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Title: Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education
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Manufacturer: Harvard University Press
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| Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education by Harvard University Press Nice try... | | Perhaps the worst thought out book aimed at attacking American school systems. Not only does Nussbaum contradict herself on several occasions, but her plans for all forms of educations are not only unrealistic, but absolutely absurd. Perhaps if she hadn't tried to pad her own views with the curriculum of schools and thoughts of every ancient philosopher, her views could have been presented more clearly. An overall failure...I'm not sure how it got published... | | Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education by Harvard University Press Cultivating Rationality | This book, like all of Nussbaum's is intelligent, well written and worthy of your time. But it is not without flaws. Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education argues in favor of the current trends in eliminating the traditional "western canon" as it has been understood. Critics have come at Nussbuam from nearly every conceivable front, claiming that she argues that education is ultimately political, that she provides ineffectual anecdotal evidence from America's top-tier and well-funded universities, that she aims to destroy the western perspective and finally, that she is idealistic and unpractical.
Each of these points is well founded but lack viable impetus unless one other element of Nussbaum's argument is noticed. Namely, that Nussbaum's book is a book about critical thinking skills and how they are taught in our nation's universities. The peripheral issues of gender, class and ethnicity, (where most of Nussbaum's critics attack), must been seen under the overall issue of education's primary purpose, namely, to produce rational thinkers. Thus, her thesis is much more about cultivating rationality and less about carrying a torch against the Western Canon.
To explain how rationality is to be cultivated, Nussbaum devotes much of her efforts to getting clear on what it means to be a "world citizen". This discussion is thoughtful and informative, even if you ultimately disagree with her. Yet, embedded in this detailed examination are serious assumptions about morality, which many other critics have noticed as well. She breezes through claims about avoiding "retributive anger", being "empathetic" and being "non-violent"; which prima facie sound reasonable. However, it may make some nervous that she grounds her entire argument on a morality that is far from generally accepted among philosophers. Nussbaum is harkening back to her roots as an expert in ancient philosophy, and this Aristotelian bias must be remembered as one reads through her argument. If you are an Aristotelian, a Hippy, or if you accept the ideas of Natural Law, Nussbaum's argument will be more successful for you.
Finally, as Nussbaum sets out her definition of what a Liberal Education is, she ignores the certain impact that her argument, if correct, will have on college instruction and pedagogy. While it may be possible to accept her implicit moral claims for the sake of an enticing discussion, I, like many others, was disappointed that she failed to seriously acknowledge the practical implications her argument begets. | | Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education by Harvard University Press Problematic, but will still provoke... | I'm not enough of a scholar to evaluate Nussbaums's treatment of "The Clouds" or Rousseau (are you?) but her treatment of the major topics is thought provoking -- and thus the book is well worth reading.
The only significant flaws I stumbled upon were her dismissal of the paradox of democratic change, and of the objections of ideology.
The former: when is a minority (perhaps 'elite') position a legimate corrective/adjustment to a democracy, and when is it an extemist and illegitimate distraction? The astonishing fact is that the problem in distinguishing one from the other interferes greatly with Nussbaum's laudatory depictions of "diversity" education, without providing even a hint of the underlying dilemma. For instance, arguments against racial bigotry are implicity conflated, in Nussbaum's book, with arguments against homosexuality. Personally, I agree with this... but how is a *democracy* to arrive at such a conculsion? Any controversy must, inevitably, be advocated at first by a minority. When is such a minority to be granted the academic privilege (as Gender Studies have, in todays University) and when not (as the 'pro-life' or 'creationist' perspectives)? Nussbaum completely ignores the problem, treating the liberal perspective as the only rational one.
