We are in the midst of a crisis of massive proportions and grave global significance. I do not mean the global economic crisis that began in 2008. At least everyone knows that that crisis is at hand, and many world leaders worked quickly and desperately to find solutions.
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. Eager for national profit, nations, and their systems of education, are heedlessly discarding skills that are needed to keep democracies alive.
If this trend continues, nations all over the world will soon be fulfilling Rabindranath Tagore?s dire prediction, 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.
?History has come to a stage when the moral man, the complete man, is more and more giving way, almost without knowing it, to make room for the ? commercial man, the man of limited purpose. this process, aided by the wonderful progress in science, is assuming gigantic proportion and power, causing the upset of man?s moral balance, obscuring his human side under the shadow of soul-less organization.?
The humanities and the arts are being cut away, in both primary/secondary and college/university education, in virtually every nation of the world. Seen by policy-makers as useless frills, at a time when nations must cut away all useless things in order to stay competitive in the global market, they are rapidly losing their place in curricula, not to mention in the minds and hearts of parents and children.
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, as nations prefer to pursue short-term profit by the cultivation of useful, highly applied skills, suited to profit-making.
Consider these three examples.
(1) In the fall of 2006, the United States Department of Education?s Commission on the Future of Higher Education, headed by Bush Administration Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, released its report on the state of higher education in the nation: A Test of Leadership: Charting the Future of US Higher Education. this report contained a valuable critique of unequal access to higher education. When it came to subject matter, however, it focused entirely on education for national economic gain.
It concerned itself with perceived deficiencies in science, technology, and engineering ? not even basic scientific research in these areas, but only highly applied learning, learning that can quickly generate profit-making strategies.
The humanities, the arts and critical thinking were basically absent. By omitting them, the report strongly suggested that it would be perfectly all right if these abilities were allowed to wither away, in favour of more useful disciplines.
(2) In the fall of 2009, in Britain, the Labour Government issued new guidelines for its Research Excellence Framework (REF), which will assess all individuals and departments in British universities. according to the new criteria, 25% of the grade for each researcher will be based on that person?s ?impact,? meaning, basically, contributions to economic growth and success.
The humanities and the arts will now be forced to become salesmen for a product, and they will be able to justify their contribution and their claim to funds only if they can demonstrate a direct, short-term economic impact. Since that time, several philosophy departments have been completely closed, some merged with social science, and all humanities programs severely curtailed.
(3) this fall SUNY Albany made drastic cuts in the humanities, completely closing classics, theatre, and some languages, and severely cutting others. this followed similar, though less highly publicized cuts at the University of Nevada and Arizona State.
Not to belabour the obvious, there are hundreds of stories like these, and new ones arrive every day, in the United States, Europe, India and, no doubt, Australia. Given that economic growth is so eagerly sought by all nations, too few questions have been posed, in both developed and developing nations, about the direction of education and, with it, of democratic society.
What I want to do in this article is sketch the case for liberal arts education, in connection with democratic citizenship. Then I shall ask why the United States, so far, is in healthier shape in this regard than Britain and Australia, and make some suggestions about what might be done to address the crisis.
Let me begin my argument with reference to one of the documents in higher education that I most love, John Stuart Mill?s inaugural address as Rector of St. Andrews University ? partly because I want this wonderful document to be more widely known and partly because it suggests that the issues that concern me are not parochial American issues, but have been recognized as central to British higher education for a long time, even if in dissent.
In 1867, then, John Stuart mill praised the Scottish university system for its commitment to a broad-based liberal arts education, which all undergraduates received in addition to specialized preparation in a major subject.
?Scotland,? he said, ?has on the whole, in this respect, been considerably more fortunate than England.? mill argued that education forms the mind for a life rich in significance and, not least, for active citizenship.
?Government and civil society are the most complicated of all subjects accessible to the human mind: and he who would deal competently with them as a thinker, and not as a blind follower of a party, requires not only a general knowledge of the leading facts of life, both moral and material, but an understanding exercised and disciplined in the principles and rules of sound thinking.?
Some of the learning for which mill praised Scotland, and whose absence he deplored in England, involved the sciences; but much, too, came from the humanities. The ?principles and rules of sound thinking? are learned, he argued, by the study of logic and of philosophical arguments.
He assigned particular value to Plato?s dialogues, which teach the student ?to accept no doctrine either from ourselves or from other people without a rigid scrutiny by negative criticism, letting no fallacy, or incoherence, or confusion of thought, slip by? ? a disposition invaluable, he held, for the survival of republican institutions.
Scottish students also learned a great deal about the complicated world outside Britain: he praised the study of international law for its broadening effect, badly needed in an era of narrow nationalism, saying that this discipline too should be required in all universities.
And finally, mill praised the way in which the imagination and the moral sentiments are cultivated and refined through the study of poetry and other works of literature.
Were mill to return to the England whose narrowness he so often deplored, he would find that the principle of broad-based liberal education never did win acceptance there. England has always, like continental Europe, and by derivation Australia, focused on single-subject university training.
