In your work you often mention how important it is for children to question their reality, think critically and imagine their role as citizens both at a national and global level. How can we embed these fundamental aspects into our education systems?

The first and most important thing is an active, Socratic pedagogy. Students must not be stuffed with facts; they must be encouraged to be active and alert participants in the learning process.  Critical thinking can be taught very early, by asking young people to give reasons for their answers: children love to ask “Why?”, and this tendency must be encouraged.  Meanwhile, the imagination should be stimulated by making the arts (dance, music, theatre, painting) a part of the daily educational process.

What is the potential role of education for peace and sustainable development in helping countries achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) over the next few decades?

Education is certainly crucial, since fear is nourished by ignorance and a lack of imagination.  And learning facts about the world is very important, since imagination and critical thinking cannot operate in a vacuum.

Much of the debate on education is confined to the narrow terrain of basic literacy, numeracy, science and technology. How do you think the tenets of critical thinking, world citizenship and imaginative understanding are reflected in the SDGs and how could they be strengthened?

Well, you really cannot achieve any of the SDGs without critical thinking and imagination, since most societies contain patterns of obtuseness in many areas that they touch upon, including environmental quality, gender, and the whole idea of justice and equality. So it seems to me that the goals demand a focus on these aspects of education, but so far as I can see this has not yet been spelled out fully.  Inclusive quality education is a nice idea, but many nations think that rote learning is a high-quality method of education, so more specificity is needed.

Overall, do you think the current draft of the SDGs reflects a truly sustainable development agenda and what, if anything, do you think should be different?

I think it’s a good draft as far as it goes, but, like most international documents, it is quite vague and aspirational, leaving more or less everything to the countries themselves to implement.  The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were somewhat more concrete, and I think that it is desirable to try to achieve more concreteness as the draft is worked on further, so that one can tell whether the goals have or have not been achieved.  Particularly in areas such as gender justice, education, and access to justice, it leaves such a large field for nations to claim that they have done what is right without really doing very much: this is an unfortunate reality with most international documents.

Socrates challenged an entrenched system of education based upon rote learning. Four hundred years later, the Roman philosopher Seneca challenged a very similar system of rote learning in a similar way, coining, in the process, the term “liberal education,” by which he meant an education that makes the person free. ~ Prof. Martha Nussbaum

In India, and throughout Asia, there is new interest in expanding access to liberal arts education, something you’ve written about extensively. In your view, how could these countries benefit from a greater emphasis on liberal arts education?

Asian nations can benefit from liberal arts education in many ways. First of all, it is clear that the liberal arts actually help economic achievement: that is why Singapore and China are reforming their education systems in this direction. Ours is a mobile economy, where one cannot do well using skills learned by rote: imagination and innovation are key.

A more important consideration is the role of liberal arts education in nourishing and sustaining democracy.  Ever since democracy began, it has been prone to some deep problems, such as deference to authority and peer pressure. We cannot hope to counteract these vices without a determined cultivation of open-minded critical thinking and individual accountability. Democracies are also prone to hierarchy and discrimination, which can be countered by an appropriate use of sympathetic imagination and by debating theories of social justice.

In what way have the debates on, and the approaches to, education changed throughout the course of your career?

If you study the history of debates on education, you soon realize that the same problems keep recurring, and that the debates have a cyclical quality.  Socrates challenged an entrenched system of education based upon rote learning.  Four hundred years later, the Roman philosopher Seneca challenged a very similar system of rote learning in a similar way, coining, in the process, the term “liberal education,” by which he meant an education that makes the person free.  Much later, the European Enlightenment offered a similar challenge to docility, and modern conceptions of progressive education soon resulted. But those conceptions are still having to battle against rote learning and “teaching to the test.” I guess this battle is likely to be ongoing, because rote teaching is easier than teaching that enlivens. Good teaching is hard.

In these basic respects, there is nothing new. But in the US the debate has changed in one way: the right wing used to love the humanities, and a way in which they differed from the left was by supporting the study of “the great books” of the Western tradition, rather than works dealing with the experiences of women, racial minorities, and non-Western people. The left won that battle, and the curriculum has become much more diverse, while of course not eliminating Shakespeare and other classic authors.  But now the right doesn’t even want the reading of the great books; they want to cut out the humanities altogether, in favor of purely technical and business-oriented education. Sometimes I feel nostalgic for my former opponents, such as Alan Bloom, because we agreed on the value of studying Plato, Rousseau, Shakespeare, and Sophocles. We disagreed about pedagogy and about inclusiveness, but Bloom really loved reading and thinking. That is not true of current leading voices on the right.

You’ve written about India in the past. How long have you been studying this country, and what made you interested in it in the first place?

All through to my Ph.D., I knew nothing about India. Indeed I was lamentably ignorant about the entire world outside of Europe and North America. That was typical of education in my day.  I got involved in co-authoring, with AmartyaSen, a paper about the internal criticism of cultures, for presentation at the WIDER Institute in 1986.  I supplied the philosophical model of internal criticism, while Amartya supplied observations about India.

But when I got to the WIDER Institute I became fascinated by the problems of development, and felt that philosophy had a really important role to play, so I created a research proposal on the quality of life, which later became the edited book of that name. But we needed field studies, and those naturally came from India, because of Amartya’s connections. In the process, I met many Indian scholars and activists and began going to India.  I just loved the country from the beginning: it has such vibrant life, such variety, such outspokenness. So I tried to learn as much as I could, and I went there regularly.

Then, in 1997, when I began work on the project that later became Women and Human Development, I decided that I wanted to focus on India, because I was dissatisfied with feminist writings that dealt with isolated examples from this or that country, without sufficient awareness of historical and regional context. So I asked Martha Chen, the development sociologist who has lived half her life in India, was born and educated in India, and speaks four Indian languages, whether she would help me learn about women’s activism, and Martha was remarkably generous, going around the country with me and taking me to many development groups.  From that point on, I pursued a process of self-education, while my fascination and sense of enjoyment with India has never abated.

Based on your background in academia and activism, do you have any tips for young people who are interested in pursuing a career dedicated to social change?

I think you need to figure out what you are good at, what you would be happy and fruitful doing. Some people are made for tough activism under difficult conditions. Others do better in an academic setting. Still others pursue a combination of the two. So knowing oneself is crucial.

I would have been a very bad activist, but I love writing. The next question concerns which field: social justice can be pursued in more or less any area – law, medicine, public health, but also philosophy, political science, economics, gender studies, and many other fields. So there again, you should ask yourself what you love doing, because if you don’t love it you will not be able to do it well over a long career. Once you have an idea of where you’re headed, then get the best education for that that you can, and work really hard.  Of course this process isn’t always so sequential: often it’s in the course of working hard that you discover what you love.

Prof. Martha Nussbaum is the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago. She is also an Associate Member in Classics, Divinity, and Political Science, a Member of the Committee on Southern Asian Studies, the Coordinator of the Center for Comparative Constitutionalism, and a board member of the Human Rights Program.Nussbaum received her M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University. She and AmartyaSen are the two Founding Presidents of the international Human Development and Capability Association, which held its 2008 annual meeting in Delhi.

Some of her most recent publications are: Why Love Matters for Justice (2013), Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach (Harvard,2011), From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation and Constitutional Law (2010), and The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India’s Future (2007)