Not for Profit

If we do not insist on the crucial importance of the humanities and the arts, they will drop away, because they do not make money.

Under pressure to cut costs, we prune away just those parts of the educational endeavor that are crucial to pre-serving a healthy society.

Distracted by pursuit of wealth, we increasingly ask our schools to turn out useful profit-makers rather than thoughtful citizens

The imaginative component of democratic education requires careful selectivity.

The empathetic imagination can be capricious and uneven if not linked to an idea of equal human dignity.

The cultivation of sympathy has been a key part of the best modern ideas of democratic education, in both Western and non-Western nations.

We cannot understand where even a simple soft drink comes from without thinking about lives in other nations.

Our problems and responsibilities call on us to study the nations and cultures of the world in a more focused and systematic way.

We need world history and global understanding for reasons that go beyond what is required to understand our own nation.

All good historical study of one’s own nation requires some grounding in world history.

Young people must gradually come to understand both the differences that make understanding essential if common problems are to be solved.

From a very early age, students should learn a different relation to the world, mediated by correct facts and respectful curiosity.

Knowledge is no guarantee of good behavior, but ignorance is a virtual guarantee of bad behavior.

Human lives are seen primarily as instruments for gain.

It is irresponsible to bury our heads in the sand, ignoring the many ways in which we influence, every day, the lives of distant people.

Our simplest decisions as consumers affect the living standard of people in distant nations involved in the production of products we use.

The global economy has tied all of us to distant lives.

The problems we need to solve – economic, environmental, religious, and political – are global in their scope.

More than any time in the past, we all depend on people we have never seen, and they depend on us.

What makes majorities try so ubiquitously, to denigrate or stigmatize minorities?

Producing economic growth does not mean producing democracy.

It is easier to treat people as objects to be manipulated if you have never learned any other way to see them.

Moral obtuseness is necessary to carry out programs of economic development that ignore inequality.

A cultivated and developed sympathy is a particularly dangerous enemy of obtuseness.

Achievements in health and education are very poorly correlated with economic growth.

Without support from suitably educated citizens, no democracy can remain stable.

To think about education for democratic citizenship, we have to think about what democratic nations are, and what they strive for.

Education is not just for citizenship. It prepares people for employment and importantly, for meaningful lives.

The profit motive suggests that science and technology are of crucial importance for the future health of their nations.

The humanities and the arts are being cut away, in both primary/secondary & university education, in virtually every nation of the world.

Thirsty for national profit, nations, and their systems of education, are heedlessly discarding skills needed to keep democracies alive.

Radical changes are occurring in what democratic societies teach the young, and these changes have not been well thought through.

We must resist efforts to reduce education to a tool of the gross national product.

We must work to reconnect education to the humanities in order to give students the capacity to be true democratic citizens.

We treat education as though its primary goal were to teach students to be economically productive rather than to think critically.

Recently, a lot of thinkers are thinking that the aims of education have gone disturbingly awry.