Not For Profit Summary

Interdisciplinarity is an essential piece of successful student engagement and mindset in liberal arts courses. The ability to visualize and connect multiple disciplines to create an argument, solution, or present novel and groundbreaking ideas, is the basis of higher education that aims to create empathetic students with the ability to think through problems critically and analytically.

Interdisciplinary studies involve the ability to interact with, combine, or connect more than one discipline of expertise. These skills become necessary between any theoretical exchange involved in the collaboration, whether that be in a lab, work, or education environment, multiple disciplines are often needed to come to an accurate and complete consensus.

General education should not only include courses that are logical for economic cultivation such as mathematics and science, but also courses on logic, global relations, and art mediums which will produce citizens that will be able to act with the knowledge and ability to behave with Socratic ideals that essential to a healthy democracy. In Not For Profit, Nussbaum claims the simulation of students “to think and argue for themselves is valuable for democracy” (48). Nussbaum provides discussion course examples from liberal arts universities and wishes to instill these critical thinking habits into other education systems around the United States. Discussion based critical thinking provides students with the ability to argue their point of view and explore the strengths and weaknesses not only of their own arguments but of their peers who may have expertise in another discipline. The smaller student population is a vital factor in interdisciplinary teachings because it will allow instructors to assess the student’s ability to receive and analyze information then create a well-developed argument, without relying on standardized tests where there is often only one correct way of processing the information