Not for profit: why education needs the humanities

We are in the midst of a crisis of massive proportions and grave global significance. The broad humanistic vision is under threat from a retrenchment in the humanities at all levels.

Today, radical changes are occurring everywhere 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 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.

What are these radical changes?

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, and also 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.

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.

With the rush to profitability in the global market, non-technical abilities are at risk of getting lost: abilities crucial to the health of any democracy internally, and to the creation of a decent world culture and a robust type of global citizenship, 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 the ability to imagine sympathetically the predicament of another person.

To think about education for democratic citizenship we have to think, first, about what democratic nations are, and what they strive for. What does it mean, then, for a nation to advance? On one view, it means to increase its Gross National Product per capita.

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.

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.

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 profit-making.

I have spoken about critical thinking and about the role of history. But what about the arts, so often valued by progressive democratic educators?

An education for short-term profit will, first of all, have contempt for these parts of a child's training, because they don't lead to increased GDP. 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. But educators for profit-making 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. 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. Art is the great enemy of that obtuseness, and artists are never 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. So, educators for profit-making will campaign against the humanities and arts as ingredients of basic education. This assault is currently taking place, all over the world.

How are the abilities of citizenship doing in the world today?

Very poorly, I fear. Education of the type I recommend is doing reasonably well in the place where I first studied it, namely the liberal arts portion of U. S. college and university curricula.

Indeed, it is this part of the curriculum, in institutions such as my own, that particularly attracts philanthropic support, as rich people remember with pleasure the time when they read books that they loved, and pursued issues open-endedly. Now, however, there is great strain.

In the New York Times, Harvard's President Drew Faust reports that the economic downturn has reinforced a picture that the value of a university degree is largely instrumental, and that university leaders are increasingly embracing a market model of their mission, in consequence cutting back the liberal arts.

What will we have, if these trends continue? Nations of technically trained people who don't know how to criticize authority, useful profit-makers with obtuse imaginations, technically trained lawyers who don't know how to understand and have concern for the communities they serve.

Democracies have great rational and imaginative powers. They also are prone to some serious flaws in reasoning, to parochialism, haste, sloppiness, 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 certainly impede the creation of a decent world culture.

If the real clash of civilizations is, as I believe, a clash within the individual person, 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, 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 favor of sympathetic and reasoned debate.