But now, in the latest assault on humanistic values represented by the REF, he would see a much deeper threat to the rich idea of learning he favoured. even Scotland is affected, its erstwhile commitment to liberal education in tatters as a result of the homogeneities imposed by the Bologna Process.
Mill would find a good deal of what he valued in the liberal arts colleges and universities of the United States, but he would see that those commitments to the shaping of the mind and heart are currently under great stress.
Indeed, the values in higher education that mill rightly cherished are under threat, as we all know, all over the world ? for a reason that never occurred to him.
To mill, the enemy of liberal education was a stuffy form of elitist classical education, practiced mechanically and soullessly, without an eye to the formation of citizens or the enrichment of the soul. Today, the enemy is the relentless thirst for national economic gain that drives education policy in virtually every nation.
How could mill even imagine a monstrosity like England?s REF, in which fully 25% of the assessment mark given to each and every scholar will be awarded for the ?impact? of that scholar?s work ? by which is meant, above all, impact on economic enrichment?
How could he have imagined that disciplines such as history, literature, classical studies and philosophy, would be valued only to the extent that they can sell themselves as tools of a growing economy?
To make my Millean argument, which is focused on the needs of citizenship, I must begin by simply stating what I take the goal to be.
Let us stipulate, then, that what we want is a nation that is not just a gain-generating machine, but one in which the people make laws for themselves, expressing their autonomy and their equality in so doing.
Let us also stipulate that this nation takes equality seriously, giving all citizens equal entitlements to a wide range of liberties and opportunities, and guaranteeing to all at least a threshold level of a group of key material entitlements.
You will see here the outline of the ?capabilities? or ?human development? approach that my work in political philosophy pursues, but I leave the fine points deliberately vague.
What qualities of mind, what skills, would a nation need to produce in its citizens, in order to achieve and sustain a system of this sort?
It is perhaps more vivid to begin from the negative (as Aristotle always does, in writing about the virtues).
So, what qualities of mind would we need to produce if we were focused only on economic growth, and took that to be the indicator of what it is for a nation to advance, or to improve its quality of life? after all, this is the dominant idea of development to this day in development economics, although increasingly under challenge.
The goal of a nation, says this model of development, should be economic growth: never mind about distribution and social equality, never mind about the preconditions of stable democracy, never mind about the quality of race and gender relations, never mind about the improvement of other aspects of a human being?s quality of life such as health and education.
One sign of what this model leaves out is the fact that South Africa under apartheid used to shoot to the top of development indices. There was a lot of wealth in the old South Africa, and the old model of development rewarded that achievement (or good fortune), ignoring the staggering distributional inequalities, the brutal apartheid regime, and the health and educational deficiencies that went with it.
Proponents of the old model sometimes like to claim that the pursuit of economic growth will by itself deliver the other good things I have mentioned: health, education, a decrease in social and economic inequality. By now, however, examining the results of these divergent experiments, we have discovered that the old model really does not deliver the goods as claimed.
Achievements in health and education, for example, are very poorly correlated with economic growth. Nor do political liberty and religious freedom track growth, as we can see from the stunning success of China.
So producing economic growth does not mean producing democracy, and it certainly does not mean producing democracies that show respect for the liberty and conscience of all citizens.
What sort of education does the old model of development suggest? Education for economic enrichment needs basic skills, literacy and numeracy. It also needs some people to have more advanced skills in computer science and technology, although equal access is not terribly important: a nation can grow very nicely while the rural poor remain illiterate and without basic computer resources, as recent events in many Indian states show.
In states such as Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh, we have seen the creation of increased GNP per capita through the education of a technical elite who make the state attractive to foreign investors; the results of this enrichment do not trickle down to improve the health and well-being of the rural poor, and there is no reason to think that enrichment requires educating them adequately.
That was always the first and most basic problem with the GNP/capita paradigm of development: it neglects distribution, and can give high marks to nations or states that contain alarming inequalities.
This is very true of education. Given the nature of the information economy, nations can increase their GNP without worrying too much about the distribution of education, so long as they create a competent tech and business elite. India has gone down this path too long.
After that, education for enrichment needs, perhaps, a very rudimentary familiarity with history and with economic fact ? on the part of the people who are going to get past elementary education in the first place, who are likely to be a relatively small elite.
But care must be taken lest the historical and economic narrative lead to any serious critical thinking about class, about whether foreign investment is really good for the rural poor, about whether democracy can survive when such huge inequalities in basic life-chances obtain.
So critical thinking would not be a very important part of education for economic enrichment, and it has not been in states that have pursued this goal relentlessly, such as Singapore and China ? although, as we?ll see in a later article, they have recently felt the need for a little more of this ability, in terms of the needs of business culture itself.
I focussed thus far on critical thinking and the role of history. But what about the arts, so often valued by progressive democratic educators? an education for enrichment will, first of all, have contempt for these parts of a child?s training, because they don?t lead to enrichment.
For this reason, all over the world, programs in arts and the humanities, at all levels, are being cut away, in favour of the cultivation of the technical.
