Martha Nussbaum: "The Liberal Arts Are Not Elitist"
The Liberal Arts Are Not Elitist
The Chronicle of Higher Education
February 28, 2010
We are in the midst of a crisis of huge proportions and grave global significance. No, I do not mean the global economic crisis that began in 2008. At least then everyone knew that the crisis was at hand, and many world leaders worked to find solutions. No, I mean a crisis that goes largely unnoticed; a crisis that is likely to be, in the long run, far more damaging to the future of democratic self-government: a worldwide crisis in education.
Radical changes are occurring in what democratic societies teach the young, and these changes have not been well thought through. Thirsty for national profit, nations and their systems of education are heedlessly discarding skills that are needed to keep democracies alive. If this trend continues, all over the world we will soon be producing generations of useful machines, rather than complete citizens who can think for themselves, criticize tradition, and understand the significance of another person's sufferings and achievements. The future of the world’s democracies hangs in the balance.
What are these radical changes? The liberal arts are being cut away in both elementary and secondary education and in universities. Indeed, what we might call the humanistic aspects of science and social science—the imaginative, creative aspect, and the aspect of rigorous critical thought—are also losing ground.
Faculty:
Martha Nussbaum
Comments
Liberal arts yet again
Well, forgive me, but it seems I've heard this song before --- not that it's still not worth singing. My take is as follows: decades of experience in higher education have convinced me that those most committed to the liberal arts, especially those dedicated to teaching introductory humanities and other courses in general education, are the least respected professionally. Those particularly invested in teaching careful reading and the ability to understand and construct arguments, are usually un -or underemployed as contingency workers. Scholars like the late Wayne Booth of the University of Chicago are all too rare these days when fashionably clotted prose addressed to increasingly narrower audiences is what is overvalued in higher education, especially in the humanities. A humane and humanistic rhetoric as a democratic capacity seems beyond our efforts despite the eloquent pleas of people like Danielle Allen (see TALKING TO STRANGERS) who understand that developing rhetoricians (not admen) is crucial to the life of democracy.
I would recommend two other pieces to converse with on this topic. First, Mark Slouka's recent essay in Harper's lamenting the dehumanizing of education, and Michael Roth's "Beyond Critical Thinking" in the Jan 2 CHRONICLE OF HE REVIEW. That such voices still exist gives one some hope.
George T. Karnezis MA '66