The End of Education Read online

  Neil Postman

  The End of Education

  Neil Postman was University Professor and Chair of the Department of Culture and Communication at New York University. Among his twenty books are studies of childhood (The Disappearance of Childhood), public discourse (Amusing Ourselves to Death), education (Teaching as a Subversive Activity), and the impact of technology (Technopoly). He died in 2003.

  Also by Neil Postman

  Building a Bridge to the 18th Century

  Technopoly

  Conscientious Objections

  Teaching as a Subversive Activity

  (with Charles Weingartner)

  Crazy Talk, Stupid Talk

  Teaching as a Conserving Activity

  The Disappearance of Childhood

  Amusing Ourselves to Death

  FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, NOVEMBER 1996

  Copyright © 1995 by Neil Postman

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1995.

  The Library of Congress has catalogued the Knopf edition as follows:

  Postman, Neil.

  The end of education: redefining the value of school / Neil

  Postman.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-79720-9

  1. Education—United States. 2. Educational change—United States. 3. Education—United States—Aims and objectives. I.

  Title.

  LA217.2.P67 1995

  370′.973–dc20 94-46605

  Random House Web address:

  http://www.randomhouse.com/

  v3.1

  To Alyssa and Claire

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Preface

  PART I

  1. The Necessity of Gods

  2. Some Gods That Fail

  3. Some New Gods That Fail

  4. Gods That May Serve

  PART II

  5. The Spaceship Earth

  6. The Fallen Angel

  7. The American Experiment

  8. The Law of Diversity

  9. The Word Weavers/The World Makers

  Epilogue

  Notes

  Preface

  The last book I wrote entirely on the subject of education was published in 1979. I return to the subject now, not because the education world has suffered from my absence, but because I have. I began my career as an elementary school teacher and have not for a single moment abandoned the idea that many of our most vexing and painful social problems could be ameliorated if we knew how to school our young. You may conclude from this that I am a romantic, but not, I think, a fool. I know that education is not the same thing as schooling, and that, in fact, not much of our education takes place in school. Schooling may be a subversive or a conserving activity, but it is certainly a circumscribed one. It has a late beginning and an early end and in between it pauses for summer vacations and holidays, and generously excuses us when we are ill. To the young, schooling seems relentless, but we know it is not. What is relentless is our education, which, for good or ill, gives us no rest. That is why poverty is a great educator. Having no boundaries and refusing to be ignored, it mostly teaches hopelessness. But not always. Politics is also a great educator. Mostly it teaches, I am afraid, cynicism. But not always. Television is a great educator as well. Mostly it teaches consumerism. But not always.

  It is the “not always” that keeps the romantic spirit alive in those who write about schooling. The faith is that despite some of the more debilitating teachings of culture itself, something can be done in school that will alter the lenses through which one sees the world; which is to say, that non-trivial schooling can provide a point of view from which what is can be seen clearly, what was as a living present, and what will be as filled with possibility.

  What this means is that at its best, schooling can be about how to make a life, which is quite different from how to make a living. Such an enterprise is not easy to pursue, since our politicians rarely speak of it, our technology is indifferent to it, and our commerce despises it. Nonetheless, it is the weightiest and most important thing to write about.

  Not everyone agrees, of course. In tracking what people have to say about schooling, I notice that most of the conversation is about means, rarely about ends. Should we privatize our schools? Should we have national standards of assessment? How should we use computers? What use can we make of television? How shall we teach reading? And so on. Some of these questions are interesting and some are not. But what they have in common is that they evade the issue of what schools are for. It is as if we are a nation of technicians, consumed by our expertise in how something should be done, afraid or incapable of thinking about why.

  I write this book in the hope of altering, a little bit, the definition of the “school problem”—from means to ends. “End,” of course, has at least two important meanings: “purpose” and “finish.” Either meaning may apply to the future of schools, depending on whether or not there ensues a serious dialogue about purpose. By giving the book its ambiguous title, I mean to suggest that without a transcendent and honorable purpose schooling must reach its finish, and the sooner we are done with it, the better. With such a purpose, schooling becomes the central institution through which the young may find reasons for continuing to educate themselves.

  PART I

  1 • The Necessity of Gods

  In considering how to conduct the schooling of our young, adults have two problems to solve. One is an engineering problem; the other, a metaphysical one. The engineering problem, as all such problems are, is essentially technical. It is the problem of the means by which the young will become learned. It addresses the issues of where and when things will be done, and, of course, how learning is supposed to occur. The problem is not a simple one, and any self-respecting book on schooling must offer some solutions to it.

  But it is important to keep in mind that the engineering of learning is very often puffed up, assigned an importance it does not deserve. As an old saying goes, There are one and twenty ways to sing tribal lays, and all of them are correct. So it is with learning. There is no one who can say that this or that is the best way to know things, to feel things, to see things, to remember things, to apply things, to connect things and that no other will do as well. In fact, to make such a claim is to trivialize learning, to reduce it to a mechanical skill.