Indian parents take pride in a child who gains admission to the Institutes of Technology and Management; they are ashamed of a child who studies literature, or philosophy, or who wants to paint or dance or sing.
But educators for enrichment will do more than ignore the arts; they will fear them, for a cultivated and developed sympathy is a particularly dangerous enemy of obtuseness, and moral obtuseness is necessary to carry out programs of enrichment that ignore inequality.
Speaking of education in both India and Europe, Rabindranath Tagore said that aggressive nationalism needs to blunt the moral conscience, so it needs people who don?t recognize the individual, who speak group-speak, who behave, and see the world, like docile bureaucrats.
Thus Tagore?s school, based on the arts, was a radical experiment; it is deeply unpopular today with politicians aiming at national success. We?ll later see that Singapore and China have been grappling with this issue in an utterly predictable fashion.
Pure models of education for economic growth are difficult to find in flourishing democracies, since democracy is built on respect for each person, and the growth model respects only an aggregate. however, education systems all over the world are moving closer and closer to the growth model, without much thought about how ill-suited it is to the goals of democracy.
Now let?s look at the other model of the goal, the ?human development? model that I?ve sketched.
According to this model, what is important is what opportunities, or ?capabilities,? each person has, in key areas ranging from life, health, and bodily integrity to political liberty, political participation, and education.
This model of development recognizes that each and every person possesses an inalienable human dignity that ought to be respected by laws and institutions. A decent nation, at a bare minimum, acknowledges that its citizens all have entitlements in these and other areas, and devises strategies to get people above a threshold level of opportunity in each.
In a highly general sense, this is the sort of goal mill has in mind, when he speaks of the contribution of higher education to citizenship.
If a nation wants to promote that type of humane, people-sensitive democracy, one dedicated to promoting opportunities for ?life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? to each and every person, what abilities will it need to produce in its citizens? At least the following seem crucial:
- the ability to deliberate well about political issues affecting the nation, to examine, reflect, argue and debate, deferring neither to tradition nor authority;
- the ability to think about the good of the nation as a whole, not just that of one?s own local group, and to see one?s own nation, in turn, as a part of a complicated world order in which issues of many kinds require intelligent transnational deliberation for their resolution;
- the ability to have concern for the lives of others, to imagine what policies of many types mean for the opportunities and experiences of one?s fellow citizens, of many types, and for people outside one?s own nation.
Before we can say more about higher education, however, we need to understand the problems we face on the way to making students responsible democratic citizens who might possibly implement a human development agenda.
Education and the internal ?clash of civilizations?
What is it about human life that makes it so hard to sustain egalitarian democratic institutions, and so easy to lapse into hierarchies of various types ? or, even worse, projects of violent group animosity, as a powerful group attempts to establish its supremacy?
Whatever these forces are, it is ultimately against them that true education for human development must fight: so it must, as Gandhi put it, engage in a kind of clash of civilizations within each person, as respect for others contends against narcissistic aggression.
The internal clash can be found in all modern societies, in different forms, since all contain struggles over inclusion and equality, whether the precise locus of these struggles is in debates about immigration, or the accommodation of religious, racial, and ethnic minorities, or sex equality, or affirmative action.
In all societies, too, there are forces in the human personality that militate against mutual recognition and reciprocity, as well as forces of compassion and respect that give egalitarian democracy strong support.
What, then, do we know by now about forces in the personality that militate against democratic reciprocity and respect?
To begin with, we know that people have a high level of deference to authority. Psychologist Stanley Milgram showed that experimental subjects were willing to administer a very painful and dangerous level of electric shock to another person, so long as the superintending scientist told them that what they were doing was all right ? even when the other person was screaming in pain (which, of course, was faked for the sake of the experiment).
Solomon Asch, earlier, had shown that experimental subjects are willing to go against the clear evidence of their senses when all the other people around them are making sensory judgments that are off-target: his very rigorous and oft-confirmed research shows the unusual subservience of normal human beings to peer pressure.
Both Milgram?s work and Asch?s have been used effectively by Christopher Browning to illuminate the behaviour of young Germans in a police battalion that murdered Jews during the Nazi era. So great was the influence of both peer pressure and authority on these young men, he shows, that the ones who couldn?t bring themselves to shoot Jews felt ashamed of their weakness.
Still other research demonstrates that apparently normal people are willing to engage in behaviour that humiliates and stigmatizes if their situation is set up in a certain way, casting them in a dominant role and telling them that the others are their inferiors.
One particularly chilling example involves school children whose teacher informs them that children with blue eyes are superior to children with dark eyes. Hierarchical and cruel behaviour ensue. The teacher then informs the children that a mistake has been made: it is actually the brown-eyed children who are superior, the blue-eyed inferior. The hierarchical and cruel behaviour simply reverses itself: the brown-eyed children seem to have learned nothing from the pain of discrimination.
