Martha C. Nussbaum: Educational Justice and Critical Thinking

Martha Nussbaum’s prolific body of work uses classic philosophy to analyze and develop solutions of equity and justice for modern problems. Tackling issues of poverty, women’s rights, LGBTQ+ issues, democracy, animal rights, disability rights, and many more, her scope of work is too vast to cover in its entirety. The focus of this writing will be on her theories of education, in particular the just distributions of funding, access, and growth as analyzed by her capabilities theory and list of central capabilities, and the evaluation of curricular and instructive practices and goals. Nussbaum has provided normative reasoning that identifies problems and posits solutions to the issues of equity of access and funding in education. She has also proposed humanities-based pedagogy to help develop and maintain democratic practices through multiculturalism and critical thinking. Her work pulls from centuries of Western and non-Western philosophical inquiry and helps to establish what is fair, just, and desirable in a quality education.