PROMPT:
Many of you have taken UNE’s Citizenship course this year. Use your experience in that course plus a selection (a particular passage or recurring theme) from Nussbaum’s book to make a case for what you think is the strongest connection between liberal education and Citizenship. Noting that Citizenship as it’s offered at UNE is a social science course, where in your humanities courses or extracurricular experiences do you see evidence to support or extend Nussbaum’s argument?
RESPONSE:
Q1: “Thirsty 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” (Nussbaum 2).
Q2: “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, finally, the ability to imagine sympathetically the predicament of another person” (7).
Q3: “The ability to think well about a wide range of cultures, groups, and nations in the context of a grasp of the global economy and of the history of many national and group interactions is crucial in order to enable democracies to deal responsibly with the problems we currently face as members of an interdependent world. And the ability to imagine the experience of another – a capacity almost all human beings possess in some form – needs to be greatly enhanced and refined if we are to have any hope of sustaining decent institutions across the many divisions that any modern society contains” (10).
Q4: “The student’s freedom of mind is dangerous if what is wanted is a group of technically trained obedient workers to carry out the plans of elites who are aiming at foreign investment and technological development” (21).
The strongest connection between a liberal arts education and citizenship is the simple understanding and respect of human beings and their ideas and feelings. I feel that an education in the liberal arts makes it easier for people to understand more than just the basic facts for the well being of a population. Someone with a liberal arts education is able to evaluate the needs for individuals. Likewise, they are able to evaluate the consequences to the actions of the elites. For example, elites often support the use of oil within companies because they invest in oil companies. However, oil uses have an adverse effect on the environment and the support of these big companies harms smaller companies. Someone without a liberal arts education may still be able to see and understand these effects, but are conditioned to ignore them.
Further, someone with a liberal arts education understands the importance of local government. Liberal arts allows one to understand different cultures, economic standings and religions. This comes to play a ton in local situations because local government is less focused on an entire population and has the ability to evaluate the needs of their people on a much smaller scale. Someone without a liberal arts education may not quite understand the importance of local government because they have been conditioned to be more focused on national government and larger scale issues. Fixing problems within local governments can help to fix larger scale issues seen in national government. Most issues identified within a local government surround culture, economic standing and religion whereas larger scale issues in national government tend to focus less on these thing.
As someone in a citizenship course currently, I have seen town meetings and the topics surrounding. They focus a lot on schooling and how to help those who have less access to resources. They focus on environmental issues on the small scale, like organizing town cleanings and supporting smaller businesses. I have noticed that these meetings really focus on the individuals within the community and how to make everyone’s experiences equal and greater for the individual AND the whole.