Perhaps the most famous experiment of this type is Philip Zimbardo?s Stanford Prison Experiment, in which he found that subjects randomly cast in the roles of prison guard and prisoner began to behave differently almost right away. The prisoners became passive and depressed, the guards used their power to humiliate and stigmatize.
(Although, I must say that I believe this experiment was badly designed in a number of ways, and is thus less than conclusive: for example, Zimbardo gave elaborate instructions to the guards, telling them that their goal should be to induce feelings of alienation and despair in the prisoners.)
Other research on disgust, on which I?ve drawn in my book on the role of disgust in social inequality, shows that people are very uncomfortable with the signs of their own animality and mortality: disgust is the emotion that polices the boundary between ourselves and other animals.
In virtually all societies, it is not enough to keep ourselves free from contamination by bodily waste products that are in the language of psychologists, ?animal reminders.? instead, people create subordinate groups of human beings who are identified as disgusting and contaminating, saying that they are dirty, smelly, bearers of disease, and so forth. There is a lot of work done on how such attitude figure in anti-Semitism, racism, sexism and homophobia.
Similarly, when people are ashamed of need and helplessness, they tend to want to enslave others. As the great philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau noted in his book on education, all small children want their parents to be their slaves, and this tendency, unchecked by education, is a huge impediment to democracy.
What else do we know? We know that these forces take on much more power when people are anonymous or not held personally accountable. People act much worse under shelter of anonymity, as parts of a faceless mass, than they do when they are watched and made accountable as individuals. (Anyone who has ever violated the speed limit, and then slowed down on seeing a police car in the rear-view mirror, will know how pervasive this phenomenon is.)
We also know that people behave badly when nobody raises a critical voice: Asch?s subjects went along with the erroneous judgment when all the other people whom they took to be fellow experimental subjects (and who were really working for the experimenter) concurred in error; but if even one other person said something different, they were freed to follow their own perception and judgment.
Finally, we know that people behave badly when the human beings over whom they have power are dehumanized and de-individualized. In a wide range of situations, people behave much worse when the ?other? is portrayed as like an animal, or as bearing only a number rather than a name.
In thinking how we might help individuals and societies to win what I previously referred to as the internal clash of civilizations in each person, we would do well to think about how these tendencies can be used to our advantage.
So, the other side of the internal clash ? and this part, I think, Gandhi got brilliantly right ? is the child?s growing capacity for compassionate concern, for seeing another person as an end and not a mere means. one of the easiest ways to regain lost omnipotence is to make slaves of others, and young children initially do conceive of the other humans in their lives as mere means to their own satisfaction.
But as time goes on, if all goes well, they feel gratitude and love toward the separate beings who support their needs, and they thus come to feel guilt about their own aggression and real concern for the well-being of another person. As concern develops, it leads to an increasing wish to control one?s own aggression: the child recognizes that its parents are not its slaves, but separate beings with rights to lives of their own.
Such recognitions are typically unstable, since human life is a chancy business and we all feel anxieties that lead us to want more control, including control over other people. But a good development in the family, and a good education later on, can make a child feel genuine compassion for the needs of others, and can lead it to see them as people with rights equal to its own.
With that under our belt, I would like to propose that there are three values that are particularly crucial to decent global citizenship.
The first is the capacity for Socratic self-criticism and critical thought about one?s own traditions. As Socrates argues, democracy needs citizens who can think for themselves, rather than deferring to authority, who can reason together about their choices rather than simply trading claims and counter-claims.
Critical thinking is particularly crucial in this era of rapid sound-bites and of political polarization through increasingly strident media. We will only have a chance at an adequate dialogue across political boundaries if young citizens know how to engage in dialogue and deliberation in the first place.
And they will only know how to do that if they learn how to examine themselves and to think about the reasons why they are inclined to support one thing rather than another ? rather than, as so often happens, seeing political debate as simply a way of boasting, or getting an advantage for their own side.
When politicians bring simplistic propaganda their way, as politicians in every country have a way of doing, young people will only have a hope of preserving independence and holding the politicians accountable if they know how to think critically about what they hear, testing its logic and imagining alternatives to it.
Students exposed to instruction in critical thinking learn, at the same time, a new attitude to those who disagree with them. They learn to see people who disagree not as opponents to be defeated, but, instead, as people who have reasons for what they think.
When their arguments are reconstructed it may turn out that they even share some important premises with one?s own ?side,? and we will both understand better where the differences come from. We can see how this humanizes the political ?other,? making the mind see that opposing form as a rational being who may share at least some thoughts with one?s own group.
It is possible, and essential, to encourage critical thinking from the very beginning of a child?s education ? both through a content that emphasizes argumentative skills and through a pedagogy aimed at making children independent.
Indeed, it has often been done: it is one of the hallmarks of modern progressive education, from Froebel, Pestalozzi and Maria Montessori in Europe to Rabindranath Tagore in India, to Bronson Alcott in nineteenth century America and Dewey in the twentieth.
Because of the influence of these thinkers, the United States has long valued critical thinking in schools, to a greater extent than some nations.
