Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities - Updated Edition
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A passionate defense of the humanities from one of today's foremost public intellectuals
In this short and powerful book, celebrated philosopher Martha Nussbaum makes a passionate case for the importance of the liberal arts at all levels of education.
Historically, the humanities have been central to education because they have been seen as essential for creating competent democratic citizens. But recently, Nussbaum argues, thinking about the aims of education has gone disturbingly awry in the United States and abroad. We increasingly treat education as though its primary goal were to teach students to be economically productive rather than to think critically and become knowledgeable, productive, and empathetic individuals. This shortsighted focus on profitable skills has eroded our ability to criticize authority, reduced our sympathy with the marginalized and different, and damaged our competence to deal with complex global problems. And the loss of these basic capacities jeopardizes the health of democracies and the hope of a decent world.
In response to this dire situation, Nussbaum argues that we must resist efforts to reduce education to a tool of the gross national product. Rather, we must work to reconnect education to the humanities in order to give students the capacity to be true democratic citizens of their countries and the world.
In a new preface, Nussbaum explores the current state of humanistic education globally and shows why the crisis of the humanities has far from abated. Translated into over twenty languages, Not for Profit draws on the stories of troubling—and hopeful—global educational developments. Nussbaum offers a manifesto that should be a rallying cry for anyone who cares about the deepest purposes of education.
Martha C. Nussbaum
Martha C. Nussbaum is the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics, appointed in the Philosophy Department and the Law School of the University of Chicago. She gave the 2016 Jefferson Lecture for the National Endowment for the Humanities and won the 2016 Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy. The 2018 Berggruen Prize in Philosophy and Culture, and the 2020 Holberg Prize. These three prizes are regarded as the most prestigious awards available in fields not eligible for a Nobel. She has written more than twenty-two books, including Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions; Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice; Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities; and The Monarchy of Fear.
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Reviews for Not for Profit
43 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Meh. I mostly agree with what she says, but I found the book unexciting and pointless. Sure the humanities are important, sure they should be emphasized more. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5It's pathetic that we live in a society that so little values the humanities that scholars like Nussbaum feel compelled to defend them. Nussbaum's defense of the value of the humanities is informed, intelligent, thoughtful, and obvious. She could have summed up her arguments in a lengthy essay rather than a book but the points she repeats are worth repeating.
Book preview
Not for Profit - Martha C. Nussbaum
NOT FOR PROFIT
The Public Square Book Series
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
MARTHA C. NUSSBAUM
With a new preface by the author
NOT FOR
WHY DEMOCRACY
Needs
THE HUMANITIES
PROFIT
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON AND OXFORD
Copyright © 2010 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press,
41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR
press.princeton.edu
All Rights Reserved
Sixteenth printing, and first paperback printing, with a new afterword, 2012
New paperback edition, with a new preface by the author, 2016
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-691-17332-0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016947358
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
This book has been composed in Adobe Garamond Pro with Bodoni and Futura display
Printed on acid-free paper. ∞
Printed in the United States of America
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
[H]istory 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.
—Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism, 1917
Achievement comes to denote the sort of thing that a well-planned machine can do better than a human being can, and the main effect of education, the achieving of a life of rich significance, drops by the wayside.
—John Dewey, Democracy and Education, 1915
To Lois Goutman, Marthe Melchior, Marion Stearns, and all my teachers at the Baldwin School
CONTENTS
Foreword by Ruth O’Brien ix
Preface to the 2016 Edition xiii
Acknowledgments xxv
I
The Silent Crisis
1
II
Education for Profit, Education for Democracy
13
III
Educating Citizens: The Moral (and Anti-Moral) Emotions
27
IV
Socratic Pedagogy: The Importance of Argument
47
V
Citizens of the World
79
VI
Cultivating Imagination: Literature and the Arts
95
VII
Democratic Education on the Ropes
121
Afterword to the Paperback Edition: Reflections on the Future of the Humanities—at Home and Abroad
145
Notes 155
Index 163
FOREWORD
Ruth O’Brien
The humanities and arts play a central role in the history of democracy, and yet today many parents are ashamed of children who study literature or art. Literature and philosophy have changed the world, but parents all over the world are more likely to fret if their children are financially illiterate than if their training in the humanities is deficient. Even at the University of Chicago’s Laboratory School—the school that gave birth to philosopher John Dewey’s path-breaking experiments in democratic education reform—many parents worry that their children are not being schooled enough for financial success.
In Not for Profit, Nussbaum alerts us to a silent crisis
in which nations discard skills
as they thirst for national profit.
As the arts and humanities are everywhere downsized, there is a serious erosion of the very qualities that are essential to democracy itself. Nussbaum reminds us that great educators and nation-builders understood how the arts and humanities teach children the critical thinking that is necessary for independent action and for intelligent resistance to the power of blind tradition and authority. Students of art and literature also learn to imagine the situations of others, a capacity that is essential for a successful democracy, a necessary cultivation of our inner eyes.
