“…How can we educate American citizens who do take seriously the reality of lives outside America, and who think of political events accordingly? Citizens who are not simply Americans, but citizens of the entire world, committed to both compassion and justice for the millions who suffer, not only from war, but from daily preventable tragedies such as malnutrition and disease? How can we educate American citizens who think responsibly about such problems, and America’s role in forming a world community to work on their solution? And what role do our independent colleges and universities play in this process of forming imaginative and compassionate world citizens?
    …The first recommendation I would make for a culture of respectful compassion is…that an education in common human weakness and vulnerability should be a very profound part of the education of all children. Young people should learn to be tragic spectators, and to understand with increasing subtlety and responsiveness the predicaments to which human life is prone. Through stories and dramas, history, film, and the study of the global economic system, they should get the habit of decoding the suffering of another, and this decoding should deliberately lead them into lives both near and far. That ability lies at the core of the classic idea of liberal arts education, which insists on common experiences of imagination and understanding, as young people prepare for citizenship and for life.
    …This concept of a link between liberal education and a deeper and more inclusive kind of citizenship has a special urgency in our times, as we struggle with the burdens of being American in an era of American domination, asking ourselves what we owe to the rest of the world, how we can rightly take our place in international debates of many sorts…. If institutions of higher education do not build a richer network of human connections, it is likely that our dealings with one another will be mediated by the impoverished norms of market exchange and profit-making. And these impoverished norms do not help, to put it mildly, if what we want is a world of peace, where people will be able to live fruitful cooperative lives. So that is the general task of the independent college in our era, as I see it: to cultivate the humanity of students so that they are capable of relating to other human beings not through economic connections alone, but through a deeper and wider set of human understandings.
    I have argued, in Cultivating Humanity, that three capacities, above all, are essential to the cultivation of humanity in today’s world, and they are all, I believe, built into the structure of education, in differing degrees, in many of our independent colleges and universities. First is the capacity for critical examination of oneself and one’s traditions—or living what, following Socrates, we may call “the examined life”.... A liberal arts college that helps young people speak in their own voice and to respect the voices of others will have done a great deal to produce thoughtful and potentially creative world citizens.
    Citizens who cultivate their humanity need, further, my second element, an ability to see themselves as not simply citizens of some local region or group but also, and above all, as human beings bound to all other human beings by ties of recognition and concern.… This requires a great deal of knowledge that American college students rarely got in previous eras, knowledge of non-Western cultures, and also of minorities within their own, of differences of gender and sexuality.
    Citizens cannot think well on the basis of factual knowledge alone. The third ability of the citizen can be called the narrative imagination. This means the ability to think what it might be like to be in the shoes of a person different from oneself, to be an intelligent reader of that person’s story, and to understand the emotions and wishes and desires that someone so placed might have.… Courses in literature and the arts can impart this ability in many ways…. [W]e need…carefully crafted courses in the arts and humanities, which bring students into contact with issues of gender, race, ethnicity, and cross-cultural experience and understanding.… Rousseau said of such an education, “Thus from our weakness, our fragile happiness is born.” But if this happiness is to be born, our independent colleges and universities…will be, I believe, its cradles.”
    For the full text of Nussbaum's address, click here.