We are in the midst of a crisis of huge proportions and grave global significance. No, I do not mean the global economic crisis that began in 2008. At least then everyone knew that the crisis was at hand, and many world leaders worked to find solutions. No, I mean a crisis that goes largely unnoticed; a crisis that is likely to be, in the long run, far more damaging to the future of democratic self-government: a worldwide crisis in education.
Radical changes are occurring in what democratic societies teach the young, and these changes have not been well thought through. 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, all over the world we 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. The future of the world’s democracies hangs in the balance.
What are these radical changes? The liberal arts are being cut away in both elementary and secondary education and in universities. 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.
To take just one example: In the winter of 2006, a prestigious American university—let’s call it Y—held a symposium celebrating a major anniversary. A centerpiece of the original plan was a symposium on “The Future of Liberal Education.” A few months before the event, speakers who had agreed to be part of that symposium were told that it had been canceled, and that they should just come and lecture to small departmental audiences on any topic they liked. A helpful and nicely talkative junior administrator told me that the reason for the change was that the president of Y had decided that a symposium on liberal education would not “make a splash.” So he decided to replace it with a symposium on the latest achievements in technology and their role in generating profits for business and industry.
That is the crisis facing us. But we have not yet faced it. We are pursuing the possessions that protect, please, and comfort us—what the Indian educator, poet, and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore called our material “covering.” But we seem to be forgetting about the soul. About what it is for thought to open out of the soul and connect person to world in a rich, subtle, and complicated manner.
Given that economic growth is so eagerly sought by all nations, especially at this time of crisis, too few questions have been posed about the direction of education, and, with it, of the world’s democratic societies. With the rush to profitability in the global market, values precious for the future of democracy are in danger of getting lost.
The profit motive suggests to many concerned leaders that science and technology are of crucial importance for the future health of their nations. We should have no objection to good scientific and technical education. My concern is that other abilities, equally crucial, are at risk of getting lost in the competitive flurry, abilities crucial to the health of any democracy internally, and to the creation of a world culture capable of tackling the world’s most pressing problems.
Education is not just for citizenship. It prepares people for employment and for lives of rich significance. All modern democracies, however, are societies in which the meaning and ultimate goals of human life are topics of reasonable disagreement among citizens who hold many different religious and secular views, and those citizens will naturally differ about how far various types of humanistic education serve their own particular goals. What we can agree about is that young people all over the world, in any nation lucky enough to be democratic, need to grow up to be participants in a type of government in which the people inform themselves about crucial issues they will address as voters, and, sometimes, as elected or appointed officials. Every modern democracy is also a society in which people differ greatly along many parameters, including religion, ethnicity, wealth and class, physical impairment, gender, and sexuality, and in which all voters are making choices that have a major impact on the lives of people who differ from themselves. One way of assessing any educational scheme is to ask how well it prepares young people for life in a form of social and political organization that has those features.
Economic interest, too, requires us to draw on the humanities and arts, to promote a climate of responsible and watchful stewardship and a culture of creative innovation.
Thus we are not forced to choose between a form of education that promotes profit and a form of education that promotes good citizenship: A flourishing economy requires the same skills that support citizenship, and thus the proponents of what I shall call “education for profit,” or (to put it more comprehensively) “education for economic growth,” have adopted an impoverished conception of what is required to meet their own goal.
What does it mean for a nation to advance? In one view, it means to increase its gross domestic product per capita. For decades that measure has been the standard used by development economists, as if it were a proxy for a nation’s overall quality of life: 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 that are not well linked to economic growth. (Empirical studies have by now shown that political liberty, health, and education are all poorly correlated with growth.) One sign of what that model leaves out is the fact that South Africa under apartheid used to shoot to the top of development indexes. 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.
The United States has never had a pure growth-directed model of education. Some distinctive and by-now-traditional features of our system positively resist being cast in those terms. Unlike virtually every nation of the world, we have a liberal-arts model of university education: Instead of entering college to study a single subject, students are required to take a wide range of courses in their first two years, prominently including courses in the humanities. That model influences secondary education: Nobody is tracked too early into a nonhumanities stream.
Nor is the emphasis on the liberal arts a vestige of elitism or class distinction: From early on, leading American educators connected the liberal arts to the preparation of informed, independent, and sympathetic democratic citizens. The liberal-arts model is still relatively strong, but it is now under severe stress in this time of economic hardship.
But educators for economic growth do more than ignore the liberal arts: They 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 economic development that ignore inequality.
Pure models of education for economic growth are difficult to find in flourishing democracies, since democracy is built on respect for each person, and the growth model respects only an aggregate. However, education systems all over the world are moving closer and closer to the growth model, without much thought about how ill suited it is to the goals of democracy.
How else might we think of the sort of nation and citizen we are trying to build? The primary alternative to the growth-based model in international-development circles, and one with which I’ve been associated, is known as the human-development paradigm, begun by Mahbub ul Haq and Amartya Sen, and now further developed by the work of the Human Development and Capability Association. What is important is what opportunities, or “capabilities,” each person has in key areas ranging from life, health, and bodily integrity to political liberty, political participation, and education.
This model recognizes that each and every person possesses an inalienable human dignity that ought to be respected by laws and institutions.
The argument about the economic worth of education, however, ought to be subservient to that concerning the stability of democratic institutions, since a strong economy is a means to human ends, not an end in itself. Most of us would not choose to live in a prosperous nation that had ceased to be democratic. Moreover, although it is clear that a strong business culture requires some people who are imaginative and critical thinkers, it is not clear that it requires all people in a nation to gain those skills. Democratic participation makes wider demands.
No system of education is doing a good job if its benefits reach only wealthy elites. The distribution of access to quality education is an urgent issue in all modern democracies. It has long been a shameful feature of the United States, a wealthy nation, that access to quality elementary and secondary education, and, especially, to college and university education is so unequally distributed. Many developing nations contain even larger disparities in access: India, for example, reports a male literacy rate of only around 65 percent, a female literacy rate of around 50 percent.
Urban-rural disparities are larger. In secondary and higher education, there are even more striking gaps between male and female, rich and poor, urban and rural. The lives of children who grow up knowing that they will go on to university and even postgraduate education are utterly different from the lives of children who, in many cases, do not get a chance to attend school at all.
Until we are clear about what we should be striving for, it is difficult to figure out how to get it to those who need it.
