Formations of Secular Liberal Arts Education: A Critique of Martha Nussbaum’s Education for Democratic Citizenship

Abstract

Education for economic advancement has become the dominant form of education in the advanced world, especially in the United States.1 This has not been universally accepted as good news. For instance, William Deresiewicz recently described the state of American education in New Republic magazine as a system focused only on the development of expertise, producing smart and talented students who are experts in their field, “but also anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and stunted sense of purpose … great at what they're doing but with no idea why they’re doing it.”2 Similarly, Martha Nussbaum has devoted a litany of books and articles as warning against this pervasive form of education.3 In her crusade against educating for economic success, she has championed a philosophy of education she calls “educating for democratic citizenship.”4 She believes the purpose of education is moral formation with an emphasis on “carefully crafted instruction in the arts and humanities, which will bring students into contact with issues of gender, race, ethnicity, and cross-cultural experience and understanding.”5 Notably, her philosophy of education tacitly presupposes that liberal arts, if kept secular, is a neutral form of education, and therefore unproblematically suited for all students in a pluralist society. This is a presumption that many proponents of liberal arts share. Yet, the teaching of liberal arts entails a particular reading of certain issues that can be contested by differing cultural lenses. Indeed, in his anthropological critique of the secularity, Talal Asad has revealed an important bricolage of Enlightenment, Christian, and Hellenistic concepts undergirding the assumed need for secular public space. In the following, I will show how a similar analysis of Nussbaum’s human development model of education reveals foundational assumptions that are distinctly Western, which support the entrenchment of a particular socio-historically contingent hegemony and is therefore not a neutral form of education, nor appropriate for a pluralist society.