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  3. 【F1】The only thing most teachers and students of the humanities agree on, it often seems, is that these are troubled times for t

【F1】The only thing most teachers and students of the humanities agree on, it often seems, is that these are troubled times for t

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问题     【F1】The only thing most teachers and students of the humanities agree on, it often seems, is that these are troubled times for their field. For a whole variety of reasons—social, intellectual, and technological the humanities have been losing their confident position at the core of the university’s mission. This represents an important turning point, not just for education, but for our culture as a whole. Ever since the Renaissance, the humanities have defined what it means to be an educated person.【F2】The very word comes from the Latin name of the first modern curriculum, the study of humanity, invented in fourteenth-century Italy as a rival to traditional university subjects like medicine and law.
    According to Princeton historian Anthony Grafton, "the study of humanity included quite a specific range of subjects: grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic, the arts that gave a command of Latin, the language of learning, and oratory, history, poetry, and moral philosophy. " For centuries after, these disciplines were considered indispensable for any well-educated person. Still more important, they helped to define an ethical ideal; they were "forms of thought and writing," Grafton explains, "that improved the character of the student. "【F3】To study the humanities was to grow more independent and brave, both intellectually and morally and it was the royal road to becoming a complete human being. In the words of the critic George Steiner, modern education has been defined by the principle "that the humanities humanize. "
    Even today, most members of institutions like Harvard would instinctively approve, in some form, the proposition advanced six centuries ago by the Italian Renaissance humanist Pier Paolo Vergerio: "We call those studies liberal, then, which are worthy of a free mart: they are those through which virtue and wisdom are either practiced or sought, and by which the body or mind is inclined towards all the best things. " But today, every part of Vergerio’s belief is coming under increased attack.【F4】For one thing, "liberal studies" can appear less useful, to the student and to society as a whole, than concrete scientific and technical knowledge. Better to emerge from college as a budding biologist or financier, our practical-minded culture incessantly tells us, than as a mere reader of books.【F5】Meanwhile, the humanities themselves have become infinitely more self-critical in recent decades, so that "virtue" and "wisdom," unquestionable terms for Vergerio, are now contested battlegrounds. Reading canonical texts, many people now believe, is not the road to freedom, but a subtle kind of indoctrination.
【F1】
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答案似乎总是如此：唯一一件能让大多数人文学科师生达成一致意见的事情是，如今是他们领域的多事之秋。
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