The End of Education

by Neil Postman

  I should add that among the “new” ideas now current in several places is the organization of schooling around themes. This is a progressive idea, pointing as it does to the need for providing meaning in education. It also explicitly rejects the common assumption that the subjects of a curriculum have nothing to do with one another. But there are trivial themes, and idiotic themes, and themes that are trendy but, in the end, explain nothing and lead nowhere. The spaceship Earth is not, I believe, among these. We may think of it as the “negentropic” theme, which includes the idea that the test of a civilization, as Eric Hoffer has reminded us, is in its capacity for maintenance. To build a house is a fine and noble thing, but to keep it from crumbling is the essential task of a civilization. That the young are not exempt from this task is the message of this theme.

  But that message implies still another—that we cannot afford to waste the energy and potential idealism of the young. There is no question that listlessness, ennui, and even violence in school are related to the fact that students have no useful role to play in society. The strict application of nurturing and protective attitudes toward children has created a paradoxical situation in which protection has come to mean excluding the young from meaningful involvement in their own communities. It is hardly Utopian to try to invent forms of youthful participation in social reconstruction as an alternative or supplement to the schooling process. Moreover, as things stand now in many places, the energy of the young works in opposition to learning; that is, it is an obstacle that schooling must overcome. What I am proposing intends to use youthful energy as an asset to students’ academic experience. This is the principle of “Judo,” in which one uses the strength of one’s opponent as an addition to one’s own strength. In this case, we do not suppress the energy of students; rather, we exploit it for benign, constructive, and humane purposes.

  For those realists who think the fable and its implications are impractical, I now propose another idea that would appear to be more conventional but is probably more “impractical.” In this one, the students stay in school, take academic subjects, and can even be tested or, as realists like to say, have their learning assessed. I propose that we realign the structure of what are called “major subjects” so that (if you will forgive an unplanned alliteration) archaeology, anthropology, and astronomy are given the highest priority. What makes this “impractical” is the fact that subjects are, as much as anything else, bureaucratic and institutional entities. Teachers are licensed by the state to teach a subject; publishers produce textbooks in subjects; national organizations are formed around subjects. To turn a “major” subject into a “minor” one, or to eliminate a subject altogether, or to introduce a new one is a significant legal and political matter and is bound to arouse opposition. Nonetheless, the matter is worth serious consideration, all the more so because there is, after all, a measure of arbitrariness to the weight given to one subject or another. When I attended public school (in New York City), both music and art were considered “minor” subjects—for what reason, I have no idea. There was then a High School of Music and Art (and still is), so that someone must have thought these subjects were of sufficient import to organize learning around them. But not in my schools. Even further, geography was treated as a separate subject, and, if my memory serves accurately, so was public speaking. Neither makes the grade in most schools now. Of course, these days, computer science and media studies are regarded as subjects (in New Mexico, media studies is required in high school), and I know of more than one high school that gives courses in such subjects as sports writing. In other words, for all the seeming solidity of the subjects in a curriculum, changes do take place, and usually for reasons that may be said to be “educational.”

  In this context, it would be helpful if the training of teachers and administrators included attention to the history of “subjects” so that there might be some understanding of how, when, and why subjects were formed. This would assist in shielding school people from the dangers of hardening of the categories. “English,” for example, was not a subject in American schools until the 1920s. The ancient Greeks had a curriculum formed around the study of “harmonics,” and so lumped together (as major subjects) arithmetic, astronomy, music, and geometry. The Sophists taught grammar, logic, and rhetoric, the last two of which have little importance in American schools. I wonder why. (Plato thought logic shouldn’t be studied until one reached the age of thirty-five. But I don’t think that is the reason we mostly ignore it.) The Greeks, by the way, had no interest in or respect for any language but their own and would have thought courses in “foreign languages” an absurdity. My favorite subject of all time is found in the curriculum developed by Confucius, which required students to study and practice archery—not, incidentally, because they were being trained as warriors, but because the subject taught them discipline, precision, and concentration. Confucius also insisted on students’ studying what we would call “good manners.” Can you imagine a school today requiring as a major subject the study and practice of good manners? Surely, no one can say it is not an important subject. Perhaps it is not in the curriculum because the Educational Testing Service would be hard-pressed to figure out how to assess it.

