Value of Humanities education

The relevance of educating our children in the humanities is fast receding, giving way to undue emphasis on economic literacy and business education. Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago Martha N Nussbaum, in her book ‘Not for Profit - Why Democracy Needs the Humanities’ (Princeton University Press: 2010) states: The humanities and arts play a central role in the history of democracy and yet today many parents are ashamed of children who study literature or art.

Martha N Nussbaum	Rabindranath Tagore
Karl Popper	Peter Drucker

Literature and philosophy have changed the world, but parents all over the world are more likely to fret if their children are financially illiterate than if their training in the humanities is deficient.
These words echo the sage observation in 1917 of Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore who said: History has come to a stage when the moral man is more and more giving way, almost without knowing it, to make room for the commercial man, the man of limited purpose.
This process, aided by the wonderful progress in science, is assuming gigantic proportion and power, causing the upset of mans moral balance, obscuring his human side under the shadow of soulless organization.

Modern society

There are two issues in determining the value of these statements: the first is, what is the contribution of the humanities to modern society; and the second is, how do the humanities affect a modern democracy. In this context, a modern democracy has to be defined.
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