In Liberal Education and Democratic Citizenship, Michael H. McCarthy carefully describes the many crises confronting American democracy and identifies their philosophical, cultural, and institutional origins. He argues that a liberal education, properly understood, can address several of these crises effectively. The book’s successive chapters explore the sources, areas, and levels of division in contemporary America, and show how they have created important disagreements about the major challenges we presently face and the credible solutions they require. McCarthy articulates what a liberal education actually is and why it is vitally important for both our personal and civic lives. He also clarifies the critical contrast between effective freedom, the aim of a liberal education, and the concepts of freedom within economic and political liberalism. McCarthy addresses the distinctive educational challenges presented by modernity and post-modernity: their moral aspirations, acute historical consciousness, and passion for radical criticism, as well as the traditional (Tocqueville) and contemporary (William Galston and Charles Taylor) discontents of American democracy. A central part of the book’s unfolding argument is the enduring cultural contrast between the principles and aspirations of civic republicanism and the imperial assumptions of economics. This juxtaposition helps us to understand the power and limitations of the “stories we Americans live by” as well as the civic virtues we commonly need to create a free, just, and multi-racial America. These critical virtues, McCarthy argues, are the specific goal of a liberal and democratic education

A passionate defense of the humanities from one of today's foremost public intellectuals In this short and powerful book, celebrated philosopher Martha Nussbaum makes a passionate case for the importance of the liberal arts at all levels of education. Historically, the humanities have been central to education because they have been seen as essential for creating competent democratic citizens. But recently, Nussbaum argues, thinking about the aims of education has gone disturbingly awry in the United States and abroad. We increasingly treat education as though its primary goal were to teach students to be economically productive rather than to think critically and become knowledgeable, productive, and empathetic individuals. This shortsighted focus on profitable skills has eroded our ability to criticize authority, reduced our sympathy with the marginalized and different, and damaged our competence to deal with complex global problems. And the loss of these basic capacities jeopardizes the health of democracies and the hope of a decent world. In response to this dire situation, Nussbaum argues that we must resist efforts to reduce education to a tool of the gross national product. Rather, we must work to reconnect education to the humanities in order to give students the capacity to be true democratic citizens of their countries and the world. In a new preface, Nussbaum explores the current state of humanistic education globally and shows why the crisis of the humanities has far from abated. Translated into over twenty languages, Not for Profit draws on the stories of troubling—and hopeful—global educational developments. Nussbaum offers a manifesto that should be a rallying cry for anyone who cares about the deepest purposes of education.

With a highly accessible and lucid text this book reviews the political shift toward neo-liberal ideology and explores its tremendous impact on education. It maps out in careful detail the theoretical foundations of democratic citizenship by asking the question: What does it mean to learn and live in a democracy and what responsibilities, capacities and knowledge does a citizen need to fulfill these requirements?

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.

An eloquent tribute to the value of the liberal education

Citizenship under Fire examines the relationship among civic education, the culture of war, and the quest for peace. Drawing on examples from Israel and the United States, Sigal Ben-Porath seeks to understand how ideas about citizenship change when a country is at war, and what educators can do to prevent some of the most harmful of these changes. Perhaps the most worrisome one, Ben-Porath contends, is a growing emphasis in schools and elsewhere on social conformity, on tendentious teaching of history, and on drawing stark distinctions between them and us. As she writes, "The varying characteristics of citizenship in times of war and peace add up to a distinction between belligerent citizenship, which is typical of democracies in wartime, and the liberal democratic citizenship that is characteristic of more peaceful democracies." Ben-Porath examines how various theories of education--principally peace education, feminist education, and multicultural education--speak to the distinctive challenges of wartime. She argues that none of these theories are satisfactory on their own theoretical terms or would translate easily into practice. In the final chapter, she lays out her own alternative theory--"expansive education"--which she believes holds out more promise of widening the circles of participation in schools, extending the scope of permissible debate, and diversifying the questions asked about the opinions voiced.

This volume explores some of the tensions and pressures of citizenship in Western liberal democracies. Citizenship has adopted many guises in the Western context, although historically citizenship is attached only to some variant of democracy. How democracy is configured is thus at the core of citizenship. Beginning in ancient Greece, citizenship is attached to the notion of a public sphere of deliberation, open only to a small number of males. Nonetheless, we take from these origins an understanding of citizenship that is attached to friendship, preservation of a distinct community, and adherence to law. These early conceptions of citizenship in the west have been dramatically altered in the modern context by the ascendancy of individual rights and equality, expanding the inclusiveness of definition of citizenship. The universality of rights claims has led to debate about the legitimacy of the nation state and questioning of borders. A further development in our understanding of citizenship, and one that has shifted citizenship studies considerably in the last few decades, is the backlash against the universalism of rights in the defense of cultural recognition within democratic polities. Multiculturalism as a broad spectrum of citizenship studies defends the autonomy and recognition of cultural, and sometimes religious, identity within an overarching scheme of rights and equality. This collection draws upon the many threads of citizenship in the Western tradition to consider how all of them are still extant, and contentious, in contemporary liberal democracy.