Through the humanities we reflect on the fundamental question: What does it mean to be human? The humanities offer clues but never a complete answer. They reveal how people have tried to make moral, spiritual, and intellectual sense of a world in which irrationality, despair, loneliness, and death are as conspicuous as birth, friendship, hope, and reason.
From: The Humanities in American Life, a 1980 report from the United States Rockefeller Commission on the HumanitiesThe Humanities are the academic disciplines that study the human experience. The subjects that are generally classified as humanities include ancient and modern languages, literature, law, history, philosophy, religion, the visual and performing arts, as well as the social sciences such as psychology, sociology, anthropology, and political science. Essentially, to study the humanities is to try to make sense of humanity, of our individual and collective experiences. Freshman Humanities is effectively an introduction to the study of Humanities at Animas High School. It is designed to be a survey course; we will cover a wide sampling of the disciplines mentioned above. We will explore what it means to be human through a variety of lenses. We will examine a diverse array of texts, images, and other human artifacts that relate the stories of humanity. We will study the clues in a quest to find meaning in the human experience, and although we should never expect to find a complete answer, we will acquire perspective and awareness that will enrich our journeys as humans on this planet.