Nussbaum’s particular strength in Not for Profit lies in the manner in which she uses her capacious knowledge of philosophy and educational theory, both Western and non-Western. Drawing on Rabindranath Tagore (the Indian Nobel Prize laureate in literature, and founder of an experimental school and university) and John Dewey, as well as on Jean Jacques Rousseau, Donald Winnicott, and Ralph Ellison, she creates a human development model
of education, arguing that it is indispensable for democracy and for cultivating a globally minded citizenry.
The humanities and arts contribute to the development of young children at play as well as that of university students. Nussbaum argues that even the play of young children is educational, showing children how they can get along with others without maintaining total control. It connects experiences of vulnerability and surprise to curiosity and wonder, rather than anxiety.
These experiences are then extended and deepened by a wise humanities curriculum.
[D]eficiencies in compassion,
Nussbaum elaborates, can hook up with the pernicious dynamic of disgust and shame … [and] shame is a universal response to human helplessness.
Societies that inculcate the myth of total control
rather than mutual need and interdependency
only magnify this dynamic. She suggests that we think like Rousseau, who knew that his Emile must learn to identify with common human predicaments. He must see the world through the lens of many types of vulnerability, cultivating a rich imagination. Only then will he truly see people as real and equal. Only then can he be an equal among equals, understanding interdependency, as democracy and global citizenship both require. A democracy filled with citizens who lack empathy will inevitably breed more types of marginalization and stigmatization, thus exacerbating rather than solving its problems.
In Not for Profit Nussbaum undercuts the idea that education is primarily a tool of economic growth. She argues that economic growth does not invariably generate better quality of life. Neglect and scorn for the arts and humanities puts the quality of all our lives, and the health of our democracies, at risk.
Not for Profit is especially appropriate for this series, The Public Square. It offers readers a call to action
in the form of a plan that replaces an educational model that undercuts democracy with one that promotes it. It builds a convincing, if at first counterintuitive, case that the very foundation of citizenship—not to mention national success—rests on the humanities and arts. We neglect them at our peril.
Nussbaum enters The Public Square with this far-reaching and expansive book, which shows us the importance of learning to play well with others—and then how to think for ourselves.
PREFACE TO THE 2016 EDITION
Five years since the last edition of Not For Profit, how do things look for the humanities? The first thing to be said is that they are clearly in trouble all over the world. I had no idea that my arguments would seem relevant to so many different countries. With twenty translations either in print or in process, I’ve been in conversation with people in many different parts of the world who share my sense of urgency about the contraction of an area of study that seems so centrally connected to the future of democracy and good citizenship—particular in a time of heightened anxiety, more or less everywhere, about migration and ethno-religious pluralism, a time when citizens need to communicate better, not worse, than before, if pressing problems are to be solved.
In the U.S., things have improved slightly in K through 12, as the Common Core has replaced No Child Left Behind. The Common Core is far from ideal, but it does place the accent more nearly where it belongs, on student abilities, rather than on stored knowledge uncoupled from critical thought or active imagination. We still need to do much better, demanding forms of assessment that focus far more on what happens in the classroom and on the quality of student-teacher interactions. But disaster is being held at bay, at least. It is also very encouraging to see intelligent public arts programs for young people sprouting up in some of our major cities: in Los Angeles, under the inspiring direction of conductor Gustavo Dudamel, in Baltimore under the equally intelligent entrepreneurship of conductor Marin Alsop, in my own city, Chicago, through the partnership of opera star Renee Fleming with the city government.¹ Similar experiments abound, showing that music and art can foster community, excellence, and an expanded sense of citizenship (as I said, discussing the Chicago Children’s Choir).
When we reach colleges and universities, there is some good news to report. First, we simply have new sources of valuable data to study the issues, in the form of reports from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Association of American Colleges and Universities.² Although the Academy, unfortunately, focuses primarily on students majoring in the humanities, rather than on the far broader issue of liberal arts courses open to, and frequently required of, students from all majors, the data and analysis, compiled by a high-quality team of administrators and scholars, are extremely helpful. Of particular interest is the finding that two-year institutions are an especially important and growing source of humanities students. In 2012–13, almost forty percent of Associate degrees were in the humanities, a much higher percentage than for four-year BA programs. This is good news indeed, since it would be all too easy for such community college programs to slide toward narrow vocational education, thus creating a class-based, two-tier system, where liberal education is increasingly an opportunity for elites. This has not happened, and it’s very important to prevent it from happening.
