The End of Education Read online

  But one thing may be said clearly in Hirsch’s defense. His list is no argument against diversity. It is, in fact, a celebration of diversity. Even a casual perusal of the list will reveal that it includes names, places, events, and ideas from all over the world, and implies significant artistic, intellectual, and social contributions from diverse ethnic groups. To the extent that Hirsch’s list is intended for American students, its diversity was inevitable.

  The idea of diversity is a rich narrative around which to organize the schooling of the young. But there are right reasons to do this, and wrong ones. The worst possible reason, as I have already discussed, is to use the fact of ethnic diversity to inspire a curriculum of revenge; that is, for a group that has been oppressed to try to even the score with the rest of America by singling itself out for excessive praise and attention. Although the impulse to revenge is in itself understandable, such a view will lead to weird falsifications, divisiveness, and isolation. There is a joke about this that Jews tell to each other about themselves: One day, in a small town in Russia, circa 1900, a Jew notices many people in panic, running this way and that, shouting for help. He stops another Jew and asks what is happening. He is told that there is a circus in town and the lions have escaped from their cages. “Is this good or bad for the Jews?” he asks.

  The joke is intended to mock a self-absorbed attitude that allows for no larger identification than with one’s own group. One may as well ask, Is Shakespeare good for the Jews? Are Newton’s laws good for the Jews? There are, to be sure, certain Jewish sects whose answer to these questions is, in fact, “bad for the Jews,” because secular learning of any sort is considered a distraction from Talmudic studies, and a threat to piety. But that is exactly the point. Such sects have their own schools and their own narratives, and wish to keep their young away from public education. Any education that promotes a near-exclusive concern with one’s own group may have value, but is hostile to the idea of a public education and to the growth of a common culture. Certainly, there may be occasions when it is natural and appropriate to ask, for example, Was this good or bad for blacks, or Latinos, or Koreans? But the point of the joke is that if everything is seen through the lens of ethnicity, then isolation, parochialness, and hostility, not to mention absurdity, are the inevitable result.

  There is, in addition, another reason for emphasizing diversity, one of which we may be skeptical. I refer to the psychological argument that claims the self-esteem of some students may be raised by focusing their attention on the accomplishments of those of their own kind, especially if the teachers are of their own kind. I cannot say if this is so or not, but it needs to be pointed out that while a diminished self-esteem is no small matter, one of the main purposes of public education—it is at the core of a common culture—is the idea that students must esteem something other than self. This is a point Cornel West has stressed in addressing both whites and blacks. For example, after reviewing the pernicious effects of race consciousness, which include poverty and paranoia, he ends his book Race Matters by saying, “We simply cannot enter the twenty-first century at each other’s throats.… We are at a crucial crossroads in the history of this nation—and we either hang together by combating these forces that divide and degrade us or we hang separately.”3 I take this to be a heartfelt plea for the necessity of providing ourselves and especially our young with a comprehensive narrative that makes a constructive and unifying use of diversity.

  Fortunately, there is such a narrative. It has both a theoretical and a practical component, which gives it special force. The theoretical component comes to us from science, expressed rather abstractly in the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The law tells us that although matter can be neither created nor destroyed (the First Law), it tends toward becoming useless. The name given to this tendency is entropy, which means that everything in the universe moves inexorably toward sameness, and when matter reaches a state in which there is no differentiation, there is no employable energy. This would be a rather relentlessly depressing notion if not for the fact that there are “negentropic” forces in the universe, energies that retard sameness and keep things moving, organized, and (from a human point of view) useful. Every time we clean our homes, or our streets, or use information to solve a problem, or make a schedule, we are combating entropy, using intelligence and energy to overcome (that is, postpone) the inevitable decay of organization.

  The physicists describe all of this in mathematical codes and do not always appreciate the ways in which the rest of us employ their ideas of entropy and negentropy. Still, the universe is as much our business as it is theirs, and if there are lessons to be learned from the universe, attention must be paid. The lesson here is that sameness is the enemy of vitality and creativity. From a practical point of view, we can see this in every field of human activity. Stagnation occurs when nothing new and different comes from outside the system. The English language is a superb example of this point; so is Latin. English is a relatively young language, not much more than six hundred years old (assuming Chaucer to be our first major English author). It began its journey as a Teutonic tongue, changed itself by admitting the French language, then Italian, and then welcomed new words and forms from wherever its speakers moved around the globe. T. S. Eliot once remarked that English is the best language for a poet to use, since it contains, for the poet’s choice, the rhythms of many languages. This is an arguable point, perhaps. But it is not arguable that English is rapidly becoming the global language, has more words in it, by far, than any other language, and exerts its influence everywhere (much to the chagrin of the French, who, failing to grasp the importance of diversity, are using their energies to prevent changes in their language). English, in a word, is the most diverse language on earth, and because of that, its vitality and creativity are assured. Latin, on the other hand, is dead. It is dead because it is no longer open to change, especially change from outside itself. Those who speak and write it, speak and write it as has been done for centuries. Other languages drew upon Latin for strength, picked on its flesh and bones, created themselves from its nourishment. But Latin was not nourished in return, which is why its usefulness is so limited.

