Early in her new book, Creating Capabilities, Martha Nussbaum, University of Chicago professor of law and ethics, makes an important distinction about all countries in the world. We are not truly divided into “developed” and “developing” nations — between those that have it figured out and those that are struggling to get there. Rather, all countries are “developing.” At its core, Nussbaum writes, “every nation has a lot of room for improvement in delivering an adequate quality of life to all of its people.”
For Nussbaum, the question of how nations support the quality of life for all people needs to be better addressed. For a long time now, most nations, including ours, have been content to measure national progress through increases in Gross National Product (GNP). But the GNP of any nation, while an easy measurement, tells us little about the quality of life in that nation. Worse, it can mask serious problems such as inequalities in health care, education, and nutrition — inequalities that we should consider unconscionable. Apartheid South Africa, to take one obvious example, often registered impressive GNP figures. Currently, the United States, with its healthy GNP, has the greatest disparity in wealth in the entire northern hemisphere.
A report from the nonprofit Fiscal Policy Institute points out that, in New York City alone, the top 1 percent of wage earners took for themselves close to 44 percent of all income in the city in 2007. If New York were an independent nation, it would come in as the 15th worst among 134 countries when ranked by extreme income distribution. As writer Christopher Ketcham says, New York has become “a banana republic without the death squads.”
“At the very least,” Nussbaum writes, “users of GNP should acknowledge that other national measures are also significant…. And once we concede this point, there are compelling reasons to go much further in our thinking.” For her part, Nussbaum argues that we should measure progress through our attainment of the “human capabilities” that we consider essential for all citizens. Her list includes the basic necessities of food, shelter, and health, as well as other capabilities that allow all of us to live fulfilling, emotionally and physically safe lives.
Of course, access to a high-quality education is central to all of this.
In this issue of Independent School, the writers wrestle with the question of how we want to define “the good life” today, and how we can retool schools in support of that good life. Perhaps this has always been a central question in schools, but with the pressures of holding the world together with a population of seven billion and counting, it has been heightened to the point where we can’t be lazy about answering it.
How do we truly enable engaged thinking about real cultural needs? How do we inspire students to be leaders in a rapidly changing and increasingly egg-crated culture? Do schools have a role in helping us shift away from a consumer culture and develop an environmental ethic? What exactly are our educational imperatives today?