Abstract
Higher education makes an important contribution to citizenship. In the United States, the required portion of the “liberal arts education” in colleges and universities can be reformed so as to equip students for the challenges of global citizenship. This chapter advocates focusing on three abilities: (1) the Socratic ability to criticize one’s own traditions and to carry on an argument on terms of mutual respect for reason; (2) the ability to think as a citizen of the whole world, not just some local region or group; and (3) the “narrative imagination,” the ability to imagine what it would be like to be in the position of someone very different from oneself. This chapter discusses the role of the “liberal arts” curriculum in US education and asks how European universities, with their different structure, might promote these three abilities.
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Notes
- 1.
Strictly speaking, the course of study is rarely linear in this way. Usually students begin study of the major subject early, in the first or certainly the second year; and in the third and fourth years, they do not study only one thing but continue to take some basic required courses and other “elective” (optional) courses outside their major.
- 2.
For helpful discussion of this issue, I am very grateful to the University of Humanistic Studies in Utrecht, the Netherlands, which sponsored a conference on these ideas in 1999. This University is the closest thing, in Europe , to an American liberal arts college , with a five-year humanistic curriculum integrating many different subjects .
- 3.
Ralph Ellison , Invisible man. (New York: Random House, 1992).
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Nussbaum, M. (2018). Education for Citizenship in an Era of Global Connection. In: Stoller, A., Kramer, E. (eds) Contemporary Philosophical Proposals for the University. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72128-6_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72128-6_8
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