Education for Profit, Education for Freedom

Overview & Synopsis

Education is often discussed in low-level utilitarian terms: how can educators produce technically trained people who can hold onto "their" share of the global market? With the rush to profitability, values precious for the future of democracy are in danger of getting lost. The profit motive suggests to most concerned politicians that science and technology are of crucial importance. This author contends that educators should have no objection to good scientific and technical education. But other abilities--abilities crucial both to the health of democracy and to the creation of a decent world culture and a robust type of global citizenship--are at risk of getting lost in the competitive flurry. In this keynote address, Nussbaum focuses on the contrast between an education for profit-making and an education for a more inclusive type of citizenship. This contrast is related to another, familiar in discussions of global justice and global citizenship, between two conceptions of development: (1) the old narrowly economic conception of development; and (2) the richer more inclusive notion of "human development." The analysis of education used even by the best practitioners of the human development approach tends to focus on basic marketable skills. It neglects the humanistic abilities of critical thinking and imagining that are so crucial if education is really to promote human development, rather than merely economic growth and individual acquisition.