Not for profit: why education needs the humanities

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.