  Of course, there are many learnings that are little else but a mechanical skill, and in such cases, there well may be a best way. But to become a different person because of something you have learned—to appropriate an insight, a concept, a vision, so that your world is altered—that is a different matter. For that to happen, you need a reason. And this is the metaphysical problem I speak of.

  A reason, as I use the word here, is different from a motivation. Within the context of schooling, motivation refers to a temporary psychic event in which curiosity is aroused and attention is focused. I do not mean to disparage it. But it must not be confused with a reason for being in a classroom, for listening to a teacher, for taking an examination, for doing homework, for putting up with school even if you are not motivated.

  This kind of reason is somewhat abstract, not always present in one’s consciousness, not at all easy to describe. And yet for all that, without it schooling does not work. For school to make sense, the young, their parents, and thei
r teachers must have a god to serve, or, even better, several gods. If they have none, school is pointless. Nietzsche’s famous aphorism is relevant here: “He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how.” This applies as much to learning as to living.

  To put it simply, there is no surer way to bring an end to schooling than for it to have no end.

  By a god to serve, I do not necessarily mean the God, who is supposed to have created the world and whose moral injunctions as presented in sacred texts have given countless people a reason for living and, more to the point, a reason for learning. In the Western world, beginning in the thirteenth century and for five hundred years afterward, that God was sufficient justification for the founding of institutions of learning, from grammar schools, where children were taught to read the Bible, to great universities, where men were trained to be ministers of God. Even today, there are some schools in the West, and most in the Islamic world, whose central purpose is to serve and celebrate the glory of God. Wherever this is the case, there is no school problem, and certainly no school crisis. There may be some disputes over what subjects best promote piety, obedience, and faith; there may be students who are skeptical, even teachers who are nonbelievers. But at the core of such schools, there is a transcendent, spiritual idea that gives purpose and clarity to learning. Even the skeptics and nonbelievers know why they are there, what they are supposed to be learning, and why they are resistant to it. Some also know why they should leave.

  A few years ago, I had a sad conversation with a brilliant and popular philosophy professor at Principia College, in Elsah, Illinois. Principia was and, as far as I know, still is, the only institution of higher learning of the Christian Science Church. He told me that his years at Principia had been the happiest he had known, but that he had taken a job at a secular university because he no longer believed in the tenets of Christian Science. The courses he taught, I should say, did not include discussions of, let alone instruction in, those tenets. No one other than himself need ever have known of his disaffection. But he no longer believed in the purpose of the institution, and every course, irrespective of its content, was infused with the spirit of a narrative he could not accept. So he left. I have always hoped that this forlorn professor eventually found another god to serve, another narrative to give meaning to his teaching.

  With some reservations but mostly with conviction, I use the word narrative as a synonym for god, with a small g. I know it is risky to do so, not only because the word god, having an aura of sacredness, is not to be used lightly, but also because it calls to mind a fixed figure or image. But it is the purpose of such figures or images to direct one’s mind to an idea and, more to my point, to a story—not any kind of story, but one that tells of origins and envisions a future, a story that constructs ideals, prescribes rules of conduct, provides a source of authority, and, above all, gives a sense of continuity and purpose. A god, in the sense I am using the word, is the name of a great narrative, one that has sufficient credibility, complexity, and symbolic power to enable one to organize one’s life around it. I use the word in the same sense, for example, as did Arthur Koestler in calling his book about communism’s deceptions and disappointments The God That Failed. His intention was to show that communism was not merely an experiment in government or social life, and still less an economic theory, but a comprehensive narrative about what the world is like, how things got to be the way they are, and what lies ahead. He also wished to show that for all of communism’s contempt for the “irrational” narratives of traditional religions, it relied nonetheless on faith and dogma. It certainly had its own conception of blasphemy and heresy, and practiced a grotesque and brutal method of excommunication.

  By giving this example, I do not mean to suggest that gods must fail—far from it, although, of course, there are many that do. My own life has been contemporaneous with the emergence of three catastrophic narratives: the gods of communism, fascism, and Nazism, each of which held out the promise of heaven but led only to hell. As you will see if you proceed to succeeding chapters, there are several other gods that have captured the hearts and minds of people but that, I believe, are inadequate to provide a profound reason either for living or for learning. And if you proceed even further, you will see that I believe there are life- and learning-enhancing narratives that are available if only we would give them sufficient attention: These are gods that serve, as well as gods to serve.

  Nonetheless, my intention here is neither to bury nor to praise any gods, but to claim that we cannot do without them, that whatever else we may call ourselves, we are the god-making species. Our genius lies in our capacity to make meaning through the creation of narratives that give point to our labors, exalt our history, elucidate the present, and give direction to our future. To do their work, such narratives do not have to be “true” in a scientific sense. There are many enduring narratives whose details include things that are false to observable fact. The purpose of a narrative is to give meaning to the world, not to describe it scientifically. The measure of a narrative’s “truth” or “falsity” is in its consequences: Does it provide people with a sense of personal identity, a sense of a community life, a basis for moral conduct, explanations of that which cannot be known?

