Wednesday, August 16
"democracies have great rational and imaginative powers. yet they also are prone to irrationality, parochialism, haste, sloppiness and selfishness. education based mainly on profitability in the global markets magnifies these deficiencies - to the point that they threaten the very life of democracy itself. we need to favour an education that cultivates the critical capacities, that fosters a complex understanding of the world and its peoples and that educates and refines the capacity for sympathy. in short, an education that cultivates human beings rather than useful machines. if we do not insist on the crucial importance of the humanities and the arts, they will drop away. they don't make money, but they do something far more precious: they make a world worth living in."
- martha nussbaum, Ernst Freund Distinguised Service professor of law and ethics at the University of Chicago.