Unannounced Crisis in Education and Bringing Up Citizens of the World. A review of the book: Nussbaum M. (2014) Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (translated to Russian). Moscow: Publishing House of the Higher School of Economics.

Abstract

The book by the famous American philosopher Martha Nussbaum is part of a series of publications in support of humanities and arts. A lot of experts share the author’s idea of decay in contemporary democratic education. This is manifested in excessive amount of testing and monitoring, in a drop in university places for philosophy students, in reallocation of funds in favor of natural science and engineering higher education institutions. This paper advocates education designed to bring up citizens of the world and distinguishes between education for profit and democratic education. The existing economic growthbased model of social development should be replaced with a new model based on development of human potential. Bringing up citizens of demo cratic states aims to develop critical thinking and enable the citizens to see other people’s viewpoints and to understand them. The paper also unfolds the key principles of the so called Socratic pedagogy, which Nussbaum believes to become the central practice of humanitarian education in Western culture. The practice makes people think independently and argue without falling back on weighty or generally accepted opinions.