Teaching humanities at the university

Abstract

The article deals with some peculiarities of teaching the Humanities, especially, such disciplines as "Philosophy" and "the Russian language", for the students of non-core profiles, mainly, of the Natural Science and Technical directions.These disciplines are required to study in the most areas of education (Philosophy - in all areas of education). However, the students of the Natural Science and Technical directions are experiencing some difficulties at learning the training programs on these disciplines. The purpose of the research, described in the given article, was to find out the reason of these difficulties. The article asserts the viewpoint that one of the dominant reasons is the difference of the Humanities' and the Natural Science's types of thought and knowledge. It is based on the Humanities' methodology concept by M. M. Bakhtin. The gist of the concept lies in the fact that, on the one hand, the Natural Sciences are characterized by the researched objects' description; while the Humanities, on the other hand, are exploring the human being, some cultural phenomena and their interpretation, which have a symbolic or iconic character. Hence, there is a difference between the Humanities and the Natural Sciences' perception, which gives the students the following difficulties: · The lack of the unified paradigm in the Humanities and existence of many different viewpoints on the same issue; · the lack of experimental means for testing the hypotheses and the limitation with abstract logical thought; · A great role of the subjective factor of the scientist's personality, having created the concept, and the person, perceiving the new knowledge. In this regard, the students' skills, developed at studying the relevant disciplines, are often unclaimed because they are inappropriate in the given situation. Of course, these difficulties can be overcome, and here much depends on the teacher's behavior. He/she should immediately explain the students that such a skeptical perception of the Humanities is wrong, and that it is caused by the fact, that they are unconsciously transferring the criteria of the Natural-Scientific knowledge to the Humanities' perception. In order to make the representatives of non-Humanities' directions to get used to some peculiarities of the Humanities' thought, the teacher should acquaint them with the original sources, the latest scientific research in the given area (even at the level of anthologies) and to encourage discussions among students.