My wife handed me this article by Martha Nussbaum in the newsweek a while back, and it’s been sitting on my desk waiting to be read since then. I went for a walk with my daughter swinging in her sling across my chest this morning, reading it as I sang her to sleep, and was enthralled by its simplicity and clarity on that which seems so ingrained in me, misunderstood and underused by education systems and mass media world wide. If you don’t have time to read the whole article, I ask you to read the following (last) paragraph TWICE. Once, as is – accenting the importance of liberal arts education – and a second time, replacing the word “education” with “news media” – for shits and giggles…
Democracies have great rational and imaginative powers. Yet they also are prone to irrationality, parochialism, haste, sloppiness and selfishness. Education based mainly on profitability in the global market magnifies these deficiencies–to the point that they threaten the very life of democracy itself. We need to favor an education that cultivates the critical capacities, that fosters a complex understanding of the world and its peoples and that educates and refines the capacity for sympathy. In short, an education that cultivates human beings rather than producing useful machines. If we do not insist on the crucial importance of the humanities and the arts, they will drop away. They don’t make money. But they do something far more precious: they make a world worth living in.
