문화와 언어: 인문교육의 지평

Abstract

Since some believe that the aim of education in the field of humanities is to raise students to be professional scholars of liberal arts and the reality that most graduates from the college of humanities have been experiencing substantial difficulties to get a job directly connected to what they have learned from their college, many have kept thinking that these made worse the situations so called "the crisis of humanities". In this article, however, I argue that a model of education in humanities, based on writing education is really a 'practical education', compatible with the educational demand of current society and it is relevant to a function of universities, that is, academic research. First of all, a traditional world view is relied upon a commonsense of realism, according to which the objective world exists mind-independently of subjects. But once we rethink the necessity of being clung to that kind of realism, we can re-view the world as a 'linguistically turned' one, namely as a cultural being. Language is of course an element of culture, but a privileged one, because our culture in itself is linguistic. Culture is a sort of a text. And the writing education can enhance our creativity in designing and constructing that culture. And our portrait of current society as 'Knowledge-Based Society' also supports my point in another way. The situation of rapidly changing knowledge requires educators to foster educatee with an problem-solving ability, being capable of unifying and reconstructing this and that knowledges, and this kind of ability can be nurtured with a constructive education rather than with the cramming system of it.