Interestingly, this is an aspect of American education that has recently attracted the attention of both China and Singapore. even with reference to their own narrow goals, which certainly do not include the empowerment of democratic citizens, they both noticed that their business cultures had too little critical thinking and active participation, so both have conducted nation-wide reforms to make students ?active learners.?
It seems dubious whether these reforms will really take hold, because teachers are still evaluated by their students? success on national multiple choice exams; and of course critical thinking is not permitted to spill over into the discussion of political policy.
A recent study of Singapore found that the typical style of policy discussion is one where a problem is put before students, a variety of solutions is enumerated ? and then the teacher shows why the solution actually adopted by government was the best for the problem. No wonder, when teachers can be sued for libel by the government for criticizing its policies.
So far I have been talking about schools, but what of higher education? Here there are opportunities to teach logical analysis and critical reasoning in a much more formal and systematic way. John Stuart mill argued that any decent university education must make sure that the ?principles and rules of sound thinking? are learned. They are best learned, he argues, by the required study of logic and of philosophical arguments.
Mill assigned particular value to Plato?s dialogues, which teach the student ?to accept no doctrine either from ourselves or from other people without a rigid scrutiny by negative criticism, letting no fallacy, or incoherence, or confusion of thought, slip by unperceived? ? a disposition invaluable, he held, for the survival of republican institutions.
In my 1987 book Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defence of Reform in Liberal Education, I supported this recommendation, after studying a wide range of United States college and university curricula. It?s particularly notable that all the Jesuit universities require two full semesters of philosophy for precisely Mill?s reasons, and I have urged all to emulate them.
As Singapore and China have realized, this ability is valuable even were our goal simply economic growth. It is indispensable, however, if what we want is democracy. We now have experimental evidence to corroborate Socrates?s diagnosis: human beings are prone to be subservient to both authority and peer pressure; to prevent atrocities we need to counteract these tendencies, producing a culture of individual dissent.
Asch found that when even one person in his study group stood up for the truth, others followed, so that one critical voice can have large consequences. By emphasizing each person?s active voice, we also promote a culture of accountability. When people see their ideas as their own responsibility, they are more likely, too, to see their deeds as their own responsibility.
The second key ability of the modern democratic citizen, I would argue, is the ability to see oneself as a member of a heterogeneous nation, and world, understanding something of the history and character of the diverse groups that inhabit it.
Knowledge is no guarantee of good behaviour, but ignorance is a virtual guarantee of bad behaviour. Simple cultural and religious stereotypes abound in our world ? for example, the facile equation of Islam with terrorism ? and the first way to begin combating these is to make sure that from a very early age students learn a different relation to the world.
Students should gradually come to understand both the differences that make understanding difficult between groups and nations and the shared human needs and interests that make understanding essential, if common problems are to be solved.
This understanding of the world will promote human development only if it is itself infused by searching critical thinking, thinking that learns to question and scrutinize historical evidence and to think independently about what the evidence supports.
In curricular terms, these ideas suggest that all young citizens should learn the rudiments of world history, a grasp of the basic workings of the global economy, and a rich and non-stereotypical understanding of the major world religions, and then should learn how to inquire in more depth into at least one unfamiliar tradition, in this way acquiring tools that can later be used elsewhere.
At the same time, they ought to learn about the major traditions, majority and minority, within their own nation, focusing on an understanding of how differences of religion, race, and gender have been associated with differential life-opportunities.
All, finally, should learn at least one foreign language well: seeing that another group of intelligent human beings has cut up the world differently, that all translation is interpretation, gives a young person an essential lesson in cultural humility.
Again, all of this must begin in schools, but mill urged that it needs to be carried further by a more sophisticated study of the world at the university level, and I agree. he focused on international law, but we should cast our net more widely, thinking about religion, the global economy and, crucially, history.
The third ability of the citizen, closely related to the first two, is what I would call the narrative imagination. this means the ability to think what it might be like to be in the shoes of a person different from oneself, to be an intelligent reader of that person?s story, and to understand the emotions and wishes and desires that someone so placed might have.
Learning to see another human being not as a thing but as a full person is not an automatic achievement: it must be promoted by an education that refines the ability to think about what the inner life of another may be like ? and also to understand why one can never fully grasp that inner world, why any person is always to a certain extent dark to any other.
It is hard to do either critical thinking or historical study well without this ability. this was argued well by the great novelist Ralph Ellison. In a later essay about his novel Invisible Man, he argues that debates about race in the United States are crude and ineffectual because of an imaginative failing on the part of white society, who cannot really form a complex imaginative picture of African-American lives.
A novel such as his can at least assist them in this task. thus it can become ?a raft of perception, hope, and entertainment? on which American culture could ?negotiate the snags and whirlpools? that stand between us and our democratic ideal. his novel, of course, takes the ?inner eyes? of the white reader as its theme and its target.
The hero is invisible to white society, but he tells us that this invisibility is an imaginative and educational failing on their part, not a biological accident on his. through the imagination we are able to have a kind of insight into the experience of another group or person that it is very difficult to attain in daily life ? particularly when our world has constructed sharp separations between groups, and suspicions that make any encounter difficult.
