More of the Humanities?

From The Hedgehog Review: “The current enthusiasm for the humanities as self-help connects with very old traditions. The notion that literature or art can heal and transfigure extends back to the Greeks, whose admirers in the Renaissance era revived and celebrated the idea. But it was later humanists, particularly German neo-humanists in the 18th century, who gave the ideal of secular soul-making through humanistic study its mature expression, developing it into a theoretical principle in works such as Friedrich Schiller’s ‘Letters upon the Aesthetic Education of Mankind’ (1794), and institutionalizing it in the school reforms they helped design.”