The End of Education

by Neil Postman

  Sad to say, some of America’s most important political leaders believe that one who learns how to be useful economically will have learned how to be an educated person. A headline, early in 1994, announced: CLINTON TELLS EDUCATORS YOUTHS ARE NOT GETTING PRACTICAL SKILLS FOR JOBS.6 The story quotes the President as saying, “In the nineteenth century, at most, young Americans needed a high school education to make their way.… It was good enough if they could read well and understand basic numbers. In the twenty-first century, our people will have to keep learning all their lives.” Of course, in the nineteenth century it was also desirable for people to continue learning all their lives. In fact, there was far more technological change in the nineteenth century than is likely to occur in the twenty-first. The nineteenth century gave us telegraphy, photography, the rotary press, the telephone, the typewriter, the phonograph, the transatlantic cable, the electric light, movies, the locomotive, rockets, the steamboat, the X ray, the revolver, the computer, and the stethoscope, not to mention canned food, the penny press, the modern magazine, the advertising agency, the modern bureaucracy, and, for God’s sake, even the safety pin. But let us suppose the President did not learn about this in Arkansas schools and was advancing the standard-brand argument that with continuing, rapid technological change the job market will require people who are adaptable to change, who can learn new concepts easily, and who can discard unusable assumptions without trauma. This is a very difficult task for the schools, and one that John Dewey held to be of the utmost importance. The President’s solution is to provide the young with more practical vocational skills, which appears to be, not surprisingly, the same solution offered to California educators by Labor Secretary Robert Reich and Education Secretary Richard Riley.7 Of course, this is exactly the wrong solution, since the making of adaptable, curious, open, questioning people has nothing to do with vocational training and everything to do with humanistic and scientific studies. The President’s speech and the advice of his colleagues demonstrate that they themselves have difficulty discarding outmoded assumptions, including their belief that if something is not working—for example, training people for jobs—then what is needed is more of it.

  Yet it must be admitted that the President and all his men were cheered, and cheered by educators, for placing the god of Economic Utility before all others. One may well wonder, then, why this god has so much strength, why the preparation for making a living, which is well served by any decent education, should be assigned a metaphysical position of such high station. I believe the reason is that the god of Economic Utility is coupled with another god, one with a smiling face and one that provides an answer to the question, If I get a good job, then what?

  I refer here to the god of Consumership, whose basic moral axiom is expressed in the slogan “Whoever dies with the most toys, wins”—that is to say, goodness inheres in those who buy things; evil in those who do not. The similarity between this god and the god of Economic Utility is obvious, but with this difference: The latter postulates that you are what you do for a living; the former that you are what you accumulate.

  Devotion to the god of Consumership serves easily as the metaphysical basis of schooling because it is urged on the young early in their lives, long before they get to school—in fact, as soon as they are exposed to the powerful teachings of the advertising industry. In America, for example, the preeminent advertising medium is television, and television viewing usually begins at age eighteen months, getting serious by age three. This is the age at which children begin to ask for products they see advertised on television and sing the jingles accompanying them. Between the ages of three and eighteen, the average American youngster will see about 500,000 television commercials, which means that the television commercial is the single most substantial source of values to which the young are exposed. On the face of it, the proposition that life is made worthwhile by buying things would not seem to be an especially engrossing message, but two things make it otherwise. The first is that the god of Consumership is intimately connected with still another great narrative, the god of Technology. The second is that the television messages sent about consumership and technology come largely in the form of religious parables. This second point is not discussed as much as it ought to be, and I pause here to speak of it to emphasize the fact that the god of Consumership has a theology that cannot be taken lightly.

  Of course, not every commercial has religious content. Just as in church the pastor will sometimes call the congregation’s attention to nonecclesiastical matters, so there are television commercials that are entirely secular. Someone has something to sell; you are told what it is, where it can be obtained, and what it costs. Though these ads may be shrill and offensive, no doctrine is advanced and no theology invoked. But the majority of important television commercials take the form of religious parables organized around a coherent theology. Like all religious parables, these commercials put forward a concept of sin, intimations of the way to redemption, and a vision of Heaven. This will be obvious to those who have taken to heart the Parable of the Person with Rotten Breath, the Parable of the Stupid Investor, the Parable of the Lost Traveler’s Checks, the Parable of the Man Who Runs Through Airports, or most of the hundreds of others that are part of our youth’s religious education. In these parables, the root cause of evil is technological innocence, a failure to know the particulars of the beneficent accomplishments of industrial progress. This is the primary source of unhappiness, humiliation, and discord in life. Technological innocence refers not only to ignorance of detergents, drugs, sanitary napkins, cars, salves, and foodstuffs but also to ignorance of technical mechanisms such as banks and transportation systems. In a typical parable, you (that is, the surrogate “you”) may come upon your neighbors while on vacation (always a sign of danger in television commercials) and discover that they have invested their money in a certain bank of whose special high interest rates you have been unaware. This is, of course, a moral disaster, as becomes clear when you learn that your neighbors’ vacation will last for three weeks; yours must last only one.

