It's back to school and ad flyers are landing by my door, hawking deals and pens, backpacks and computers. Hilroy-ringed notebooks are selling for loss-leader prices of 15 cents a piece. Students are outfitted for school, like legions of discount mercenaries.

Philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum believes a bachelor of arts degree is still a worthy pursuit, even if it's an economically dubious pursuit. (Gene J. Puskar/Associated Press)

It's a good time for Wal-Mart, Grand and Toy and Staples. Whether it's a good time for students is a more daunting, knottier question.

The cost-benefit analysis of education is a hoary question, made ever more noticeable by hollowed-out economies and student debt.

Is a bachelor of arts degree in psychology worth it, wondered one former student I know of. Before he earned his degree from an elite university, he could find employment in catering. Now, $60,000 later, he earns his living …catering.

But he is, no doubt, a more educated and, possibly, more deft caterer. That is, if his resentment doesn't get the better of him.

Not-for-Profit U

Martha C. Nussbaum believes the caterer's bachelor of arts (and "arts" is the telling noun) is still a worthy pursuit, even if it's economically dubious.

Nussbaum is a distinguished American philosophy professor and writer, a feminist scholar who loves the classics and Aristotle. Nor does her mind rest solely in the clouds, like some Platonic snob, gazing at shadows on a cave wall. She has spent years talking and working with poor women in India, where she's also worked with the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen.

Still, she believes my forlorn caterer has benefited from his arts education. He is a better citizen, a bulwark of democracy. And she fears the constant costing of education is harming the inner, noble tradition of a humanistic education to turn out thinking citizens.

(Princeton University Press)

And she tells us, in her manifesto, Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, that education in the arts and humanities should not be run on economic models. She dislikes "for profit" schooling - education factories turning out masses of credentialized job chasers, where the only purpose of an education is to increase the gross national product.

Nussbaum sees a "silent crisis" in education. Arts and education funding is being eviscerated, she says.

She uses the old crisis trope to scare us. I've heard this crisis talk for many years (especially when I was a producer on an arts show, it was a daily practice of breast-beating).

Fortunately, nobody has strapped a suicide belt to their body and blown themselves up outside an entertainment palace performing Mamma Mia rather than a serious Canadian drama. Then the silent crisis would be a lot noisier.

An argument for the arts

Still, I must confess, I very much want to believe Martha C. Nussbaum. After all, I work at CBC's Ideas and taught humanities myself for a couple of years. I am one of the lucky few who can earn a living thinking big thoughts outside the academy.

Meanwhile, though, my acquaintance, the caterer, has quit his job and is drifting somewhere in Europe. I don't think he will be available to vote in the next election, when and if it is ever called.

Nussbaum is a wonderful figure, not merely a thinking machine, though she can think along with the best of these human devices. She's committed, smart and a terrific speaker and lecturer. And for a philosopher, she is deeply emotional, which she truly values — a feminist who had to bring up a child in a largely male, and often hostile, academic faculty environment.

She very much believes the arts and the humanities — literature, philosophy, the classics and history — expand the dimensions of sympathy. When you read a great book it expands your range of empathy. You see things from other perspectives.

It's an old argument, almost a cliché, which even philistines who never read a book or see a play will acknowledge as they dismiss it.

And when you learn to reason (Nussbaum loves the Socratic method of inquiry: debate) you learn to sift through evidence and come to balanced, fair decisions. Like many philosophers, she's in love with unpeeling arguments. She works and thinks in a mercantile culture, so she's defensive and doesn't seem to apply the same rigour to her own statements.

But she is, after all, making a polemical argument.

As I say, I very much want to believe her. And I must confess I am a little bored with her arguments. I feel like a turncoat, just saying this.

Where's the work?

It's not because I see any hypocrisy here, making arguments for the arts when graduates of all kinds can't find work. She sits on top of an academic ladder, where few will ever reach. She knows this but still feels compelled to make her moral arguments.

And it's not just because the arts in the university are guilty of shooting themselves in the foot — an argument Nussbaum doesn't deal with. Humanities are often so specialized, so obscure, so careerist that many humanities graduates (and there are a lot fewer of them these days) cannot write a clear sentence. Believe me, I have met them.

And as a clarion call for the truth, humanities professors often won't even tell their own graduate students this simple truth: There is no work for them. And if they work, they'll be ill-paid migratory workers — adjunct or seasonal professors — picking beans in the untenured fields of the academy.

Of course, grad students sort of know this but continue to hope for the best. They may be the one person who gets lucky, they think. Cultivating the imagination does wonders for fancy. Aristotle, who once tutored the conquering Alexander the Great, was a lot more hard-headed.

Sympathy here, necessity there

In the end I love the arts and humanities, but I damn well know that the cultivation of sympathy doesn't mean that expensively educated elite arts majors (turned business executives) won't close their managed workplaces and ship those jobs "offshore".

The brain is a wonderful compartment. Sympathy is over here, and necessity (and making a living in a ruthless environment) is over there, buried behind the sympathetic ear.

Nussbaum tells us the real "clash of civilization" is not between terrorists and the rest of us but inside ourselves. Of course, she easily disposes of real threats for imaginary ones, but I will give her this one, just for the argument.

Still, as a soldier in the humanities, I am modest about what a good book, argument or Ideas program can do.

And please, brilliant Martha, don't use that "crisis" talk. We journalists use it so often I think our audience is becoming inured to it.