Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education

Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education | Martha C. Nussbaum | Cultivating Rationality

books:

Cultivating Humani...

	Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education Martha C. Nussbaum Harvard University Press, 1998 - 352 pages average customer review:based on 13 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

How can higher education today create a community of critical thinkers and searchers for truth that transcends the boundaries of class, gender, and nation? Martha C. Nussbaum, philosopher and classicist, argues that contemporary curricular reform is already producing such "citizens of the world" in its advocacy of diverse forms of cross-cultural studies. Her vigorous defense of "the new education" is rooted in Seneca's ideal of the citizen who scrutinizes tradition critically and who respects the ability to reason wherever it is found--in rich or poor, native or foreigner, female or male.

Drawing on Socrates and the Stoics, Nussbaum establishes three core values of liberal education--critical self-examination, the ideal of the world citizen, and the development of the narrative imagination. Then, taking us into classrooms and campuses across the nation, including prominent research universities, small independent colleges, and religious institutions, she shows how these values are (and in some instances are not) being embodied in particular courses. She defends such burgeoning subject areas as gender, minority, and gay studies against charges of moral relativism and low standards, and underscores their dynamic and fundamental contribution to critical reasoning and world citizenship.

For Nussbaum, liberal education is alive and well on American campuses in the late twentieth century. It is not only viable, promising, and constructive, but it is essential to a democratic society. Taking up the challenge of conservative critics of academe, she argues persuasively that sustained reform in the aim and content of liberal education is the most vital and invigorating force in higher education today.

for more information click here

Problematic, but will still provoke...

I'm not enough of a scholar to evaluate Nussbaums's treatment of "The Clouds" or Rousseau (are you?) but her treatment of the major topics is thought provoking -- and thus the book is well worth reading.

The only significant flaws I stumbled upon were her dismissal of the paradox of democratic change, and of the objections of ideology.

The former: when is a minority (perhaps 'elite') position a legimate corrective/adjustment to a democracy, and when is it an extemist and illegitimate distraction? The astonishing fact is that the problem in distinguishing one from the other interferes greatly with Nussbaum's laudatory depictions of "diversity" education, without providing even a hint of the underlying dilemma. For instance, arguments against racial bigotry are implicity conflated, in Nussbaum's book, with arguments against homosexuality. Personally, I agree with this... but how is a *democracy* to arrive at such a conculsion? Any controversy must, inevitably, be advocated at first by a minority. When is such a minority to be granted the academic privilege (as Gender Studies have, in todays University) and when not (as the 'pro-life' or 'creationist' perspectives)? Nussbaum completely ignores the problem, treating the liberal perspective as the only rational one.

This is related to the latter problematique: sometime a "received" doctrine [...] discerns a threat in the argument for "diversity". To a liberal, this perspective seems absurd. But where is the line to be drawn? If an alien culture (or domestic minority) were to advocate something extreme -- perhaps human sacrifice or infant euthanasia? How are 'believers' to discern which moral positions are too extreme to be defenced (bias against miscegenation; homosexual behavior) and which are defensible? (suttee? abortion?) Nussbaum provides no guidance; nor -- more importantly -- does she elaborate on how the academy is to respond to questions regarding such a delineation.

for more information click here

Cultivating Rationality

This book, like all of Nussbaum's is intelligent, well written and worthy of your time. But it is not without flaws. Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education argues in favor of the current trends in eliminating the traditional "western canon" as it has been understood. Critics have come at Nussbuam from nearly every conceivable front, claiming that she argues that education is ultimately political, that she provides ineffectual anecdotal evidence from America's top-tier and well-funded universities, that she aims to destroy the western perspective and finally, that she is idealistic and unpractical.
Each of these points is well founded but lack viable impetus unless one other element of Nussbaum's argument is noticed. Namely, that Nussbaum's book is a book about critical thinking skills and how they are taught in our nation's universities. The peripheral issues of gender, class and ethnicity, (where most of Nussbaum's critics attack), must been seen under the overall issue of education's primary purpose, namely, to produce rational thinkers. Thus, her thesis is much more about cultivating rationality and less about carrying a torch against the Western Canon.
To explain how rationality is to be cultivated, Nussbaum devotes much of her efforts to getting clear on what it means to be a "world citizen". This discussion is thoughtful and informative, even if you ultimately disagree with her. Yet, embedded in this detailed examination are serious assumptions about morality, which many other critics have noticed as well. She breezes through claims about avoiding "retributive anger", being "empathetic" and being "non-violent"; which prima facie sound reasonable. However, it may make some nervous that she grounds her entire argument on a morality that is far from generally accepted among philosophers. Nussbaum is harkening back to her roots as an expert in ancient philosophy, and this Aristotelian bias must be remembered as one reads through her argument. If you are an Aristotelian, a Hippy, or if you accept the ideas of Natural Law, Nussbaum's argument will be more successful for you.
Finally, as Nussbaum sets out her definition of what a Liberal Education is, she ignores the certain impact that her argument, if correct, will have on college instruction and pedagogy. While it may be possible to accept her implicit moral claims for the sake of an enticing discussion, I, like many others, was disappointed that she failed to seriously acknowledge the practical implications her argument begets.

for more information click here

reviews: page 1, 2, 3

products you might be interested in