  The path to redemption requires that one believe the advice given in the commercial and then act upon it. Those who do both, as shown in the parable, will have found their way to Heaven, more or less in a state of ecstasy. It is probably unnecessary to say that all traditional religions reject the god of Consumership, claiming that devotion to it is a false spirituality, if not outright blasphemy. One would think that our schools would also be in explicit opposition to such a god, since education is supposed to free the young from the bondage of crude materialism. But, in fact, many of our schools, especially in recent times, have allied themselves with this god in a most emphatic way. I refer, for example, to the fact that approximately ten thousand schools have accepted the offer made by Christopher Whittle to include, daily, two minutes of commercial messages in the curriculum—the first time, to my knowledge, that an advertiser has employed the power of the state to force anyone to watch commercials. In exchange for this opportunity, Whittle offers his own ten-minute version of the news of the day and free, expensive television equipment, including a satellite dish.

  That schools would accept such an arrangement reveals two things simultaneously. The first, of course, is that there is widespread support for the god of Consumership. That is to say, the schools see no contradiction between anything they might wish the students to learn and what commercials wish them to learn. The second is that there is equally wide support for the god of Technology, to which I will turn in the following chapter. Here, it is necessary to say that no reasonable argument can be made against educating the young to be consumers or to think about the kinds of employment that might interest them. But when these are elevated to the status of a metaphysical imperative, we are being told that we have reached the end of our wits—even worse, the limit of our wisdom.

  3 • Some New Gods That Fail

  If one has a trusting relationship with one’s students (let us say gradu
ate students) and the subject under discussion is the same as the subject of this book, it is not altogether gauche to ask them if they believe in God (with a capital G). I have done this three or four times, and most students say they do. Their answer is preliminary to the next question: If someone you love were desperately ill and you had to choose between praying to God for his or her recovery or administering an antibiotic (as prescribed by a competent physician), which would you choose?

  Most say the question is silly, since the alternatives are not mutually exclusive. Of course. But suppose they were; which would you choose? God helps those who help themselves, some say in choosing the antibiotic, and thereby getting the best of two possible belief systems. But if pushed to the wall (for example, God does not always help those who help themselves; God helps those who pray and who believe), most say the antibiotic, after noting that the question is asinine and proves nothing. Of course, the question was not asked, in the first place, to prove anything, but to begin a discussion of the nature of belief. And I do not fail to inform the students, by the way, that there has recently emerged at least some (though not conclusive) evidence of a scientific nature that when sick people are prayed for, they do better than those who aren’t.1

  As the discussion proceeds, important distinctions are made among the different meanings of “belief,” but at some point it becomes far from asinine to speak of the god of Technology—in the sense that people believe technology works, that they rely on it, that it makes promises, that they are bereft when denied access to it, that they are delighted when they are in its presence, that for most people it works in mysterious ways, that they condemn people who speak against it, that they stand in awe of it, and that, in the born-again mode, they will alter their lifestyles, their schedules, their habits, and their relationships to accommodate it. If this be not a form of religious belief, what is?

  In all strands of American cultural life, one can find so many examples of technological adoration that it is possible to write a book about it. And I would if it had not already been done so well. But nowhere do you find more enthusiasm for the god of Technology than among educators. In fact, there are those, like Lewis Perelman, who argue (for example, in his book School’s Out) that modern information technologies have rendered schools entirely irrelevant, since there is now much more information available outside the classroom than inside. This is by no means considered an outlandish idea. Dr. Diane Ravitch, former Assistant U.S. Secretary of Education, envisions, with considerable relish, the challenge that technology presents to the tradition that “children (and adults) should be educated in a specific place, for a certain number of hours, and a certain number of days during the week and year.” In other words, that children should be educated in school. Imagining the possibilities of an information superhighway offering perhaps a thousand channels, Dr. Ravitch assures us that:

  In this new world of pedagogical plenty, children and adults will be able to dial up a program on their home television to learn whatever they want to know, at their own convenience. If Little Eva cannot sleep, she can learn algebra instead. At her home-learning station, she will tune in to a series of interesting problems that are presented in an interactive medium, much like video games.… Young John may decide that he wants to learn the history of modern Japan, which he can do by dialing up the greatest authorities and teachers on the subject, who will not only use dazzling graphs and illustrations, but will narrate a historical video that excites his curiosity and imagination.2

  In this vision, there is, it seems to me, a confident and typical sense of unreality. Little Eva can’t sleep, so she decides to learn a little algebra? Where did Little Eva come from, Mars? If not, it is more likely she will tune into a good movie. Young John decides that he wants to learn the history of modern Japan? How did young John come to this point? How is it that he never visited a library up to now? Or is it that he, too, couldn’t sleep and decided a little modern Japanese history was just what he needed?

  What Ravitch is talking about here is not a new technology but a new species of child, one that, in any case, hasn’t been seen very much up to now. Of course, new technologies do make new kinds of people, which leads to a second objection to Ravitch’s conception of the future. There is a kind of forthright determinism about the imagined world described in it. The technology is here or will be; we must use it because it is there; we will become the kind of people the technology requires us to be; and, whether we like it or not, we will remake our institutions to accommodate the technology. All of this must happen because it is good for us, but in any case, we have no choice.

