The End of Education

by Neil Postman

  If we leave aside the vagueness, if not incomprehensibility, of such phrases as “emancipatory scholarship” and “inherent primacy,” it is clear enough that the authors believe the schools are the battleground where the struggle for a new narrative must be fought. They conclude this paragraph by saying that Eurocentric knowledge must be replaced, since “[such] a singular, monovocal curriculum is one of the last institutional terrains of white, patriarchal, ruling-class hegemony.”

  This is clearly not the language of “cultural pluralism,” which would have among its aims celebrating the struggles and achievements of nonwhite people as part of the story of humankind. In fact, the authors explicitly denounce any efforts to “heroize” (their word) such figures as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Crispus Attucks, and Martin Luther King, Jr. They believe that the “heroizing” approach conceals the “holocaustal atrocities, economic benefits, and dehumanization of [slavery’s] perpetrators.” Obviously, what “multiculturalism” aims at is not reconciliation with Eurocentric history and learning, but a thorough rejection of it so that a new beginning may be made, a new narrative constructed.

  In order to accomplish this, the “multiculturalists” must do two things. First, they must reveal and highlight those ugly parts of history that are usually excluded from the various Eurocentric narratives. Second, they must show that the more humane parts of those narratives have their origin in nonwhite cultures.

  The first task is relatively easy, since all narratives conceal or sanitize unsavory if not indefensible chapters. Narratives are not exactly histories at all, but a special genre of storytelling that uses history to give form to ideals. “The purpose of myth,” Claude Lévi-Strauss reminds us, “is to provide a model capable of overcoming a contradiction.”11 That is why no serious harm is done to the great story of Christianity by revealing that a particular Pope was an ambitious, unscrupulous schemer. Neither is it lethal to speak of the Inquisition. The reality is that there has never been a Christian—not even St. Francis or Mother Teresa—who has lived in every particular a Christian life. The story of Christianity is only in part a history of Christians. It is largely the story of the poignant struggle of people to give life to a set of transcendent ideals. That they have stumbled on the way is embarrassing and sometimes shameful, but it does not discredit the purpose of the story, which in fact is about the discrepancy between reality and the ideal.

  The same is true of the American story of democracy. To point out that the Constitution, when written, permitted the exclusion of women and nonproperty owners from voting, and did not regard slaves as fully human, is not to make a mockery of the story. The creation of the Constitution, including the limitations of the men who wrote it, is only an early chapter of a two-hundred-year-old narrative whose theme is the gradual and often painful expansion of the concepts of freedom and humanity. How difficult that struggle has been was expressed by Abraham Lincoln in 1856 in a response he made to the presidential campaign of the Know-Nothing party. “Our progress in degeneracy,” he observed sardonically, “appears to me pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘All men are created equal.’ We now practically read it ‘All men are created equal, except Negroes.’ When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘All men are created equal, except Negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.’ ”12

  The Know-Nothings did not get control, but we know nonetheless how that reversion to degeneracy was stayed, at what cost, and how we have continued the journey that Jefferson charted. That we are far from reaching the goal is made abundantly clear by the robust complaints of those who are not yet adequately represented, including the “multiculturalists.” But the point is that it is possible, by ignoring its transcendent ideals, to tell America’s story as a history of racism, inequity, and violence. Is this the story we wish to be the foundation of American public schooling? If the answer is, Yes, because it contains truth, then we must turn to the second task of the “multiculturalists” to see if they are mainly concerned with truth-telling. That task is to show that the humane parts of the Eurocentric narrative have their origins in nonwhite cultures. Schlesinger’s book documents the failure of “multiculturalists” to come even close to the truth. He shows that according to respected historians, including black historians, most of the claims made by “multiculturalists” are propagandistic fantasies. These include the claims that black Africa is where science, philosophy, religion, medicine, technology, and other great humanistic achievements originated; that ancient Egyptians were black; that Pythagoras and Aristotle stole their mathematics and philosophies from black scholars in Egypt; that most American blacks originated in Egypt; and that the enlightened parts of the U.S. Constitution were based, in some measure, on political principles borrowed from the Iroquois. Schlesinger is so discouraged by the abuse of history reflected in these claims that he concludes: “If some Kleagle of the Ku Klux Klan wanted to devise an educational curriculum for the specific purpose of handicapping and disabling black Americans, he would not be likely to come up with anything more diabolically effective than Afrocentrism.”13

  One might reply to Schlesinger that neither historical balance nor truth is the issue here. What is being attempted is the creation of a new narrative, similar in point and method to the process by which, for example, American colonists constructed a mythology of the Pilgrims as democratic nation-builders. In that instance, history was used, invented, or forgotten to suit the needs of the story. The story, as we know, has been hugely successful. Americans know about Miles Standish but not about Squanto and Wituwamet. Americans celebrate, even revere, Thanksgiving, but they do not know (or, if they do, give it little weight) that some Indians call Thanksgiving the National Day of Mourning.