This is related to the latter problematique: sometime a "received" doctrine [...] discerns a threat in the argument for "diversity". To a liberal, this perspective seems absurd. But where is the line to be drawn? If an alien culture (or domestic minority) were to advocate something extreme -- perhaps human sacrifice or infant euthanasia? How are 'believers' to discern which moral positions are too extreme to be defenced (bias against miscegenation; homosexual behavior) and which are defensible? (suttee? abortion?) Nussbaum provides no guidance; nor -- more importantly -- does she elaborate on how the academy is to respond to questions regarding such a delineation. | | Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education by Harvard University Press A Sober Defense of Open-Mindedness | | Inasmuch as this book is an account of Nussbaum's research on the success of muticultural education at a few dozen American universities, it will be read as a challenge to the doom-saying conservatives who argue that education has gone to Hell since we abandoned the Great Books tradition of the Fifties. And it works rather well as such: as well as she can while writing for a lay audience, she confronts the likes of Alan Bloom on their own terms, demonstrating that there's a lot to be said for seeing muticultural education as an extension, rather than a betrayal, of the Western Philosophical Tradition. But what's interesting is her intolerance of hypocrisy on the Left as well as the Right: she denounces the excesses of Afrocentrism and the self-validating fantasies of academic feminism as well as any conservative editorialist. She's very much her own woman, and a public moralist in the best sense. | | Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education by Harvard University Press Nussbaum is not reliable | | I have seen the disagreements among reviewers of Nussbaum's books, and I think that those who are wary of her are better readers both of her work and of the works she discusses. She simply is not reliable in her accounts of what anyone says, ancient, modern, or anything else. On the very first page of this book she makes mistakes as she summarizes the plot of Aristophanes' "Clouds." And she's a classicist? But for real laughs in "Cultivating Humanity" read her way over-simplified explanation of compassion in Rousseau and others. Honestly, she doesn't have a clue about what makes that such a complex passion or what Rousseau thought its purpose should be. In recent years she has embarrassed herself repeatedly on the "Letters to the Editor" page of The New Republic by angrily attacking people for things they never said. That is in keeping with what she does in this book. No, she is not even open-minded enough to fairly represent what other people say and think, never mind to learn from them. And from her we're to learn to live together in harmony with everyone as world citizens? OK. | | Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education by Harvard University Press Product Description | How can higher education today create a community of critical thinkers and searchers for truth that transcends the boundaries of class, gender, and nation? Martha C. Nussbaum, philosopher and classicist, argues that contemporary curricular reform is already producing such "citizens of the world" in its advocacy of diverse forms of cross-cultural studies. Her vigorous defense of "the new education" is rooted in Seneca's ideal of the citizen who scrutinizes tradition critically and who respects the ability to reason wherever it is found--in rich or poor, native or foreigner, female or male. Drawing on Socrates and the Stoics, Nussbaum establishes three core values of liberal education--critical self-examination, the ideal of the world citizen, and the development of the narrative imagination. Then, taking us into classrooms and campuses across the nation, including prominent research universities, small independent colleges, and religious institutions, she shows how these values are (and in some instances are not) being embodied in particular courses. She defends such burgeoning subject areas as gender, minority, and gay studies against charges of moral relativism and low standards, and underscores their dynamic and fundamental contribution to critical reasoning and world citizenship. For Nussbaum, liberal education is alive and well on American campuses in the late twentieth century. It is not only viable, promising, and constructive, but it is essential to a democratic society. Taking up the challenge of conservative critics of academe, she argues persuasively that sustained reform in the aim and content of liberal education is the most vital and invigorating force in higher education today. | | Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education by Harvard University Press Amazon.com | | Multiculturalism is often attacked in higher education as either a bankrupt moral relativism or an anti-white-male power play. In Cultivating Humanity, philosopher Martha Nussbaum draws on some dead white males, namely Socrates, Seneca, and Cicero, to defend diversity studies in higher education. Nussbaum examines diversity programs in universities across America and finds that by coupling diversity studies with rigorous philosophical inquiry the programs are quite successful at accomplishing their mission: to turn out citizens well-grounded in their own culture and with the rational capacity and empathy to understand and explore differing points of view. For anyone who questions the necessity of a liberal education in a university curriculum, Cultivating Humanity is required reading. |
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