For Journal #9: Many of you have taken UNE’s Citizenship course this year. Use your experience in that course plus a selection (a particular passage or recurring theme) from Nussbaum’s book to make a case for what you think is the strongest connection between liberal education and Citizenship. Noting that Citizenship as it’s offered at UNE is a social science course, where in your humanities courses or extracurricular experiences do you see evidence to support or extend Nussbaum’s argument?

Response:

The passage from Nussbaum that I believe has the strongest connection between liberal education and Citizenship is in Chapter 6; 

 “Such educators realized early on that the most important contribution of the arts to life after school was that of strengthening the personalities emotional and imaginative resources, giving children abilities to understand both self and others that they would otherwise lack.” (Nussbaum, 101-102)

This passage stood out to me because in connection with my Citizenship courses was to understand and relate with how others are around you, instead of just your own feelings. Understanding why we should value people and their lives as well. For my Citizenship hours, even though this was a social science course, I was able to utilize my liberal arts education by using it to empathize and relate to what people in lower income families must go through every day to survive. In other humanities courses, such as my Indigenous Film + Lit class, the literature read about how Indigenous people have been treated and discriminated against, and reading actual real life accounts of that made me see not only myself but look beyond my life to understand more about theirs. Without that knowledge gained from the class I most likely would not have become as passionate as I am about obtaining equal rights for minority groups and believing that all lives are important in our society. If my education had been solely focused on the science and technology I agree with Nussbaum that those skills would not have been fully developed. This isn’t to say that there is not value in the sciences, but humanities help to build those life skills, or people skills to help you communicate and understand people after your formal education.