This part of education is one that it is particularly crucial to begin early, but, once again, it is crucial to continue it later, through a more sophisticated study of literature and the arts. As I discussed earlier, Mill?s inaugural address develops this theme, too, arguing that a type of ?aesthetic education? at the university level is crucial to the refinement of the imagination, and thus to intelligent citizenship.
He notes that England resists this idea in a way that both Scotland and the continental nations do not. he attributes this failing to a combination of Puritanism with the commercial mentality.
I note that this is another part of liberal education that China and Singapore have decided to view as essential, in terms of the limited goals of their business culture ? in order to jump-start creativity and innovation ? with the result that programs in the arts are being encouraged all over, including an ambitious film program in Singapore sponsored by new York University.
Again, the imagination is not allowed to roam freely: thus, for example, the new York University film program is not permitted to screen any student-produced film outside the campus, and there are many worries about how free even the campus is likely to be.
But the case is clear: two nations whose systems of education are unabashedly aimed at economic growth have seen the need to broaden the scope given to imaginative literature and the arts, in terms of those goals.
I prefer to focus on Mill?s broader account of the goals of aesthetic education. Still, in some contexts it is important to point out that the humanities supply ingredients that are essential for a healthy business culture.
Education and ?American exceptionalism?
The type of education that I have sketched out is under threat everywhere. Nevertheless, the United States and South Korea are relatively healthy, and the humanities are at least less threatened in these nations than elsewhere. why?
The system of university education in the United States has four features that distinguish it from Britain and Australia. In this final, more constructive article, I would like to commend these features for further, sustained consideration.
First, the United States has a longstanding tradition of liberal arts education. We have long had a system that builds in a role for the humanities in every person?s university or college education. whatever the major subject is, all students take some core courses that are supposed to offer a general preparation for citizenship and life.
Sometimes these are distribution requirements, sometimes a more thoughtful plan of core learning, but all of the prestigious colleges follow this model. many more commercial and business-oriented schools do too, since it is a mark of prestige to incorporate such courses.
This system has inertia built into it, so if people want to retain it, they have a relatively easy job. moreover, it silences the objections of many parents, by not forcing on anyone a difficult choice between studies that prepare for a job and studies that prepare for citizenship and life. It is taken for granted that one does both.
Consequently a very large proportion of the people who study philosophy, or read classical texts in translation, are never going to major in those subjects, and they do not have to worry about the way in which this pursuit might limit job opportunities.
Please note that this system has utterly rejected the idea that consumer demand is the criterion of what should be required. Although students are frequently members of curricular review committees, it is simply understood that required courses are a valuable way of exposing students to ingredients for citizenship and life that they might be too timid, or distracted, or indifferent to select on their own.
Moreover, the system ensures that the leaders and wealthy people of society have studied literature, philosophy and history at some time in their lives. this is often a part of their education that they remember with particular pleasure, thinking of a time when they could pursue ideas for their own sake and were full of intellectual curiosity. There is then a kind of nostalgic recollection of that time, and they want to pass that same experience on to their children.
Which leads me to the second feature: the United States has a well-developed system of private funding of higher education. By now, a very large proportion of American colleges and universities are privately funded. even state university systems have been in this business for a long time ? the University of Michigan, for example, is in effect a private university.
This system has its drawbacks, to be sure, since administrators have to work incessantly to secure the money they need. But, given the system of liberal education, it also has huge advantages, because the leaders of society, by and large, value liberal education, seek it for their children, remember it with pleasure and seek to transmit it.
A smart university will cultivate such people by seminars and special events. my own university, for example, has a Humanities Weekend in which the Humanities Visiting Committee ? the most active donors ? organizes large numbers of alumni and potential donors to visit the campus for a series of lectures and seminars with the faculty, which they adore.
I?ve also worked with the head of that committee ? a wealthy practicing lawyer who has already given two million dollars to endow a chair in the history of the British novel, and who regularly sits in on some classes of mine, out of sheer enjoyment ? to organize a retreat for the most active humanities donors.
She chose as the text for the last retreat Tolstoy?s The Death of Ivan Illych, a choice I questioned at first, since it does not fit into my expertise ? but what a brilliant choice it was, as a group of wealthy bourgeois discussed the idea of spiritual regeneration with passionate energy ? just before going into a dinner that presented them with facts about the economic crisis of the university.
It is a fact, however caused, that our university is doing extremely well in the humanities throughout this crisis, and is in the middle of building a multimillion dollar arts centre.
It is important to recognize that donors of this sort have entirely different incentives from state politicians, one reason why so many of our state universities have been so eager to privatize. Politicians have no incentive to cultivate the long-term health of democracy.
When they stand for election in the next cycle, they need to show tangible short-term gains in jobs and productivity. So it?s not surprising that they will focus on the features of higher education that seem likely to deliver such outcomes.
Can you imagine a politicians campaigning by telling her constituents, ?I?ve laid the groundwork for the long-term health of democratic institutions by my focus on the humanities.? It?s too intangible, and would not be likely to succeed.
