Learning, the arts and citizenship

by Martha Nussbaum

Martha Nussbaum is the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor in the Law School at the University of Chicago. The following is an address made by her to teachers at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, on 4 November 2005.

The arts offer children opportunities for learning through their own creative activity, something that Dewey particularly emphasized. To put on a play about the civil rights movement is to learn about it in a way that is likely to seem more meaningful to a child than the reading of a textbook account. Learning about hardship and discrimination enters the personality at a deeper level. The arts are also crucial sources of both freedom and community.

When people put on a play together, they have to learn to go beyond tradition and authority, if they are going to express themselves well. And the sort of community created by the arts is non-hierarchical, a valuable model of the responsiveness and interactivity that a good democracy will also foster in its political processes.

The arts are great sources of joy, and this joy carries over into the rest of a child’s education. Amita Sen’s book about Tagore as choreographer, aptly entitled Joy in All Work, shows how all the “regular” education in Tagore’s Santiniketan school, which enabled these students to perform very well in standard examinations, was infused with delight because of the way in which it was combined with dance and song. Children do not like to sit still all day, but they also do not know automatically how to express emotion with their bodies in dance. Tagore’s expressive but also disciplined dance regime was an essential source of creativity, thought, and freedom for all pupils, but particularly for women, whose bodies had been taught to be shame-ridden and inexpressive.

There is a further point to be made about what the arts do for the reader or spectator. As Tagore knew, and as radical artists have often emphasized, the arts, by generating pleasure in connection with acts of subversion and cultural criticism, produce an endurable and even attractive dialogue with the prejudices of the past, rather than one fraught with fear and defensiveness.

The great African American artist Ralph Ellison, for example, called his novel Invisible Man “a raft of perception, hope, and entertainment” that could help the American democracy “negotiate the snags and whirlpools” that stand between it and “the democratic idea.” Entertainment is crucial to the ability of the arts to offer perception and hope. At the heart of all three of the Tagorean (and Deweyan) capacities is the idea of freedom: the freedom of the child’s mind to engage critically with tradition; the freedom to imagine citizenship in both national and world terms, and to negotiate multiple allegiances with knowledge and confidence; the freedom to reach out in the imagination, allowing another person’s experience into oneself.

Science and technology are important, and nations are surely right to focus on the prosperity that they promise to bring. It would be disastrous, however, if the other parts of a liberal education were short-circuited in the process, producing nations of smart engineers who have little capacity for empathetic imagining and for critical thinking. Such impoverishment of mind would nourish the politics of obtuseness and hatred, all over the world. In the U.S., it would nourish both political detachment and complacency and a tendency to polarization, as people mistrust the ability of reasoned debate to bridge differences.

Progressive education, emphasizing critical thinking and imaginative learning, exacts high financial and humancosts. It requires very individualistic focusing on each child’s experience, and it requires constantly attentive and imaginative pedagogy. But the importance of progressive education for the health of democracy is out of all proportion to these costs.

Moreover, my experience in NGO’s around the world shows me that the imagination is a hardy plant. When it is not killed, it can thrive in many places, without a lot of fancy equipment, as it thrives in so many utterly impoverished NGO programs I’ve observed. If NGO’s that have no equipment and no money, only heart and mind and a few slates,can accomplish so much, there is no excuse for the public and private schools of this wealthy nation to lag behind.