Teaching Humanity

But liberal education has high financial and pedagogical costs. Such teaching needs small classes, where students get copious feedback on frequent writing assignments. European professors are not used to this idea--and would now be horrible at it if they did try; they've come to expect that holding a chair means not having to grade undergraduate writing assignments. (This is also true in parts of Asia.) And even where faculty are keen on the liberal-arts model, bureaucrats can be unwilling to support enough teaching positions required to make it work. The University of Oslo, for instance, has introduced a required ethics course for first-year students, but it is taught as a lecture to 500 people, with a multiple-choice examination at the end. This is worse than useless. It gives students the illusion that they have actually had some philosophical education, when they have had only a gesture toward such learning.

At Sweden's new urban university, Sodertorn's Hogskola, where many students are immigrants, the faculty and the vice-chancellor badly want a liberal-arts curriculum based on preparation for democratic citizenship. They have sent young faculty to U. S. liberal-arts colleges to study and practice small-class teaching, and they have constructed an exciting course on democracy. As yet, however, they do not have enough teachers to run the small sections that are crucial if the class is to succeed. Only in small idiosyncratic institutions, such as the Utrecht Institute for Humanist Studies and the European College of Liberal Arts in Berlin, is the liberal-arts idea a reality in Europe.

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.

Nussbaum is the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago.

© 2006