Hands of High School Teachers

Clifford Orwin, a professor of political science at the University of Toronto, makes the good point in this op-ed column in the Toronto Globe and Mail (9/17/2015) that we might have wonderful arguments why students should study the humanities, but those arguments are not the reason students actually do take up the study. Great, often eccentric high school teachers are. After a wonderful description of the teacher who pointed him in this direction, he concludes: "On the whole, however, the fate of the humanities in Canada depends on its high schools, and their success at instilling a love of the subject that (like any love) owes nothing to statistics."