Teaching the Humanities in a Fractious World: A Reply to Sceptics

This book confronts an ever more popular suspicion - that a university education in the humanities and social sciences is an ‘elitist’ indoctrination into ‘leftist’ or ‘liberal’ views.Having taught them for nearly 40 years, Gavin Kitching shows that, on the contrary, studying these subjects leads one to question all political and social views (left-wing, right-wing, ‘elite’, ‘popular’, religious, secular) and to be sceptical of all the beliefs about human identity (whether racial, gender, national, or class) to which they give rise. The book is divided into 34 brief sections which can be read as stand-alone discussions of some topic or as sequential steps in an argument.This modular structure makes it an excellent teaching text for students.It is written in an accessible, even colloquial, style which gives it the broadest possible appeal, and its arguments are illustrated by a host of ‘everyday’ linguistic, sociological and psychological examples.These not only enliven the book but dem