Martha Nussbaum, professor of law and ethics at the University of Chicago, has an essay in the April 30^th issue of the TLS, on the threat to liberal education represented by cuts to the humanities budgets of universities. (The TLS and the LRB have published several essays recently on the criteria for public endowment in England, whichshow scant respect for programs in the humanities.) Here are paragraphs from the beginning and the end of her essay, a preview of her forthcoming book, Not For Profit: Why democracy needs the humanities.

Radical changes are occurring in what democratic societies teach the young, and these changes have not been well thought through. Thirsty for national profit, nations, and their systems of education, are heedlessly discarding skills that are needed to keep democracies alive. If this trend continues, nations all over the world will soon be producing generations of useful, docile, technically trained machines, rather than complete citizens who can think for themselves, criticize tradition, and understand the significance of another person's sufferings and achievements.What are these radical changes? The humanities and the arts are being cut away, in both primary/secondary and college/university education, in virtually every nation of the world. Seen by policymakers as useless frills, at a time when nations must discard all useless things in order to stay competitive in the global market, they are rapidly losing their place in curricula, and also in the minds and hearts of parents and children. What we might call the humanistic aspects of science and social science - the imaginative, creative aspect, and the aspect of rigorous critical thought - are also losing ground as nations prefer to pursue short-term profit by the cultivation of the useful and highly applied skills suited to profit-making....During the era in which people began to demand democratic self-governance, education all over the world was remodelled to produce the sort of student who could function well in this demanding form of government: not a cultivated gentleman, stuffed with the wisdom of the ages, but an active, critical, reflective, and empathetic member of a community of equals, capable of exchanging ideas on a basis of respect and understanding with people from many different backgrounds. Today we still maintain that we like democracy and self-governance, and we also think that we like freedom of speech, respect for difference, and understanding of others. We give these values lip service, but we think far too little about what we need to do in order to transmit them to the next generation and ensure their survival.