Moving beyond these valuable data, further good news for the humanities is found in the quality of the new voices that are addressing the issue. Two particularly valuable books are Michael Roth’s Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters and Fareed Zakaria’s In Defense of a Liberal Education.³ Roth’s lucid and highly readable book provides a history of the idea of liberal education in the U.S., showing its deep links to the ideals of democracy in America. He focuses particularly on the role of critical thinking in a free and engaged society. Zakaria’s book is especially striking for its moving narrative of his own education. He moved from an India where rote learning and technical training dominated, to a liberal education at Yale where he discovered history and, more generally, a broad-based education that stimulated curiosity, critical thinking, and imagination, and he reflects impressively on what he gained for both life and citizenship. His historical analysis complements Roth’s, agreeing that the U.S. democratic tradition has deep links to the practice of liberal education. The high quality of both books, and their favorable reception, give further momentum to the struggle to keep the humanities strong. My book remains distinctive in its international character and its focus on the psychological underpinnings of education, which help us understand why the liberal arts are crucial and why they are frequently under attack. The three books complement one another, and it would be an excellent thing if politicians, trustees, administrators, parents, and students would consult all three.
Turning to politics, however, we find some distressing developments. Not very long ago, conservative politicians used to defend liberal education strongly, differing with liberals primarily over issues such as whether women’s studies and the study of race should play a part in it. Today there are increasingly strident calls for the drastic curtailing of the liberal arts. To take just one example: In one of his first acts as governor, in January 2013, Governor Pat McCrory of North Carolina lashed out at liberal arts education. On a national radio program hosted by conservative pundit William Bennett, he said that university curricula are full of worthless courses
that offer no chances of getting people jobs.
He singled out language study, philosophy, and gender studies as examples. I’m going to adjust my education curriculum to what business and commerce needs to get our kids jobs.
⁴ It is not clear that McCrory can enact his ideas, since his office does not give him control over curriculum. UNC, like all distinguished university systems, has a large measure of faculty autonomy and educational control. Even its budget must be passed by the legislature and is not simply created by gubernatorial fiat. But it is ominous that McCrory thinks he can gain popularity by beating up on the humanities. Numerous other politicians have launched similar attacks on the liberal arts. During his unsuccessful campaign for the Republican nomination for president, Marco Rubio claimed, with typical inelegance, We need more welders and less philosophers.
⁵ Florida’s governor Rick Scott directed his wrath at the anthropologists, saying, You know, we don’t need a lot more anthropologists in the state…I want to spend our dollars giving people science, technology, engineering, math degrees. That’s what our kids need to focus all their time and attention on.
⁶ Note his all
: apparently he disapproves not only of liberal arts majors, but also of general education requirements in the liberal arts. Meanwhile, Wisconsin’s governor Scott Walker has proposed to fund departments in proportion to their role as a pipeline into the state’s economy–simply assuming that politicians can predict what fields are in fact most beneficial for the state, an assumption that history shows to be highly unreliable.⁷ Nor does Walker even consider that a state’s system of higher education might have further and broader goals, such as the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake and the formation of citizenship. More recently, many state officials have been offering students financial incentives to focus on STEM fields and not the humanities.⁸
In this context, effective arguments are more needed than ever. I believe that Not For Profit remains timely as a reminder of the grave risks we run if we let these development move ahead unchecked.
Not For Profit focuses on citizenship. I argue that the humanities and arts provide skills that are essential to keep democracy healthy. I choose this focus because I believe that most of my readers share the goal of sustaining a healthy democracy, and that even those who do not already favor liberal arts education may be led to support it by the sort of argument I provide. There are, however, two other arguments to be made for keeping the humanities strong. We should remember them and use them.
First, even if we were just aiming at economic success, business cultures around the world are keenly aware of the importance of both critical thinking and imagination for healthy business cultures. Critical thinking builds corporate cultures of accountability in which critical voices are not silenced. And a trained imagination is essential for innovation, a key to any healthy economy: no nation can thrive on the basis of yesterday’s skills learned by rote. So business leaders in many parts of the world have given liberal education strong support. For just one example: David Rubenstein, co-founder of the Carlyle Group, one of our most successful private equity firms, said at the World Economic Forum Davos that he worries that American students are losing a valuable skill that can help them succeed in business and life: critical thinking. American policy makers and educators, Rubenstein said, have put too much of a focus on the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics at the expense of the study of literature, philosophy, and other areas in the humanities. Humanities teach problem-solving skills that enable students to contribute to business success. Career-specific skills can be learned later, he said, noting that many of Wall Street’s top executives studied the humanities. The reasoning skills that come with a well-rounded humanities education actually contribute more over time, both to individual success and to the success of a nation’s business culture.⁹
Striking confirmation of Rubenstein’s argument comes from the fact that Singapore and China, two nations that, to say the least, do not aim at the cultivation of critical and independent democratic citizenship, have recently conducted education reforms that foreground the arts and humanities, explicitly in order to encourage innovation and solid corporate cultures. Of course they then must contain those disciplines, preventing them from spilling over into a demand