  Whenever a language or an art form becomes fixed in time and impermeable, drawing only on its own resources, it is punished by entropy. Whenever difference is allowed, the result is growth and strength. There is no art form flourishing today, or that has flourished in the past, that has not done so on the wings of diversity—American musicians borrowing from African rhythms, South American architects employing Scandinavian ideas, German painters finding inspiration in Egyptian art, French filmmakers influenced by Japanese techniques.

  We even find the law of diversity operating in the genetic information we pass on when procreating. In cases where marriage is confined to those of the same family—where people, as it were, clone themselves—entropic defects are more likely to occur than when differences are admitted. We may go so far as to say that sameness is the enemy not only of vitality but of excellence, for where there are few or no differences—in genetic structure, in language, in art—it is not possible to develop robust standards of excellence. I am aware that there are those who have come to the opposite conclusion. They argue that diversity in human affairs makes it impossible to have a standard of anything because there are too many points of view, too many different traditions, too many purposes; thus, diversity, they conclude, makes relativists of us all.

  At a theoretical level, we may have an interesting argument here. But from a practical point of view, we can see how diversity works to provide an enriched sense of excellence. During the weeks of the latest World Cup tournament, nations from every part of the world were participating—Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Cameroon, Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Italy, and many others. Each team brought a special tradition and a unique style to the games. The Germans were methodical and efficient, the Brazilians flamboyant, the Italians emotional. They were all good but different, and they
all knew what “good” means. The Americans didn’t have much of a style and even less of a tradition, and though they played bravely, they were eliminated fairly early. I am not aware of their complaining that they lost because they have a different standard of “good.” (For example, the team that scores the fewest goals wins.) Indeed, such a claim would be demeaning to them, as it would be demeaning to Japanese or Peruvian artists to say that their works are so different from those of other traditions that no judgments can be made of them. Their works, of course, are different from others, but what that means is not that excellence becomes meaningless but that the rest of the world expands and enriches its ideas of “good.” At the same time, because we are all human, our expanded ideas of “good” are apt to be comprehensible and recognizable. In painting, we look for delicacy, simplicity, feeling, craftsmanship, originality, symmetry, all of which are aspirations of painters all over the world, as character, insight, believability, and emotion are aspirations of playwrights. No one faults Arthur Miller for failing to use iambic pentameter in writing Death of a Salesman. But what makes his play “good” is not so different from what makes Macbeth “good.” Diversity does not mean the disintegration of standards, is not an argument against standards, does not lead to a chaotic, irresponsible relativism. It is an argument for the growth and malleability of standards, a growth that takes place across time and space and that is given form by differences of gender, religion, and all the other categories of humanity.

  Thus, the story of how language, art, politics, science, and most expressions of human activity have grown, been vitalized and enriched through the intermingling of different ideas is one way to organize learning and to provide the young with a sense of pride in being human. In this story, we do not read Gabriel García Márquez to make Hispanic students happy, but because of the excellence of his novels. That Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay were women is not irrelevant, but we ask students to know their work because their poems are good, not to strike a blow for feminism. We read Whitman and Langston Hughes for the same reason, not because the former was a homosexual and the latter African-American. Do we learn about Einstein because he was Jewish? Marie Curie because she was Polish? Aristotle because he was Greek? Confucius because he was Chinese? Cervantes because he was handicapped? Do we listen to the music of Grieg because he was a short Norwegian, or Beethoven because he was a deaf German? In the story of diversity, we do not learn of these people to advance a political agenda or to raise the level of students’ self-esteem. We learn about these people for two reasons: because they demonstrate how the vitality and creativity of humanity depend on diversity, and because they have set the standards to which civilized people adhere. The law of diversity thus makes intelligent humans of us all.

  The Word Weavers/The World Makers

  I once had the good fortune to attend a lecture by Elizabeth Eisenstein, author of a monumental two-volume study of the printing press as an agent of cultural change. During the question period, she was asked how she had come by her interest in the subject. She appeared to welcome the question. She told the audience that when she was a sixth-grade student, her teacher remarked that the invention of the printing press with movable type represented one of the great advances of human civilization, almost the equal of the invention of speech itself. Young Elizabeth took this remark to heart. But then a strange thing happened—in a word, nothing. The subject was never mentioned again. It did not come up in junior high school, senior high school, or college. Fortunately, it remained in her mind during all that time, and the result was that she eventually devoted herself to a detailed explication of what her sixth-grade teacher must have meant.