  Of course, it is not irrelevant to ask how much truth or falsehood is contained in any narrative. A narrative constructed mostly out of falsehoods usually fails, leaving its adherents bitter and, as Schlesinger reminds us, ignorant. But even if we make a most generous assessment of the facts that form the core of the “multicultural” story, we are left with the question, Can it work?

  I believe it cannot, for several reasons. The first is of a practical nature. Why should the public, which is largely of European origin, support a school program that takes as its theme their own evil? Would nonwhites support a public school whose curriculum proceeds from the assumption that nonwhites are inferior? And if the “multiculturalists” reply, That is exactly what happens in most schools, then the remedy is to revise the story so that it allows children of all races to find a dignified place for themselves in it. It is true enough that whites have oppressed blacks, but blacks have oppressed other blacks, and even whites; and whites have oppressed other whites; and Indians have slaughtered whites, and whites, Indians; and Europeans have oppressed Asians, and Asians, Europeans. How far shall we go with this?

  If I may amend Niels Bohr’s remark, cited earlier, the opposite of a profound story is another profound story, by which I mean that the story of every group may be told inspiringly, without excluding its blemishes but with an emphasis on the various struggles to achieve humanity, or, to borrow from Lincoln again, the struggles to reveal the better angels of our nature. This is what once was meant by cultural pluralism.

  The argument is sometimes made that a “multicultural” curriculum is justified where an entire student population is African-American (or Mexican or Puerto Rican), as is often the case in our large cities. This might make sense if it were the task of the public schools to create a public of hyphenated Americans. But our students already come to school as hyphenated Americans. The task of the public schools, properly conceived, is to erase the hyphens or to make them less distinct. The idea of a public school is not to make blacks black, or Koreans Korean, or Italians Italian, but to make Americans. The alternative leads, quite obviously, to the “Balkanization” of public schools—which is to say, their end. An Afrocentric curriculum for Afro-Americans? Then why not a Sinocentric curriculum for the Chinese?
An Italocentric curriculum for Italians? A Judeocentric curriculum for Jews? A Teutocentric for Germans? A Graecocentric for Greeks?

  This path not only leads to the privatizing of schooling but to a privatizing of the mind, and it makes the creation of a public mind quite impossible. The theme of schooling would then be divisiveness, not sameness, and would inevitably engender hate. In December 1993, Minister Louis Farrakhan gave a talk in Madison Square Garden, during which he made reference to a young African-American man who had, only a few days before, been arrested for gunning down passengers on the Long Island Railroad. Most of the victims were white; a few were Asians. Although there is no evidence that Farrakhan encouraged their response, members of the audience cheered either the young man or his deed. It is not clear which. One may explain this response by reference to a sense of generalized rage on the part of African-Americans against European culture. If that is the case, then surely the role of the public school is not to intensify it, but to help create a sane alternative to it.

  4 • Gods That May Serve

  Who writes the songs that young girls sing? Or the tales that old men tell? Who creates the myths that bind a nation and give purpose and meaning to the idea of a public education? In America, it is the advertisers and, of course, the popular musicians and filmmakers; maybe even the hollow men gathered around swimming pools in Beverly Hills, inventing stories we call television sitcoms.

  This does not exhaust the list, but teachers are not on it. It must be clear at the beginning that schools have not and have never been organized to create forceful, inspiring narratives. They collect them, amplify them, distribute them, ennoble them. They sometimes refute them, mock them, or neglect them. But they create nothing, and this is, I suppose, as it should be. As those who would privatize schooling correctly point out, our public schools are state-run agencies and have no license to reconstruct society on their own authority; they are given neither permission nor encouragement to promote a worldview that has no resonance in the society at large. Schools, we might say, are mirrors of social belief, giving back what citizens put in front of them. But they are not fixed in one position. They can be moved up and down and sideways, so that at different times and in different venues, they will reflect one thing and not another. But always they show something that is there, not of the schools’ invention, but of the society that pays for the schools and uses them for various purposes. This is why the gods of Economic Utility, Consumership, Technology, and Separatism are to be found in our schools now, exerting their force and commanding allegiance. They are gods that come from outside the walls of the classroom.

  All of this must be quite obvious, and a reader may well ask, When did the coauthor of a book called Teaching as a Subversive Activity grasp the point? As Joseph Heller might say it, I never didn’t grasp the point. I understood, in 1969, as now, that at any given time in the symbolic universe of a community, there dwell multiple narratives—some shining at the forefront, vivid and unmistakable; some in the background, indistinct and half-forgotten; some sleeping, some recently awakened, and many in uneasy contradiction to others. If an author wishes to define teaching as a subversive activity, he is inventing no god, but merely calling upon one to take precedence over another. For in this case, our citizens believe in two contradictory reasons for schooling. One is that schools must teach the young to accept the world as it is, with all of their culture’s rules, requirements, constraints, and even prejudices. The other is that the young should be taught to be critical thinkers, so that they become men and women of independent mind, distanced from the conventional wisdom of their own time and with strength and skill enough to change what is wrong.

