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Tagore And Nussbaum: A Comparative Analysis

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Education is very important to human development and it always has been. Through the years, education has always been relatively the same. Many well-educated authors believe that education needs to be changed, from Rabindranath Tagore, who was alive in the early nineteen hundreds, to Martha Nussbaum who is still alive to this day. Tagore was a very important Indian literary figure,who wrote “To Teachers.” In this piece he discussed how education should be more involved with nature rather than the prison that it is now.“Education for Profit, Education for Democracy,” was written by the American philosopher, Martha Nussbaum. In this chapter Nussbaum discusses how our current education system focuses on career training and does not prepare students to be good citizens of a democracy. Tagore and Nussbaum describe two different models, that contain many similarities, of how they believe education should be.
Both Tagore and Nussbaum believe education should be changed drastically but in distinct ways. Tagore even described school, as it is now, as an unbearable prison (41). Both authors refer to the current education system as essentially a factory that simply creates working machines. Tagore’s model was centered around students learning the world around them and thinking critically. While Nussbaum advocates liberal arts and an education that …show more content…

According to Nussbaum, there are many abilities that every citizen should be capable of for a democracy to be successful. In Nussbaum’s list she says, the citizens must treat others equally, be aware and understanding of their entire country, and the rest of the world (69). Similarly to what is entailed in Nussbaum’s list, Tagore wrote that students need to learn human sympathy rather than learn prejudices. Both authors express the idea that for students to be happy and productive they must be considerate and empathetic to everyone around

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