A teacher of teachers comes to MPC to remind us why culture matters.

You read a book, you listen to a piece of music, you see a work of art. It seems in all these things we’re looking for something about ourselves: our values, emotions, thoughts, persona, philosophies. We seek out culture to find ourselves. David Steiner, Ph.D, is trained to help us do that.

He’s served as director of arts education at the National Endowment for the Arts, as commissioner of education for the state of New York, and is now the dean of the School of Education at City University of New York’s Hunter College.

He visits Monterey Peninsula College Friday as part of the school’s Great Books Program to speak on “The Humanities at Risk: Why We Should Champion Great Art, Great Music and Great Books.”

The topic has a number of issues hidden in it. The humanities include academic disciplines like art, religion, music, history, language, theater, things that describe our culture and the ways we try to understand ourselves and our world.

And why are the humanities at risk? Jobs, says Steiner. They used to be a place of broad study to earn “our inheritance” from past masters, he says. Not anymore. Students are leaving it behind in favor of study in vocations like business, medicine, law and environmental sciences.

“To be educated [once] meant to be liberally educated in the liberal arts. The argument has shifted to what you might need for the job market,” Steiner says

Also it’s at risk of being held captive by academics who decide what the “great” works of Western culture should be that constitute the humanities – often centered around Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, Chaucer, Hawthorne, Melville, etc. Dead white men, it’s been referred to. It also used to be the province of the elite classes. But that’s shifting.

“Different students will gravitate to hip-hop, Jackson Pollock, Balanchine, what they saw on the subway wall,” Steiner says. “The thing itself is less important than a set of interactions. It’s what they do with it, how they interact with it, share it.”

Steiner says there is another way, a third way, to regard the humanities, and to value them. What is it? “I don’t want to give away too much,” he says. “If you’re invited to give an important talk, it seems the basic moral courtesy is to [talk about] something new.”

A cliffhanger: Will humanities be saved?

DAVID STEINER 7pm Friday at Monterey Peninsula College, Lecture Forum 102, 980 Fremont St., Monterey. Free. www.mpc.edu/greatbooks.