Home
The Humanities Begin at Home
The Missouri Humanities Council is a non-profit organization promoting the public's enjoyment of several great branches of learning. We support learning activities throughout Missouri, from family story time to large public history festivals.
We were founded in 1971 to serve as Missouri's affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Our primary concern is the quality of learning in families, schools, libraries, and history organizations. Our interests often coincide with community betterment organizations and associations interested in heritage tourism.
The great branches of learning we promote have their roots in the family.
Our brains begin to develop from the moment we enter the world. Our capacity
to think and reason well is nurtured at home in the years before
schooling begins. That is why an organization that celebrates fine writing
and scholarship is heavily invested in parental know-how.
The Humanities: Exploring Our Heritage
The humanities are fields of study concerned with human cultures, values, and ideas. The fields include History, Literature, Philosophy, Languages, Comparative Religion, Anthropology, Archaeology, and Jurisprudence.
To study in these fields is to learn disciplined and creative habits of thought and reasoning. "Historical thinking" is a wide and rich form of everyday thinking. "Attentive reading" is a way of seeing a variety of meanings in the simplest story.
The shaping of the mind begins with bedtime stories in a baby's nursery. The ability to think creatively is then nurtured in conversation with our parents, widened in our schooling, and polished in our adult relationships.
Photo by Bob Foos, Webb City Sentinel
The humanities are habits of mind that are available to enrich our lives from cradle to grave. The Missouri Humanities Council exists to promote the love of learning in non-academic venues. "Our heritage" is the human heritage, from the best achievements of the human spirit to the legacies of neglect, violence, and oppression that shame and challenge us.
Shaping Our Community
The sense of community begins in the arms of a parent. Storytelling and reading are some of the activities that shape the experience of the child. So are the rituals of mealtime, of bedtime, visiting relatives, learning a religious tradition. Parents can have an enormous influence on a child's mental developoment in the first few years.
Children with this love of learning grow up to participate! As adults, they take part in community organizations, cultural festivals, book groups, and all sorts of constructive activites. These activities "shape" the sense of building the kind of community in which we want to live.
People from six towns at a training session in Sainte Genevieve.
Staff from the Smithsonian Institution showed them
how to
set up
and guide tours around the "Key Ingredients" exhibit.
Do we want to live in a place where every child is read to? If so, we assure that new parents in the vicinity receive some instruction. Do we want to live in a place where the museums are lively? If so, we develop a talent for creating interest. The Missouri Humanities Council helps people realize those dreams.