  Why then archaeology? The argument is strong, although I should say at once I do not have in mind the study of how archaeologists do their work. There are interesting possibilities in allowing the young to learn something about the methods of archaeologists, but I am content to let that part of the subject reside in graduate school. I am referring here to the knowledge that archaeologists have produced about what is sometimes called “prehistory.” If we are interested in increasing awareness of the preciousness of the Earth, of its place as our home, both in the past and the future, then no subject will serve as well as archaeology. There was a time when students were given, once over lightly, some knowledge of the great achievements of ancient Egyptian civilization. In those days, “Tigris and Euphrates” was the answer to at least one test question, and the phrase “the cradle of civilization” was not entirely unknown to sixth graders. But the matter was never pursued with much conviction, and is rarely done so today. This was, and is, a serious mistake, especially in light of the knowledge acquired in this century about humanity’s “recent” past. We know, for example, that the Sumerians were writing on clay tablets at least a thousand years before Abraham departed from the land of Ur, and epic poetry was being written by the Babylonians a thousand years before Moses is supposed to have taken the Ten Commandments down from Mount Sinai. We know that the Bible, commonly regarded as the book on which Western morality and social organization are founded, took many of its themes from the great Babylonian epic, Gilgamesh. The first great Chinese dictionary, containing forty thousand characters, was compiled 3,500 years ago (the first great English dictionary, 200 years ago). The Sumerians were writing in cuneiform fifteen hundred years before the alphabet was invented, and three thousand years ago, the Chinese used a math textbook that included root multiplications, geometry, and equations with more than one unknown quantity.

  The Sumerians, I might add, provided us with the first documented—that is, written—record of schools, of proverbs and sayings, of love songs, of library catalogues, of resurrection tales, of legal precedent, and of tax reduction. That is to say, in studying the ancients, whether Sumerian, Babylonian, Egyptian, or Chinese, we are not only studying civilizations but people. They lived on Earth, complained, grieved, rejoiced, cheated one another, scolded their children, fell in battle, wrote poetry, and did many other things that people from Kansas City do this very day. It does them no discredit that they could not imagine using e-mail or watching television. Neither are they to be taken lightly because they did not know about the universe or the Milky Way or even the solar system. But they knew something about the Earth and how to take care of it, and what happens when its care is a matter of indifference.

  Archaeology, then, is among the best subjects we have for helping to cult
ivate in the young a sense of earthly perspective. Crew members of the spaceship Earth need to have nontrivial knowledge of crew members of the past. After all, they will be the Sumerians three thousand years from now, and their accomplishments and ignorances will be the subject of review by crew members of the future. Some sense of the continuity of humanity’s sojourn on Earth would seem a necessity.

  There are two more points that need to be made here about archaeology, which is normally regarded as an arcane subject. First, instruction in it ought to begin at an early age, and continue in spiraling levels of complexity and sophistication through college. I do not say I know exactly how this might be done with, say, fifth graders, never having had a chance to try it. I began my career as a fifth-grade teacher, and was told (this was many years ago) that there was no time for such a subject, especially because it was not “basic.” I have no objection to schools’ confining their instruction to what is basic. The question, of course, is exactly that: What is basic? Or, to put it better, What are the subjects that are suited to provide students with meaning? Prehistory, it seems to me, is one such subject, and I have no doubt that good elementary teachers can figure out how to introduce and pursue the subject.

  Second, in pursuing the subject, teachers must not only have substantive knowledge but are required to exercise extreme tact. There are many students who come to school bound to cosmological narratives that contradict archaeological scholarship. For example, not long ago I had two students (undergraduates) who believed that the Earth was created at 9:00 A.M. on October 23, 4004 B.C. Their story had no place in it for claims that took human life further back than that. One approach—which, I fear, did not work—was for me to explain that significant learning often produces confusion and even sadness, since knowledge does not always give support to cherished beliefs. I even quoted from Ecclesiastes (1:18) to provide some comfort: “For in much wisdom is much grief; and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.” They were not as impressed as I am with the insights of the Preacher.

  An alternative approach is to present archaeology as a narrative (which it is) and not as a definitive, ultimate truth rendering all competing narratives null and void. Educators may bring upon themselves unnecessary travail by taking a tactless and unjustifiable position about the relation between scientific and religious narratives. We see this, of course, in the conflict concerning creation science. Some educators representing, as they think, the conscience of science act much like those legislators who in 1925 prohibited by law the teaching of evolution in Tennessee. In that case, anti-evolutionists were fearful that a scientific idea would undermine religious belief. Today, pro-evolutionists are fearful that a religious idea will undermine scientific belief. The former had insufficient confidence in religion; the latter insufficient confidence in science. The point is that profound but contradictory ideas may exist side by side, if they are constructed from different materials and methods and have different purposes. Each tells us something important about where we stand in the universe, and it is foolish to insist that they must despise each other. There are two relevant quotations that make this point, each from a man who had more than a passing interest in the matter. The first is from none other than Galileo, who in urging that a distinction be made between religious and scientific narratives remarked that “the intention of the Holy Spirit is to teach how one goes to heaven, not how heaven goes.” The second, coming 375 years later, is from Pope John Paul II: “Science can purify religion from error and superstition. Religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes.”2

