He can click on links ranging from a timeline of the Holocaust, to an 18th-century poster of a French woman and child for discussing how dress symbolized class in society. Growing up with an interest in humanistic studies, however, is not so pervasive. Its success is built on a combination of faculty lectures with tutoring by UCI graduate and undergraduate students in the kind of reading, thinking and writing children will encounter in college. The program focuses on students in Santa Ana who are struggling against the barriers of poverty and cultural isolation, says HOT director Julia Lupton, associate professor of English and comparative literature . Their vehicle is world mythology, like Hercules and the Ancient Ballad of Mulan, which predates the Disney version of the Chinese heroine by about 15 centuries.
Myths are great stories, encompassing cultural heritages from East and West in an engaging way.
Mythology also exposes them to creative, high-level thought. The stuff that makes students' brains hurt is also what is most exciting to them. More complicated to address is the gap in appreciating the humanities that extends beyond the younger generation to a society that spends more on Super Bowl advertising than the National Endowment for the Humanities spends in a year on research. This attitude is the biggest danger facing the humanities, says professor of German and UCI Humanities Center director John Smith. If we can't explain our research and our role in education like the sciences do, then the public will say we need to teach students to read and write and that's all.