Although humanities courses in secondary schools can be used to introduce valuable curricular and pedagogical reforms, certain dangers are inherent in such courses: (1) the superficiality of the "Great Works" course organization which stresses broad coverage rather than depth of understanding, (2) the neglect or loss of distinctions between disciplines, (3) prescriptive teaching--e.g., telling students what to find in literature rather than allowing them to make their own discoveries, (4) the treatment of imaginative works as sociological documents, and (5) the tendency to read literature for its ideas, or to equate the value of a literary work with the value of the ideas found in it. There is no one model for a good humanities course, but the better courses arouse a student's interest in the arts for their own sake, encourage his desire to master new sets of intellectual skills, and exploit the particular talents and resources of school and community. (SW)