Not for profit?

what do we choose between an education for profit-making and an education for a more inclusive type of citizenship?

A few weeks ago William C. Kirby, T. M. Chang Professor of China Studies and Director of Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard, came to Hong Kong to give a public lectures titled The Chinese Century? Consumption, Production, and Education for China's New Middle Class, as one of the three public lectures on history and business in China 2010-2011 at the Central Library (others could be found here). At the end of the lecture, Kirby emphasized the importance of liberal arts and its tradition at Harvard, which I found very inspiring as I was reading a relevant book on the subject. I was quite inclined to talk to him about this after the lecture but being home too late was not an wise option (it was about 8.30pm).

The book is Martha C. Nussbaum's Not for profit: why democracy needs the humanities (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).

Nussbaum quoted Harvard's president Drew Faust: "Higher learning can offer individuals and societies a depth and breadth of vision absent from the inevitably myopic present. Human beings need meaning, understanding, and perspective as well as jobs. The question should not be whether we can afford to believe in such purposes in these times, but whether we can afford not to." (p. 124. originally from "The University's Crisis of Purpose," New York Times Review, September 6, 2009, p. 19)

This thought-provoking book is divided into seven chapters: 1. The Silent Crisis; 2. Education for Profit, Education for Democracy; 3. Educating Citizens: The Moral (and Anti-Moral) Emotions; 4: Socratic Pedagogy: The Importance of Argument; 5. Citizens of the World; 6. Cultivating Imagination: Literature and the Arts; and 7. Democratic Education on the Ropes.

In 2006, a prestigious American university was to hold a symposium celebrating a major anniversary, a centerpiece of which was to discuss the future of liberal education. The president, however, changed his mind because he thought a symposium on liberal education would not 'make a splash,' he changed the focus to the latest technological achievements and their roles in generating profits for business and industry. (p. 5)

Nuassbaum reminds us, as the author of the foreword, Ruth O'Brien, Professor at the Graduate Center in Political Science and American Studies at CUNY, said "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.'" (p. ix) "A democracy filled with citizens who lack empathy will inevitably breed more types of marginalization and stigmatization, thus exacerbating rather than solving its problems." (p. x) "Neglect and scorn for the arts and humanities", Nussbaum warns, "puts the quality of all our lives, and the health of our democracies, at risk." (p. xi)

Modern democracy requires a strong economy and economy and a flourishing business culture. This economic interest requires us to draw on the humanities and arts to promote a climate of responsible and watchful stewardship and a culture of creative innovation. (p. 10)

We are facing a worldwide crisis in education, which sees economic growth as the primary goal of education. Nations all over the world is "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." (p. 2)

"educator for economic growth 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 economic development that ignore inequality. It is easier to treat people as objects to be manipulated if you have never learned any other way to see them." "Art is a great enemy of that obtuseness, and artists...are not the reliable servants of any ideology, even a basically good one - they always ask the imagination to move beyond its usual confines, to see the world in new ways." (p. 24-5)

"if we have not learned to see both self and other in that way, imagining in one another inner faculties of thought and emotion, democracy is bound to fail, because democracy is built upon respect and concern, and these in turn are built upon the ability to see other people as human beings, not simply objects." (p. 6)

"All modern democracies," Nuassbaum says, "are societies in which the meaning and ultimate goals of human life are topics of reasonable disagreement among citizens who hold many different religious and secular views, and these citizens will naturally differ about how far various types of humanistic education serve their own particular goals." (p. 9)

"abilities...are at risk of getting lost in the competitive flurry, abilities crucial to the health of any democracy internally, and to the creation of a decent world culture capable of constructively addressing the world's most pressing problems. These abilities are associated with the humanities and the arts: the ability to think critically; the ability to transcend local loyalties and to approach world problems as a 'citizen of the world'; and, finally, the ability to imagine sympathetically the predicament of another person." (p. 7)

"the ability to imagine the experience of another - a capacity almost all human beings possess in some form -," Nuassbaum argues, "needs to be greatly enhanced and refined if we are to have any hope of sustaining decent institutions across the many divisions that any modern society contains." (p. 10)

the spirit of the humanities are "searching critical though, daring imagination, empathetic understanding of human experiences o many different kinds, and understanding of the complexity of the world we live in." (p. 7)

Science "is a friend of the humanities rather than their enemy." (p. 8) So are technology, engineering, business, and social sciences.

what abilities will it need to produce "humane, people-sensitive democracy dedicated to promoting opportunities for 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" in its citizens?

- The ability to think well about political issues affecting the nation, to examine, reflect, argue, and debate, deferring to neither tradition nor authority.

- The ability to recognize ellow citizens as people with equal rights, even though they may be different in race, religion, gender, and sexuality: to look at them with respect, as ends, not just as tools to be manipulated for one's own profit.

- The ability to have concern for the lives of others, to grasp 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.

- The ability to imagine well a variety of complex issues affecting the story of a human life as it unfolds: to think about childhood, adolescence, family relationships, illness, death, and much more in a way informed by an understanding of a wide range of human stories, not just by aggregate data.

- The ability to judge political leaders critically, but with an informed and realistic sense of the possibilities available to them.

- The ability to think about the good of the nation as a whole, not just that of one's own local group.

- The ability 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. (p. 25-6)

what schools can and should do to produce citizens in and for a healthy democracy?

- Develop students' capacity to see the world from the viewpoint of other people, particularly those whom their society tends to portray as lesser, as "mere objects".

- Teach attitudes toward human weakness and helplessness that suggest that weakness is not shameful and the need for others not unmanly; teach children not to be ashamed of need an incompleteness but to see these as occasions for cooperation and reciprocity.

- Develop the capacity for genuine concern for others, both near and distant.

- Undermine the tendency to shrink from minorities of various kinds in disgust, thinking of them as "lower" and "contaminating".

- Teach real and true things about other people (racial, religious, and sexual minorities; people with disabilities), so as to counter stereotypes and the disgust that often goes with them.

- Promote accountability by treating each child as a responsible agent.

- Vigorously promote critical thinking, the skill and courage it requires to raise a dissenting voice. (p. 45-6)