Nussbaum on Education- The Robot Corporation
Martha Nussbaum writes about Indian Education on India's 60 th year of Independence. Her argument is similar to the one that she makes in her book, the clash within.
The rest of the nation should take note, for a nation of docile engineers and managers will not long remain truly free. It is time for a national focus on pedagogy—on the teaching of critical thinking and imagining—for a national acknowledgment that the humanities and arts are crucial for democracy's future.
How can India afford the luxury of thinking about such refinements, one might ask, when teachers do not even show up to teach, or do much of their real teaching in the homes of wealthier students after school hours? One might argue that the basic things need to be fixed first, and then one can move on to pedagogy. I believe, however, that we should reject this argument. When something exciting is being imparted and received in the classroom, when the whole enterprise of education is alive and full of surprises, both teachers and students want to show up. We see this clearly in NGO education, where nobody is coerced on either side, and yet pupils and teachers participate with passion, because what is happening strikes everyone as really pertinent to their lives.
India has one of the world's most vital democracies, with its enormous diversity, its strong traditions of argument and critical exchange, its artistic distinction, its great rational and imaginative powers. But India's democracy has also committed some conspicuous failures of public reasoning, giving way to parochialism, sloppiness, inattentiveness, and worse. Education based mainly on profitability in the global market magnifies these deficiencies, producing a greedy obtuseness that threatens the very life of democracy itself. Tagore said in Japan in 1917 that a nation might commit "gradual suicide through shrinkage of the soul". India's soul is so large that it would be difficult indeed to kill it; but it is surely in danger of shrinking.
The rest of the nation should take note, for a nation of docile engineers and managers will not long remain truly free. It is time for a national focus on pedagogy—on the teaching of critical thinking and imagining—for a national acknowledgment that the humanities and arts are crucial for democracy's future.
How can India afford the luxury of thinking about such refinements, one might ask, when teachers do not even show up to teach, or do much of their real teaching in the homes of wealthier students after school hours? One might argue that the basic things need to be fixed first, and then one can move on to pedagogy. I believe, however, that we should reject this argument. When something exciting is being imparted and received in the classroom, when the whole enterprise of education is alive and full of surprises, both teachers and students want to show up. We see this clearly in NGO education, where nobody is coerced on either side, and yet pupils and teachers participate with passion, because what is happening strikes everyone as really pertinent to their lives.
India has one of the world's most vital democracies, with its enormous diversity, its strong traditions of argument and critical exchange, its artistic distinction, its great rational and imaginative powers. But India's democracy has also committed some conspicuous failures of public reasoning, giving way to parochialism, sloppiness, inattentiveness, and worse. Education based mainly on profitability in the global market magnifies these deficiencies, producing a greedy obtuseness that threatens the very life of democracy itself. Tagore said in Japan in 1917 that a nation might commit "gradual suicide through shrinkage of the soul". India's soul is so large that it would be difficult indeed to kill it; but it is surely in danger of shrinking.
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