What is School For?

Dan O sent me an article by Alfie Kohn responding to the recent presidential interest in STEM.

Here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alfie-kohn/the-stem-sell-are-math-an_b_823589.html?view=print

I responded like this: This is great – and very coincidental. The book I just finished (Martha Nussbaum's "Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities") takes a similar stand, but more vehemently. She claims that the entire discourse about education is about economic competition. Our current debates on the national scale about purposes of education have become uni-dimensional.

She also does a great job in the book of showing that the humanities are essential for BOTH the democratic purposes and the economic purposes. She says,

“Today we still maintain that we like democracy and self-governance, and we also think that we like freedom of speech, respect for difference, and understanding of others. We give these values lip service, but we think far too little about what we need to do in order to transmit them to the next generation and ensure their survival. Distracted by the pursuit of wealth, we increasingly ask our schools to turn out useful profit-makers rather than thoughtful citizens. Under the pressure to cut costs, we prune away just those parts of the educational endeavor that are crucial to preserving a healthy society….

Democracies have great rational and imaginative powers. They also are prone to some serious flaws in reasoning, to parochialism, haste, sloppiness, selfishness, narrowness of the spirit. Education based mainly on profitability in the global market magnifies these deficiencies, producing a greedy obstuseness and a technically trained docility that threatens the very life of democracy itself, and that certainly impede the creation of a decent world culture.”