  You will recognize that this kind of storytelling goes by many different names. Joseph Campbell and Rollo May refer to it as “myth.” Freud, who understood better than anyone the creative source and psychic need of such tales, nonetheless called them “illusions.” One may even say, without much of a stretch, that Marx had something of this in mind in using the word ideology. But it is not my point to differentiate with scholarly nuance the subtle variations among these terms. The point is that, call them what you will, we are unceasing in creating histories and futures for ourselves through the medium of narrative. Without a narrative, life has no meaning. Without meaning, learning has no purpose. Without a purpose, schools are houses of detention, not attention. This is what my book is about.

  The most comprehensive narratives are, of course, found in such texts as the Old Testament, the New Testament, the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita. But beginning in the sixteenth century, at least in the West, there began to emerge narratives of a different sort, although with power enough to serve as alternate gods. Among the most enduring is the great narrative known as “inductive science.” It is worth noting of this god that its first storytellers—Descartes, Bacon, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton, for example—did not think of their story as a replacement for the great Judeo-Christian narrative, but as an extension of it. In fact, the point has been made more than once that the great age of science was based on a belief in a God who was himself a scientist and technician, and who would therefore approve of a civilization committed to such an enterprise. “For all we know,” Eric Hoffer wrote, “one of the reasons that other civilizations, with all their ingenuity and skill, did not develop a machine age is that they lacked a God whom they could readily turn into an all-powerful engineer. For has not the mighty Jehovah performed from the beginning of time the feats that our machine age is even now aspiring to achieve?”1 Galileo, Kepler, and Newton would largely agree, conceiving of God, as they did, as a great clock-maker and mathematician. In any case, there is no doubt that from the beginning of the age of science, its creators believed in the great narrative of Jehovah. Their discoveries were made in the service of the Judeo-Christian God. And could they know of Stephen Hawking’s remark that the research permitted by the (now abandoned) supercollider would give insight into the mind of God, they would be pleased. The difference between them and Hawking is that Hawking, as an avowed atheist, does not believe what he said. To him, the story of Jehovah’s wonders is only a dead metaphor, perhaps a tale told by an idiot. Apparently, the great story of science, all by itself, is enough for Hawking, as it has been for many others. It is a story that exalts human reason, places criticism over faith, disdains revelation as a source of knowledge, and, to put a spiritual cast upon it, postulates (as Jacob
Bronowski has done) that our purpose on Earth is to discover reliable knowledge. Of course, the great narrative of science shares with the great religious narratives the idea that there is order to the universe, which is a fundamental assumption of all important narratives.

  In fact, science even has a version (of sorts) of the concept of the “mind of God.” As Bertrand Russell once put it, if there is a God, it is a differential equation. Kepler, in particular, would probably have liked that way of thinking about the matter; and perhaps that, after all, is what Stephen Hawking meant. In any case, the great strength of the science-god is, of course, that it works—far better than supplication, far better than even Francis Bacon could have imagined. Its theories are demonstrable and cumulative; its errors, correctable; its results, practical. The science-god sends people to the moon, inoculates people against disease, transports images through vast spaces so that they can be seen in our living rooms. It is a mighty god and, like more ancient ones, gives people a measure of control over their lives, which is one of the reasons why gods are invented in the first place. Some say the science-god gives more control and more power than any other god before it.

  Nonetheless, like all gods, it is imperfect. Its story of our origins and of our end is, to say the least, unsatisfactory. To the question, How did it all begin?, science answers, Probably by an accident. To the question, How will it all end?, science answers, Probably by an accident. And to many people, the accidental life is not worth living. Moreover, regarding the question, What moral instruction do you give us?, the science-god maintains a tight-lipped silence. It places itself at the service of both the beneficent and the cruel, and its grand moral impartiality, if not indifference, has made it welcome the world over. More precisely, it is its offspring that is so welcomed. For like another god, the God who produced a Son and a Holy Ghost, the science-god has spawned another—the great narrative of technology. This is a wondrous and energetic story, which, with greater clarity than its father, offers us a vision of paradise. Whereas the science-god speaks to us of both understanding and power, the technology-god speaks only of power. It demolishes the assertion of the Christian God that heaven is only a posthumous reward. It offers convenience, efficiency, and prosperity here and now; and it offers its benefits to all, the rich as well as the poor, as does the Christian God. But it goes much further. For it does not merely give comfort to the poor; it promises that through devotion to it the poor will become rich. Its record of achievement—there can be no doubt—has been formidable, in part because it is a demanding god, and is strictly monotheistic. Its first commandment is a familiar one: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” This means that those who follow its path must shape their needs and aspirations to the possibilities of technology. No other god can be permitted to impede, slow down, frustrate, or, least of all, oppose the sovereignty of technology. Why this is necessary is explained with fierce clarity in the second and third commandments. “We are the Technological Species,” says the second, “and therein lies our genius.” “Our destiny,” says the third, “is to replace ourselves with machines, which means that technological ingenuity and human progress are one and the same.”