Nussbaum provides several anecdotes or “representative examples” that point toward disturbing trends in democratic education and the health of the humanities in particular. What are the disturbing trends that she highlights in Chapter 7?
According to the Democratic Education on the Ropes, Nussbaum identifies her first anecdotes to the education system as the over belief in the quantitative model of testing. This quantitative model of testing leaves the students and learners to overly on academic result outcomes rather than content and knowledge base acquisition according to his time. The author alludes that this is propelled by the desire of the democratized education system to operationalize it into a national tower of prosperity. These connotations of education have distorted the true meaning of learning in humanities and art and undermined the true meaning of the national education system, which the ultimate meaning of health and wealth of humanities and art.
With the democratization of humanities in universities, many institutions have been forced to downsize or eliminate universities. These emanating trends are forced by the desire to align with economic prosperity and the inability of many universities to meet the demands of the course. This partly due to market uncertainties which define the “identity of higher education” (pg. 3) and in equal measures, higher financial and pedagogical cost associated with the democratic education system. According to this argument, the market demand for humanity students as compared to other professions has decreased, thus reducing the rate of university uptake of artistic students. This intertwined with, teaching requirement and cost for liberal education hinder the inabilities of higher education systems to provide high-quality education to humanity students.
The ability to achieve the desired quality of education in humanities and liberal art is also faced with financial uncertainty from bureaucrats and marginalization. This has reduced the abilities of humanity and art course to serve in meeting the need of all students across the country. The democratic leaders have fabricated this, and bureaucrats question the authenticity of such courses to contribute to the economy of the county. The constrain imposed in instructions of higher learning due to such measures and arguments has forced many departments to be merged, thus pressuring the merged courses to concentrate on the area they deem profitable. There is also recorded a considerable reduction in liberal art and humanity research funding in many institutions across the globe.
The demand for the global labor market and economic liberalization has shifted the focus of education to the technical proficiency and scientific abilities. This has managed to create a notion that humanities and art are useless courses that do not add value to the progress of the nation economically. This has forced the government to adopt education testing methodologies that into consideration student quantitative performance, thus ignoring students’ sympathetic reasoning and critical thinking aspect of education. As a result, the material content for education has shifted from promoting imaginations and critical thinking to test preparation and excelling in exams. This type of testing has managed to segregate the principle of teaching and learning humanities from the education system across the world and thus aggravated the challenges faced by humanity and liberal art. This has drifted the principles of humanities and liberal art from the institution of learning and left humanities to few people interesting in humanities. This is witnessed by a significant reduction of humanity content compression in a large percentage of graduates leaving instructions of higher learning across the country.
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