Donors, by contrast, have incentives to cultivate meaning and value in whatever ways they cherish. this means that a wise university needs to guide them toward projects of genuine value and away from silly or divisive projects. But donors do care for the long-term: often, for the sort of education that their children and grandchildren are going to receive.
Politicians also have to fight other cultural battles that distract them from educational values. In our state universities, regents sometimes have to campaign for election, and sometimes they do this on extremely silly issues, such as stopping funding for gay studies or women?s studies.
Private donors are independent of the partisan political process. They usually choose to devote a large portion of their time and money to a university because they like universities, and although they often do have silly or obnoxious ideas, they can be reasoned with. They are not running for anything, except immortality.
The third and fourth features flow directly on from this one: the United States has a system of tax incentives that reward charitable donations, and it possesses longstanding social norms that give people reputational rewards for such donations.
With all four of these factors operational, things are pretty hopeful. indeed, in a fine irony, my own university is now creating a centre in India to preserve teaching in Indian languages and literatures from utter extinction.
The place where you can study the largest number of these languages in the world today is the University of Chicago, and making our library resources available to Indian scholars is just one of the projects of bailout for the threatened humanities that we are planning to undertake.
There?s one more (fifth) ingredient of American exceptionalism that ought to be mentioned, although it is rapidly on the wane. this is the character of the opposition. I used to view with alarm the proposals of American conservatives such as Allan Bloom and William Bennett ? because they recommended a type of great books curriculum that I regard as too traditionalist, lacking curiosity about new forms of knowledge that help us confront pressing problems.
But now I think about those opponents with a certain nostalgia, because we really agreed about most of the most important things. They defended, like me, a requisite liberal arts portion of the university curriculum, and they too thought that it formed young people for citizenship and life.
And they believed that in a democracy all young people should have the sort of formation that comes from working through Plato?s dialogues or a tragedy of Sophocles, and hence they wanted to enliven students? minds, not just stuff them full of facts.
We differed about whether the study of race or the study of women would play a role in this liberal education, but on some huge and important things we utterly agreed. Today, I fear, we increasingly face other opponents, as both the left and right in so many countries seem dismissive of the humanities ? I think pre-eminently of Larry Summers. But for a while there in the United States, we were helped by the nature of the education debate itself.
Neither Britain nor Australia has ever really enjoyed that sort of conservative opposition, or at least it was not prominent in debates over higher education: Bloom and Thatcher were contemporaries, and so I became used to seeing the two countries as fighting rather different battles.
Before coming to the specific case of Britain, let me focus briefly on South Korea, and why it is the single case of which I know where the humanities are actually on the rise in higher education. South Korea has all four features of American exceptionalism: 70% of higher education is privately funded; a liberal arts system is securely entrenched, at least in the more prestigious universities (in 2009 law became, by national statute, a postgraduate degree requiring a liberal arts background); to some degree private donations are rewarded socially; and the tax code is pretty generous with charitable deductions.
But the primary reason why the humanities succeed in Korea was national pride. Under the Japanese occupation, the study of Korean language and literature, and of Confucian philosophy, were illegal. Koreans were shunted into narrowly technical forms of training in order to produce a useful underclass for the Japanese rulers.
So illegal schools began to spring up, in which the forbidden things were taught. American missionaries often aided in this process. out of this conflict was born a feeling of intense pride in the study of philosophy and the arts, and a feeling of partnership with American religious organizations that by now fund and maintain many good-quality institutions of higher education.
This is Korean exceptionalism, and it is indeed exceptional, and yet not uninstructive. For it shows us that the survival of the humanities depends on making large numbers of people think of the humanities as part of their national heritage, as part of being Korean, and not part of being a member of a narrow elite.
The United States has done this as well, transforming the elitist conception of the university to a populist one, and attaching to liberal arts education the idea of American equality. one of the formative documents of this era of transition was the Harvard curricular plan written by Harvard?s President James Bryant Conant, the literary theorist I.A. Richards and others, called General Education in a Free Society.
Published in 1945, it focused on the survival of free democratic institutions, and it argued for a humanities-heavy liberal arts education as part of what would be required to produce true democracy across classes and races in America.
So that, I would suggest, represents the sixth and final ingredient of American/Korean exceptionalism ? and the United States example shows that you don?t need the particular history of occupation that Korean had, all you need is the thought that free institutions require a cultivated citizen, and an artful way of expressing and commending that idea.
Now to Britain (and I believe much of this would be true of Australia as well). As John Stuart mill said long ago, England has never had the liberal arts system. Scotland did, until the Bologna Process mandated a three-year Bachelor of Arts and did away with the fourth year, which was the year of general education. So Britain is at a real disadvantage in facing the future.
It seems likely that more private funding must be sought, but I fear the future on that front too, because a community of donors who have never had the experience of studying the humanities as a part of a liberal arts education is ill prepared to see the value of such studies for citizenship and life.
