ABSTRACT
This signi cant insight Martha Nussbaum (2010, 2) associates with Mahatma Gandhi. It is also an insight long embraced in curriculum theory. Working subjectively-from within-toward a free and democratic nation, as Gandhi understood, is never only formalistically political. It is simultaneously psychological and spiritual. Avarice and narcissism undermine democracy as they deform the public sphere to an extension of private preoccupations. This deformation of the public sphere takes not only social but gendered forms, as Nussbaum (see 2010, 39) appreciates. Nor is it limited to the U.S., as Nussbaum spends considerable time commenting on the situation in India (see 2010, 1, 6, 19, 29). As we have seen, U.S. school deform is decidedly gendered and racialized. As social and political processes, gender and race are by de nition de-individuating, always informed by stereotypes, and reproduced by ritual. They are pervasive phenomena that invite subjective and social reconstruction.
