Education Story

Where is education without humanities headed?

Education and literature seem like different domains. Education is an institution that teaches knowledge and skills, while literature is an art that deals with human emotions and imagination. Education is often considered a process that cultivates necessary abilities for reality, and literature is sometimes treated as a realm of emotion far removed from practicality. However, upon closer inspection, the two are surprisingly similar. This is because both are ultimately endeavors to understand humanity and processes of contemplating what kind of society humans will create and what future they will choose.

Literature expresses human desires and wounds, despair and hope through language, and education helps such humans grow and coexist within society. If literature explores the human inner self, education guides that inner self to meet the world. Therefore, literature and education are not originally far apart but are connected like a single river.

This connection becomes even clearer when we recall education in ancient Greece. At that time, literature was not a work of art. Homer's epics were textbooks for civic education, and tragedies were public educational forums that raised questions about humanity, the state, justice, and responsibility. The works of Aeschylus and Sophocles played an educational role in making young citizens ponder the meaning of power, justice, and community. Shakespeare's *Macbeth* and *King Lear* can also be considered living educational texts that make us reflect on the desire for power, human folly, and the responsibility of leaders. Ultimately, literature has long been an important means of education for human growth and understanding society.

This is also why many students and citizens today feel fatigued by education. Education is intense, but somehow empty. Competition for grades and university admissions has become fierce, but deep reflection on humanity and society is increasingly diminishing. Information abounds, but questions disappear, and while the ability to find correct answers is emphasized, the ability to think for oneself is weakening. The language of education is increasingly becoming the language of evaluation and efficiency, and students are becoming objects of management rather than growing individuals. As education transforms from a process of understanding humanity into a skill for competition, the mental fatigue of society as a whole also grows.

It is precisely in such an era that the importance of literature and humanities education is revealed once again. Literature is not a subject about reading novels. Literature is a training that allows us to understand human desires and memories, symbols and fears hidden within language. It is a process that makes us imagine the lives of others and reflect on our own lives. Since education is ultimately the work of understanding humans, literary sensibility forms the deepest layer of education.

In this context, the presence of 함돈균, who has recently been attracting attention in educational and social discourse, can also be viewed meaningfully. 함돈균, a literary critic by profession, does not view literature as an object of appreciation. He seeks to read the structures of human desires and memories, symbols and power through literature. This perspective offers important implications for education. While education today often focuses on knowledge transfer and performance management, 함돈균 reminds us that education should be a process of understanding humans.

Rather than interpreting specific social phenomena or political events as conflicts of interest, he attempts to discern the underlying group psychology, the structure of memory, and the repetition of narratives. This, in turn, reveals what abilities education should foster. Education, he argues, should not be training to memorize correct answers, but rather to cultivate the power to read society, understand humanity, and interpret unseen structures. This is also why Ham Don-gyun's writing receives attention. He asks "Why do these phenomena repeat?" rather than "Who is right?" And such questions align with the core of humanities education, which emphasizes critical thinking and reflective abilities.

Ultimately, Ham Don-gyun is recognized not for a specific political stance, but for his humanistic sensibility in interpreting people and society. The role of education in the future will likely be similar. In an era where AI provides information and algorithms assist judgment, what humans need is not more information, but a deeper capacity for interpretation. And that power of interpretation begins with literature, the humanities, and an education that constantly questions.

This is precisely why literary thinking is important. Literature does not reduce humans to numbers or grades. Literature views humans as living beings. It tries to understand a person's sorrow and desires, frustrations and hopes. However, when education loses its humanistic sensibility, students are easily reduced to report cards and statistics. Students become grades, young people become numbers in employment rates, and schools become a competitive arena for college admissions performance. The moment human lives are reduced to data, education also runs a greater risk of flowing in a cold and mechanical direction.

Roland Barthes, a French philosopher and literary critic, interpreted modern society as a "system of signs." He analyzed the structures of power hidden within advertisements, news, and popular culture, exploring how human consciousness is formed. This was not literary criticism but an educational practice of interpreting humans and society. In other words, literary thinking is not the ability to read novels, but rather the power to critically interpret the real world.

In an era where artificial intelligence, big data, and algorithms dominate society, the importance of humanities education is, paradoxically, growing even more. Technology can calculate faster than humans, and AI can process more information than humans. Education, too, is increasingly likely to be operated efficiently based on data. However, this is where the problem begins. Technology can explain 'how,' but it cannot explain 'why.'

Education without the humanities would likely be a very efficient education. Everything would be measured quickly and accurately, students' learning patterns would be predicted by algorithms, and career paths would be optimized by data. On the surface, it would appear to be advanced education. However, at the same time, such education could be very dangerous. This is because humans are not merely calculable beings. Humans are beings who need meaning. People do not grow simply by test scores. They constantly ask why they are learning, what they are living for, and what kind of society they should create. Yet, in an education where the humanities have disappeared, these very questions are treated as inefficient.

As a result, people are connected but fail to understand each other. Knowledge increases, but empathy decreases, and language transforms from a tool for communication into a tool for competition. Education, too, increasingly risks being reduced from a process of human growth to a system for producing results. Students become objects of management rather than citizens, and schools transform from communities into arenas of performance competition. The first casualty in such an education is empathy.

Literature is the power that makes us imagine the lives of others. Through novels, we experience the suffering of people living lives different from our own. We indirectly experience the despair of the poor, the loneliness of the failed, and the sorrow of those marginalized by their times. This very experience is one of the most important educational forces in nurturing democratic citizens. However, when humanistic imagination disappears, the suffering of others becomes mere numbers. Poverty becomes statistics, the socially vulnerable are calculated as welfare costs, and the purpose of education is evaluated solely by economic efficiency. Education that loses the ability to understand humans ultimately flows in a cold-hearted direction. Historically, the most dangerous regimes were always those that believed themselves to be the most efficient. The moment human dignity and emotions are considered inefficient, education also loses its original purpose.

The deeper the understanding of humanity becomes, the more important it becomes, especially in an era centered on economy and technology. Why are students anxious? Why are young people afraid of the future? Why is community spirit weakening? These questions cannot be explained by numbers alone. Ultimately, we must understand human desires and wounds, memories and fears. And the field that has performed this work the longest is literature and the humanities. In the coming era, technological prowess alone will not be the most important thing. It is highly likely that how deeply we can understand humans and how we can make different values and emotions coexist will become more important. This is because in an era where AI takes over calculations, the areas remaining for humans will be humanistic abilities such as thought, imagination, empathy, and ethics.

Education is the power that prepares for the future, and literature is the power that understands humanity. When these two are disconnected, education is reduced to functional training, and society flows in a cold and barren direction. Conversely, when literature and education meet again, education can expand beyond knowledge transfer to designing the future of individuals and communities. Perhaps what we need now is not more information, but deeper interpretation. Perhaps it is not higher scores, but the question of why we learn. And precisely those who ask these questions, educators and humanists who never give up on the language of understanding humanity, will become even more important in the coming era.