Nor are there secure reputational rewards in place for donations to subjects that are widely perceived as frivolous. and finally, the British public has never internalized the idea that the survival of free democratic institutions requires a citizenry who have enjoyed higher education ? a fortiori, not higher education of a particular type, the type that mill and I, along with the post-war Harvard writers, favour.
It would be extraordinary if it were possible for Britain to move toward a liberal arts system ? as, indeed, South Korea has done over the past thirty years. British educators could do it, since they are good teachers and do not resent teaching undergraduates, as many Europeans do. But that?s a long-term business, and the present climate makes it deeply unfashionable.
So what to do?
I think that cultivating a sense of the importance of the humanities can still be done in the way we do it, by offering workshops and classes for potential donors and showing them what we do. There is widespread misconception about what we do ? for example, the canard that undergraduate humanities teaching is an esoteric set of lessons in postmodernism ? and we need to address this.
One way is to write more about how we teach and why. another way, though, is to bring people to the university and offer them something fun. For it really is terrific fun to study a Socratic dialogue for a day, or a story of Tolstoy, or a novel of Hemingway.
I think that British academics have a big advantage here over their continental counterparts, since they are used to teaching, and do it well, without that particular variety of continental authoritarian disdain.
At the same time, since the British educational system is going to remain a single-subject system for the foreseeable future, those of us who are concerned with those disciplines must write more and more often about why we do what we do, what we think it contributes, what the risks to society are if it is ignored.
It is not so easy to do this in a era of declining general-interest media, but it can be done, and the BBC (not to mention the ABC in Australia) offers some advantages over American commercial television in that regard.
The main thing is to talk and fight, not sit back in gloom and resignation. I wrote Not for Profit: why Democracy needs the Humanities in order to stimulate others to write similar such books, and there are signs that this is happening. For example, Victor Ferrall?s Liberal Arts at the Brink carries the debate further in a helpful way.
So I would wholeheartedly second the timely challenge from Stefan Collini:
?It is not just that we [who are committed to the humanities] should take up the challenge of ?consultation?, however disingenuously that term is used, and in our responses explain as clearly as we can what is damaging about the present formulation of these REF guidelines. It is also that we need to try to use a more adequate language in public discussion lest these officious abstractions start to colonize our minds. one reason why measures such as these do not now provoke more vociferous opposition is that over the past three decades our sensibilities have been numbed by the proliferation of economistic officialese ? ?user satisfaction?, ?market forces?, ?accountability?, and so on. Perhaps our ears no longer hear what a fatuous, weaselly phrase ?Research Excellence Framework? actually is, or how ludicrous it is to propose that the quality of scholarship can be partly judged in terms of the number of ?external research users? or the range of ?impact indicators?.
?Instead of letting this drivel become the only vocabulary for public discussion of these matters, it is worth insisting that what we call ?the humanities? are a collection of ways of encountering the record of human activity in its greatest richness and diversity. To attempt to deepen our understanding of this or that aspect of that activity is a purposeful expression of human curiosity and is ? insofar as the expression makes any sense in this context ? an end in itself. Unless these guidelines are modified, scholars in British universities will devote less time and energy to this attempt, and more to becoming door-to-door salesmen for vulgarized versions of their increasingly market-oriented ?products?. It may not be too late to try to prevent this outcome.?
Democracies have great rational and imaginative powers. But they also are prone to some serious flaws in reasoning, to parochialism, haste, sloppiness and selfishness. Education based mainly on profitability in the global market magnifies these deficiencies, producing a greedy obtuseness and a technically trained docility that threaten the very life of democracy itself, and that most certainly impede the creation of a decent world culture.
If the real clash of civilizations is, as I have argued, a clash within the individual soul, as greed and narcissism contend against respect and love, all modern societies are rapidly losing the battle, as they feed the forces that lead to violence and dehumanization and fail to feed the forces that lead to cultures of equality and respect.
If we do not insist on the crucial importance of the humanities and the arts, they will drop away, because they don?t make money.
They only do what is much more precious than that: make a world that is worth living in, filled with people who are able to see other human beings as full people, with thoughts and feelings of their own that deserve respect and sympathy, and nations that are able to overcome fear and suspicion in favour of sympathetic and reasoned debate.
Martha Nussbaum is the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics in the Philosophy Department, Law School and Divinity School at the University of Chicago. She recently delivered the Hal Wooten Lecture at the University of new South Wales. She will also be in conversation with Alan Saunders on The Philosopher?s Zone on ABC Radio National, Saturday, 20 August 2011, 1.35pm.
Some of Martha Nussbaum?s most recent books are Frontier of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (Harvard University Press, 2007), Not for Profit: why Democracy needs the Humanities (Princeton University Press, 2010) and Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach (Harvard University Press, 2011). She was named one of the top 100 global thinkers by Foreign Policy magazine in 2009 and 2010.
Educating for profit, educating for freedom ?
ABC Religion & Ethics
(Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
bong taylor armstrong real housewives abbey road ps vita lady gaga you and i lady gaga you and i
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.