  That such a thing could happen is at once startling and yet unsurprising. School is notorious for neglecting to mention, let alone study, some of the more important events in human history. In fact, something quite similar to what happened to Elizabeth Eisenstein happened to me when I was in Mrs. Soybel’s fifth-grade class. In that class, considerable attention was paid to public speaking, especially pronunciation, since the school was in Brooklyn, New York, and it was generally believed (and still is) that people from Brooklyn do not pronounce their words correctly. One of my classmates, Gerald Melnikoff, was whispering and mumbling his weekly oral presentation and thereby aroused Mrs. Soybel’s pedagogical wrath. She told Gerald that he was speaking as if he had marbles in his mouth; then, addressing the rest of the class, she told us that language was God’s greatest gift to humanity. Our ability to speak, she said, was what made us human, and this we must never forget. I took the remark seriously. (I recall that for some reason I was even frightened by it.) But as with Elizabeth Eisenstein and the printing press, the matter was never mentioned again, certainly not by Mrs. Soybel. She gave us excellent lessons in spelling, grammar, and writing and taught us to remove the marbles from our mouths when we spoke. But the role of language in making us human disappeared. I didn’t hold this against her—after all, she did mention the idea—but I waited for the subject to come up again in junior high, senior high, and college. I waited in vain. Whenever language was discussed, it was done so within the context of its being a useful tool—definitely not as a gift from God, and not even as a tool that makes us human.

  Of course, one does not need to call on God, either literally or metaphorically, to tell the story of language and humanness, of human beings as the word weavers of the planet. This does not mean the story is without mystery. No one knows, for example, when we began to speak. Was it 50,000 years ago, or 100,000 years, or longer? No one even knows why we began to speak. The usual answer is that speech arose exclusively as a functional mechanism; that is, without speech, the species could not have survived. Someone absolutely had to learn to say, “The tiger is hiding behind the tree!” But Susanne Langer thought otherwise.4 Something happened to our brains, she believed, that created in us a need to transform the world through symbols. Perhaps to give us something interesting to do in our spare time, or for the sheer aesthetic joy of it. We became symbol makers, not to spare us from the teeth of the tiger but for some other reason, which remains mysterious. Of course, we eventually discovered how speech could assist us in survival, but that was not the reason we began to speak to ourselves and to others. I place speaking to ourselves first because we surely spend more time, use more words, are affected more deeply in talking to ourselves than to others. Each of us is, to borrow a phrase from Wendell Johnson, “our own most enchanted listener.” Perhaps Langer was right. Why do we talk to ourselves? Does it enhance our survival? What is so important that we are impelled to talk to ourselves so incessantly—indeed, not only when awake but when sleeping as well?

  One answer that can provide schooling with a profound organizing principle is that we use language to create the world—which is to say, language is not only a vehicle of thought; it is, as Wittgenstein said, also the driver. We go where it leads. We see the world as it permits us to see it. There is, to be sure, a world of “not-words.” But, unlike all the other creatures on the planet, we have access to it only through the world of words, which we ourselves have created and continue to create. Language allows us to name things, but, more than that, it also suggests what feelings we are obliged to associate with the things we name. Even more, language controls what things shall be named, what things we ought to pay attention to. Language even tells us what things are things. In English, “lightning” is a thing, and so is a “wave,” and an “explosion.” Even ideas are made to appear as things. English makes us believe, for example, that “time” is moving in a straight line from “yesterday” to “today” to “tomorrow.” If we ask ourselves, Where did yesterday go? Where is tomorrow waiting?, we may get a sense of how much these words are ideas more than things and of how much the world as we imagine it is a product of how we describe it. There is no escaping the fact that when we form a sentence, we are creating a world. We are organizing it, making it pliable, understandable, useful. In the beginning, there was the word,
and in the end, as well. Is anyone in our schools taking this seriously?

  Perhaps Mrs. Soybel did, but thought we were too young to grasp the idea. If so, she was mistaken. There are many ways to teach the young the connections between language and world-making. But she made still another mistake, one common enough, by giving her students the impression that the important thing about language is to know the difference between “he don’t” and “he doesn’t,” to spell “recommendation” correctly, and never to pronounce the name of our city, “Noo Yawk.” Some might say that if she taught those lessons well, she did enough. But what, then, of the junior high teachers, the high school teachers, the college teachers? By failing to reveal the story of human beings as world-makers through language, they miss several profound opportunities. They fail, for example, to convey the idea that there is an inescapable moral dimension to how we use language. We are instructed in the Bible never to take the name of the Lord in vain. What other names must we never take in vain? And why? A fair answer is that language distinguishes between the sacred and the profane, and thereby provides organization to our moral sense. The profligate use of language is not merely a social offense but a threat to the ways in which we have constructed our notions of good and bad, permissible and impermissible. To use language to defend the indefensible (as George Orwell claimed some of us habitually do), to use language to transform certain human beings into nonpersons, to use language to lie and to blur distinctions, to say more than you know or can know, to take the name of the truth in vain—these are offenses against a moral order, and they can, incidentally, be committed with excellent pronunciation or with impeccable grammar and spelling. Our engagement with language almost always has a moral dimension, a point that has been emphasized by every great philosopher from Confucius and Socrates to Bertrand Russell and John Dewey. How is it possible that a teacher, at any level, could miss it?