  Each of these beliefs is part of a unique narrative that tells of what it means to be human, what it means to be a citizen, what it means to be intelligent. And each of these narratives can be found in American tradition. An author may think it necessary to subordinate one to the other—or vice versa—depending on what seems needed at a particular time. That is why, having coauthored Teaching as a Subversive Activity, he might later on write Teaching as a Conserving Activity.

  The problem, as always, is: What is needed now? My argument, beginning with the title of this book, is that the narratives that underlie our present conception of school do not serve us well and may lead to the end of public schooling—“end” meaning its conversion to privatized schooling (as Henry Perkinson predicts in his updated version of The Imperfect Panacea) or its subordination to individually controlled technology (as Lewis Perelman predicts in School’s Out). It is also possible that schooling will be taken over by corporations (as, for example, in the way Chris Whittle proposes) and operated entirely on principles associated with a market economy.

  Any or all of these are possibilities. But this book takes no great interest in any of these plans, including the option of public school choice as advocated by Seymour Fliegel (in his book Miracle in East Harlem). These are essentially engineering matters. They are about the practical, efficient way to deliver school services. They are important but barely touch the question, What are schools for? Yes, it matters if parents have a choice of schools, if schools are smaller, if class size is reduced, if money is available to hire more teachers, if some students receive public funds to attend private schools. But are we not still left with the question, Why? What is all the sound and fury and expense about? If a metaphor may be permitted, we can make the trains run on time, but if they do not go where we want them to go, why bother?

  My intention here is to offer an answer in the form of five narratives that, singly and in concert, contain sufficient resonance and power to be taken seriously as reasons for schooling. They offer, I believe, moral guidance, a sense of continuity, explanations of the past, clarity to the present, hope for the future. They come as close to a sense of transcendence as I can imagine within the context of public schooling.

  I am, of course, aware that what I shall propose, to put the mildest face on it, is presumptuous. For I must not only put forward ideas that inspire me but ideas calculated to inspire the young, their teachers, and their parents. My own heart and mind, I know well enough. Can I claim the same knowledge of the hearts and minds of my countrymen and-women? I cannot be sure. Who can? But I do not proceed in a state of wild surmise. I have, for example, tested these ideas in scores of places with parents and teachers from Oregon to Connecticut, with students from grammar school through the university level. I’ve listened to what they have said and, just as carefully, to what they have not said. When I have previously written about any of these ideas, I have learned, from what readers have in turn written me, the arguments for them and against them. I have spent thirty years as an affectionate critic of American prejudices, tastes, and neuroses and have been astonished and pleased to discover I share most of them. By this, I do not mean I can speak for Americans, only about them. I have also gained some confidence in these judgments from many lectures in Europe, discovering, without surprise, that Alexis de Tocqueville was right: Americans are different—in some ways better, in some worse—but different. And when one is in a foreign land, the differences emerge with uncommon clarity.

  I mention all of this not as a warranty of the soundness of my proposals but as assurance that they are grounded in a focused conception of those for whom they are intended. I think I know what gods are possible in America and what gods are not. Otherwise, there would be no point in proceeding.

  If you judge what follows to be unrealistic, superficial, or otherwise unsound, Part II of this book will, indeed, be pointless. But if you agree that these ideas move us in the right direction, Part II will provide specific examples of how one might bring these ideas to life, and the implications of doing so. The detail I will provide in Part II leads me to be as brief as possible in describing the narratives that follow. There is, in any case, nothing astonishing about them. Each is part of our symbolic landscape. We talk about them. We wonder about them. We sometimes forget about them. But they are the
re, and the question is, Can we use them to provide an end—that is, a purpose—to schooling?

  The Spaceship Earth

  Not long ago, I found myself in an extended conversation with Marvin Minsky, the distinguished scientist who is famous (some say notorious) for his passionate advocacy of “artificial intelligence.”1 In providing a context for his fertile imagination, Minsky referred to the influence on his thinking of several science-fiction writers, remarking that science-fiction writers are our true philosophers. It is significant, I thought, that he failed to include among a rather extensive list Mary Shelley (Frankenstein), Aldous Huxley (Brave New World), George Orwell (1984), and Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451). I will come to these gloomy philosophers later on, but surely Minsky has a point, and I wish to pursue it by focusing on the most popular of all our science-fiction philosophers, Steven Spielberg. Spielberg is sometimes near-Homeric in his capacity to give form to myths that resonate deeply, especially with our youth. I put aside, for the moment, Jurassic Park (which connects him with the tradition of Frankenstein) and Schindler’s List (in which he forgoes the prophetic tradition altogether) and refer to Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T., each of which asks us to believe that we are not alone in the universe. Perhaps we are, perhaps not; most likely, we will never know. But what his stories make clear is that from both a metaphorical and a literal point of view the Earth is a spaceship and we are its crew members.