  It is here that the subject of anthropology comes in, since, unlike archaeology, it presents to us living cultures that differ widely in their worldviews and therefore helps the young to defend themselves against idolatry and false absolutes. With some reservations previously noted, I call upon the Enterprise (from Star Trek) as a useful metaphor of what an anthropological outlook may teach. Like our planet itself, the Enterprise is home to a variety of groups, not all of them Earth people. Spock, for example, is half Vulcan, and from time to time Romulans and even the fearsome Klingons will share space with the Earth people. Of course, they have their own spaceships, but if we can imagine (for reasons Gene Roddenberry might have thought of) that all of them had to live on the Enterprise, we would have a fairly accurate picture of what our situation is: a community of different languages, different traditions, different physiques (and therefore different standards of beauty), and different cosmological narratives. The following questions would arise: What does each group have to know about the others? What knowledge would lead to harmony? What knowledge might lead to conflict? On what basis would any group claim superiority over the others? Would it be possible to create a narrative, including a set of symbols, that would attract the allegiance of all groups?

  Questions like these are relevant to a consideration of what students need to know not only about Eskimo, Hopi, and Brazilian rain-forest people but about Iranians, Vietnamese, Finns, Canadians, and all the others with whom they share the spaceship. There is, of course, a clear ideological bias to anthropology, as there is to the theme of the spaceship Earth—that ignorance, distrust, and intolerance of difference are dangers to the spaceship and that anything that might be done to reduce them helps to ensure everyone’s survival. But I must add at once that such an outlook does not necessarily lead to an uncritical relativism. The Vulcans, as we know, take a rather bemused attitude toward the Earthlings’ excessive emotionalism. The Earthlings, for their part, are quite sure that the Vulcans place too much value on logic and calculation. Each learns something from the other, which allows a measure of harmony, even affection, to exist between them. But each retains the belief in the essential correctness of its worldview. One does not have to be a cultural relativist in order to be tolerant of other views, at least not when survival is at stake. The Klingons would present a special problem, since their culture is organized around a distrustful belligerence. How the Earthlings, the Vulcans, and others would cope with the Klingons is, of course, an exact analogy to a problem we have on our own spaceship. The solution does not require that others accept the values of the Klingons, or that they regard that value as being as good as any other. The solution requires, first, that we recognize its existence; second, that we examine ourselves to see how much we are like Klingons; and third, that we try to find in Klingon culture elements of which we wholeheartedly approve. One probably should resist taking the Enterprise as metaphor too far, but it is worth noting that in Star Trek: The Next Generation, the Klingons and the Earthlings have become friends and seem to worry about how to civilize the Romulans. Does this remind us of how America and “the evil Empire” have now joined their destinies and are trying to find recognizable and admirable values in each other’s culture?

  Anthropology is clearly a subject of global dimensions, and its early introduction to our young and its continued study throughout schooling would help to give them an aweinspiring sense of humanity’s range of difference, as well as a sense of our common points. In learning about difference, we become less afraid and therefore more courageous. In learning about commonalities, we become more hopeful. Is there anything that our spaceship needs more than that its crew be courageous and hopeful?

  But for a sense of awe, there is nothing to match astronomy. Happily, unlike archaeology and anthropology, astronomy is no stranger to school curriculums. I remember being taught (as part of general science—none of it general and some of it not science) about the planets, stars, and comets. I even recall looking at Vincent Dinato’s paper during a test because I could not remember Neptune for the question requiring us to name all the planets. This was a fruitless effort at cheating, since Vincent only had Mars, Venus, and Earth as his answer, and it ended with Vincent looking at my paper. If only I had been sitting next to Mildred Waldman, both I and Vincent would have had perfect answers. But in studying astronomy fifty years ago, even the best students could not learn much more than Galileo, T
ycho Brahe, and Kepler knew. There was a vague reference to a Big Bang theory but no evidence of it. No one knew anything about black holes. No one had been to the moon, and no satellite had visited Mars. No one had ever seen what the Earth looks like from a point outside the Earth. And we even believed that the solar system, having once been formed, would more or less always be exactly the same. I am writing in the year when twenty-one pieces of the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet, traveling at unimaginable speeds, crashed into Jupiter, enabling us to see for ourselves that the solar system is not a fixed thing, but an ongoing process. It changed, as it were, before our very eyes. Naturally, and humanly, our astonishment was accompanied by worry about what might happen to our own spaceship if it were assaulted by a comet. Everyone agreed that were a comet to visit us, the differences between Iranians and Germans, Canadians and Finns, would melt away as quickly and decisively as would portions of the planet.