The Sense of the Past; Mira Merriman

[LOUIS FOSTER]: Welcome to University in Your Community. My name is Louis Foster, and today we're continuing our series with WSU professors concerning the sense of the past and today my guest is mira merriman from the art history department here wichita state and first of all thank you very much for coming and universal in your community colleges a great pleasure this is a topic truly that concerns me and and has concerned me all my life about one of the new objectives of the general education is as that students develop a sense of the past now what is the sense of the past mean to you I know it's a very vague topic to begin with well it is vague but I've thought about this and have some ideas a sense of the past has as far as i'm concerned is the sense of the continuing a human enterprise a sense of the past requires a sense of continuity that mankind has a

a cumulative tradition men's experiences cumulative it is not every time replayed from nothing or begun from nothing no matter how we eat our feel ourselves cut all from the past nonetheless with a product of the past and the the imagination must understand this too i think to have the full experience of being human so a lot of people say that today's students the kids that are in school right now do not are very present oriented and have no real sense of the past at all well haven't they don't have a sense of anything very much altogether is one of the things that strikes a historian they know certain kinds of things

are having to do with the momentary concerns of their lives but they are very uninformed about any aspect of a kind of humanitarian human historical life within themselves there they have no sense of the past and i think they have no sense of the past for many many reasons one of the reasons is that they're that they are not readers they have not had the experience of books the generation that has now arrived in our schools i have been brought up on television and got a television journalist and occupied the money average of six hours a day the television for some reason does not teach one would have expected that students would learn something out from the variety that television producers even maybe even a sense of history

from a historical movies but it appears that the medium itself is so temporary that even what could be learned is not learned they retain nothing so that is one reason that a sense of the past is not part of their experience the other reason perhaps is that the curriculum in high schools and in public schools have completely abandoned the aim of giving students a sense of the past for some reason and there's also very complicated subject the historical study was saying in the fifties and the sixties and in the seventies considered to be an unimportant than the word at that time i remember was irrelevant and what why should i learned this my world is in the future the

past is dead i've heard that from my students constantly they learned that somewhere and they learned it probably in the sort of cliche talk of semi intellectualism but also they learned it from the fact that their elders did not force them to have any knowledge of the past at all so that their parents were dismissed with their experience to talk about the very recent past the the you know the stories of the parents were no longer of interest because that wasn't that world that was a very violent break which took place at that time in our culture and there was a kind of a rejection of what human beings had wrought so to

speak in the western culture all this had its reasons and probably was necessary we're now talking about this vague thing called necessity if the next thing is going to come about and we are in my opinion on the verge of some kind of major changes in our culture so that was another reason that one forced to read a history that were there was the belief that what the student had as experience was sufficient for him to make judgments and to discuss and to have opinions and to like and dislike and therefore the thrust of education it seems to me at that time was that you didn't learn things but rather you opinionated about a lot of things am that was very very detrimental to any development of a sense of the past because it was for the

getting of a sense of the past i'm losing the word for this the one that one has to have in the first place just facts one has to know things one is to know things happened one has to know when they happened in relationship to each other and one has to have some kind of a detail about these things in order to make them real so that there's a sense in the past is not simply a that's not the whole story just like the dates and the those are the indispensable that's just the beginning and tell them that my classes you've got to know the name of the artist and you've got to have a hook where to put him because that artist is not alone he has four fathers and after him come his progeny he comes from somewhere he has a whole tradition he depends on

he has had teachers human beings do not have anything in themselves when they're born you see so an artist is not an isolated phenomenon like a mushroom pop and back into the earth and artist belongs to a tradition it's a growing process process and he always has a whole history behind him it within his own culture to draw upon city and the sims very seems like there's something wrong with the fact that the people are just kind of cut off the past it doesn't seem well that but that was very temporary you see it it's not the case now well i have a very definite feeling within my classes that the students are inordinately hungry now the students i get it may be that our history is a very esoteric sort of subject and those who come to my classes except for the students in the art school who have to be in my classes

those who come there come voluntarily they know it is a difficult discipline they've heard that it is difficult because there's a lot to know and very specific stuff as well as a sort of one one has to develop a certain sensitivity which people are afraid they will not develop though they usually develop it how big role does our history point in the sense of a the past obviously a very big one i would say a very large one I think as large as in literature has sam played amazon has history tells because when you think about it in our history has that selected for itself a province it is the province of political life more or less the economic life owl but of course anyone any historian will tell you that that's only partial picture of what mankind's like his political life is only a part of what he

does and in fact his political life is often vitiated in transforming changed and influenced by art art brings ideas into the world which ideas have very great power as we know and the change whole cultures so the change in art art is correspondent to the change and the cultures and very often it follows the changes in the cultures of course it corresponds when you have a different view of the world that has developed let's say because of technology you kids nowadays don't see the world in the same way that a kid in the sixteenth century and so two for instance communications and you know it would be unthinkable to have the kind of speed we have or the amount of knowledge or the you know the ability to contact all over the world their sense of the smallness of the world all these

things create a completely different view of the world in the sense of let's say relationships between people and as a result you would have in in all the arts at a different view a different interest a different concern then you had in the sixteenth century if you were if you had your own way as far as how to determine how to give the students a proper sense of the past in a university setting what types of things would you do well it would be very much against the trend what i would do of course is what i think one university in the united states does very well and that is columbia college i'm very well acquainted with columbia university because so i was brought up there and in the

college which has just gone according [inaudible] this year there is a long tradition for the teaching of the humanities now of course the sense of the past as the study of the humanities they're the every student is required to take what is known as contemporary civilization CC it is a in essence a great book course they start with that plato and aristotle and the bible and they read the philosophers and they read read political history they read the great novels they read the great writings of early saints and in other words they bring from the earliest to the latest existentialist and men like Foruba who in the nineteenth century established the great doubt of God

and religion they read the whole gamut of human concerns including a sense of the development of science and development of political thought and for a year they are inundated with these very very heavy reading about which they have to discuss and about which they have to write many papers in which they after they have read them they have to recombine the ideas and to understand their of their differences how is our stubble different from plato and what the implications are there for our lives in this this is the kind of thing that they do and to me that is the best as far as the gaining of a sense and the other thing is to go to the sources to read the documents to get in touch with the actual mind the the

actual to talk to the person across the ages that is the aim of the sense of the past ok well thank you very much we are at a time this has been university in your community community and i'd like to thank Mira Merriman from the art history department here for being my guest we've been talking about the sense of the past my name is lewis foster production assistance from Barry Hailey it was only fifteen minutes season