  This point of view is present in very nearly every statement about the future relation of learning to technology. And, as in Ravitch’s scenario, there is always a cheery, gee-whiz tone to the prophecies. Here is one produced by the National Academy of Sciences, written by Hugh McIntosh.

  School for children of the Information Age will be vastly different than it was for Mom and Dad.

  Interested in biology? Design your own life forms with computer simulation.

  Having trouble with a science project? Teleconference about it with a research scientist.

  Bored with the real world? Go into a virtual physics lab and rewrite the laws of gravity.

  These are the kinds of hands-on learning experiences schools could be providing right now. The technologies that make them possible are already here, and today’s youngsters, regardless of economic status, know how to use them. They spend hours with them every week—not in the classroom, but in their own homes and in video game centers at every shopping mall.3

  It is always interesting to attend to the examples of learning, and the motivations that ignite them, in the songs of love that technophiles perform for us. It is, for example, not easy to imagine research scientists all over the world teleconferencing with thousands of students who are having difficulty with their science projects. I can’t help thinking that most research scientists would put a stop to this rather quickly. But I find it especially revealing that in the preceding scenario, we have an example of a technological solution to a psychological problem that would seem to be exceedingly serious. We are presented with a student who is “bored with the real world.” What does it mean to say someone is bored with the real world, especially one so young? Can a journey into virtual reality cure such a problem? And if it can, will our troubled youngster want to return to the real world? Confronted with a student who is bored with the real world, I don’t think we can get away so easily by making available a virtual-reality physics lab.

  The role that new technology should play in schools or anywhere else is something that needs to be discussed without the hyperactive fantasies of cheerleaders. In particular, the computer and its associated technologies are awesome additions to a culture, and they are quite capable of altering the psychic, let alone the sleeping, habits of our young. But like all important technologies of the past, they are Faustian bargains, giving and taking away, sometimes in equal measure, sometimes more in one way than the other. It is strange—indeed, shocking—that with the twenty-first century so close on our heels, we can still talk of new technologies as if they were unmixed blessings, gifts, as it were, from the gods. Don’t we all know what the combustion engine has done for us and against us? What television is doing for us and against us? At the very least, what we need to discuss about Little Eva, Young John, and McIntosh’s trio is what they will lose, and what we will lose, if they enter a world in which computer technology is their chief source of motivation, authority, and, apparently, psychological sustenance. Will they become, as Joseph Weizenbaum warns, more impressed by calculation than human judgment? Will speed of response become, more than ever, a defining quality of intelligence? If, indeed, the idea of a school will be dramatically altered, what kinds of learning will be neglected, perhaps made impossible? Is virtual reality a new form of therapy? If it is, what are its dangers?

  These are serious matters, and they need to be discus
sed by those who actually know something about children from the planet Earth, and whose vision of children’s needs, and the needs of a society, go beyond thinking of school mainly as a place for the convenient distribution of information. Schools are not now and have never been chiefly about getting information to children. That has been on the schools’ agenda, of course, but it has always been way down on the list. In a moment, I will mention a few school functions that are higher, but here it needs saying that for technological Utopians, the computer vaults information access to the top. This reshuffling of priorities comes, one might say, at a most inopportune time. The problem of giving people greater access to more information, faster, more conveniently, and in more diverse forms was the main technological thrust of the nineteenth century. Some folks haven’t noticed it, but that problem was largely solved, so that for almost one hundred years, there has been more information available to the young outside the school than inside. That fact did not make the schools obsolete, and it does not make them obsolete now. Yes, it is true that Little Eva, the insomniac from Mars, could turn on an algebra lesson, thanks to the computer, in the wee hours of the morning. She could also, if she wished, read a book or magazine, watch television, pop a video into the VCR, turn on the radio, or listen to music. All of this she could have done before the computer. The computer does not solve any problem she has but exacerbates one. For Little Eva’s problem is not how to get access to a well-structured algebra lesson, but what to do with all the information available to her during the day, as well as during sleepless nights. Perhaps this is why she couldn’t sleep in the first place. Little Eva, like the rest of us, is overwhelmed by information. She lives in a culture which has 260,000 billboards, 17,000 newspapers, 12,000 periodicals, 27,000 video outlets for renting tapes, 400 million television sets, and well over 500 million radios, not including those in automobiles. There are 40,000 new book titles published every year, and each day 41 million photographs are taken. And, thanks to the computer, over 60 billion pieces of advertising junk mail arrive in our mailboxes every year. Everything from telegraphy and photography in the nineteenth century to the silicon chip in the twentieth has amplified the din of information intruding on Little Eva’s consciousness. From millions of sources all over the globe, through every possible channel and medium—light waves, airwaves, ticker tapes, computer banks, telephone wires, television cables, satellites, and printing presses—information pours in. Behind it in every imaginable form of storage—on paper, on video, on audiotape, on discs, film, and silicon chips—is an even greater volume of information waiting to be retrieved. In the face of this, we might ask, What can schools do for Little Eva besides making still more information available? If there is nothing, then new technologies will indeed make schools obsolete. But in fact, there is plenty.