The End of Education

by Neil Postman

  One thing that comes to mind, of which something will be said later in the book, is to provide her with a serious form of technology education, something quite different from instruction in using computers to process information, which, it strikes me, is a trivial thing to do, for two reasons. In the first place, approximately 35 million people have already learned how to use computers without the benefit of school instruction. If the schools do nothing, most of the population will know how to use computers in the next ten years, just as most of the population learned how to drive cars without school instruction. In the second place, what we needed to know about cars—as we need to know about computers, television, and other important technologies—is not how to use them but how they use us. In the case of cars, what we needed to think about in the early twentieth century was not how to drive them but what they would do to our air, our landscape, our social relations, our family life, and our cities. Suppose that in 1946, we had started to address similar questions about television: What would be its effects on our political institutions, our psychic habits, our children, our religious conceptions, our economy? Wouldn’t we be better positioned today to control television’s massive assault on American culture?

  I am talking here about making technology itself an object of inquiry, so that Little Eva and Young John in using technologies will not be used or abused by them, so that Little Eva and Young John become more interested in asking questions about the computer than in getting answers from it.

  I am not arguing against using computers in school. I am arguing against our sleepwalking attitudes toward it, against allowing it to distract us from more important things, against making a god of it. This is what Theodore Roszak warned against in The Cult of Information: “Like all cults,” he wrote, “this one has the intention of enlisting mindless allegiance and acquiescence. People who have no clear idea of what they mean by information, or why they should want so much of it, are nonetheless prepared to believe that we live in an Information Age, which makes every computer around us what the relics of the True Cross were in the Age of Faith: emblems of salvation.”4 To this, I would add the sage observation of Alan Kay of Apple Computer. Kay is widely associated with the invention of the personal computer, and certainly has an interest in the use of computers in schools. Nonetheless, he has repeatedly said that any problems the schools cannot solve without computers, they cannot solve with them. What are some of those problems? There is, for example, the traditional task of teaching children how to behave in groups. You cannot have a democratic—indeed, civilized—community life unless people have learned how to participate in a disciplined way as part of a group. One might even say that schools have never been essentially about individualized learning. It is true, of course, that groups do not learn; individuals do. But the idea of a school is that individuals must learn in a setting in which individual needs are subordinated to group interests. Unlike other media of mass communication, which celebrate individual response and are experienced in private, the classroom is intended to tame the ego, to connect the individual with others, to demonstrate the value and necessity of group cohesion. At present, most scenarios describing the uses of computers have children solving problems alone. Little Eva, Young John, and the others are doing just that, and, in fact, they do not need the presence of other children. The presence of others may, indeed, be an annoyance. (Not all computer visionaries, I must say, take lightly the importance of a child’s learning to subordinate the self. Seymour Papert’s The Children’s Machine is an imaginative example of how computers have been used to promote social cohesion, although, as I have had occasion to say to him, the same effects can be achieved without computers. Naturally, he disagrees.)

  Nonetheless, like the printing press before it, the computer has a powerful bias toward amplifying personal autonomy and individual problem-solving. That is why, Papert to the contrary, most of the examples we are given picture children working alone. That is also why educators must guard against computer technology’s undermining some of the important reasons for having the young assemble in school, where social cohesion and responsibility are of preeminent importance.

  Although Ravitch is not exactly against what she calls “state run schools,” she imagines them as something of a relic of a pre-technological age. She believes that the new technologies will offer all children equal access to information. Conjuring up a hypothetical Little Mary who is presumably from a poorer home than Little Eva, Ravitch imagines that Mary will have the same opportunities as Eva “to learn any subject, and to learn it from the same master teachers as children in the richest neighborhood.”5 For all its liberalizing spirit, this scenario contains some omissions that need to be kept in mind. One is that though new technologies may be a solution to the learning of “subjects,” they work against the learning of what are called “social values,” including an understanding of democratic processes. If one reads the first chapter of Robert Fulghum’s All I Ever Really Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, one will find an elegant summary of a few things Ravitch’s scenario has left out. They include learning the following lessons: share everything, play fair, don’t hit people, put things back where you found them, clean up your own mess, wash your hands before you eat, and, of course, flush.6 The only thing wrong with Fulghum’s idea is that no one actually has learned all these things at kindergarten’s end. We have ample evidence that it takes many years of teaching these values in school before they are accepted and internalized. That is why it won’t do for children to learn in isolation. The point is to place them in a setting that emphasizes collaboration, as well as sensitivity to and responsibility for others. That is also why schools require children to be in a certain place at a certain time and to follow certain rules, such as raising their hands when they wish to speak, not talking when others are talking, not chewing gum, not leaving until the bell rings, and exhibiting patience toward slower learners. This process is called making civilized people. The god of Technology does not appear interested in this function of schools. At least, it does not come up much when technology’s virtues are enumerated.

  The god of Technology may also have a trick or two up its sleeve about something else. It is often asserted that new technologies will equalize learning opportunities for the rich and poor. It is devoutly to be wished, but I doubt it. In the first place, it is generally understood by those who have studied the history of technology that technological change always produces winners and losers—which is to say, the benefits of new technologies are not distributed equally among the population. There are many reasons for this, among them economic differences. Even in the case of the automobile, which is a commodity most people can buy (though not all), there are wide differences between rich and poor in the quality of what is available to them. It would be quite astonishing if computer technology equalized all learning opportunities, irrespective of economic differences. One may be delighted that Little Eva’s parents could afford the technology and software to make it possible for her to learn algebra at midnight. But Little Mary’s parents may not be able to, may not even know such things are available. And if we say that the school could make the technology available to Little Mary (at least during the day), there may be something else Little Mary is lacking—two parents, for instance. I have before me an account of a 1994 Carnegie Corporation Report, produced by the National Center for Children in Poverty. It states that in 1960, only 5 percent of our children were born to unmarried mothers. In 1990, the figure was 28 percent. In 1960, 7 percent of our children under three lived with one parent. In 1990, 27 percent. In 1960, less than 1 percent of our children under eighteen experienced the divorce of their parents. In 1990, the figure was almost 50 percent.7

  It turns out that Little Mary may be having sleepless nights as often as Little Eva, but not because she wants to get a leg up on algebra lessons. Maybe it is because she doesn’t know who her father is, or, if she does, where he is. Maybe we now can understand why McIntosh’s lad is bored wit
h the real world. Or is he confused about it? Or terrified? Are there educators who seriously believe that these problems can be addressed by new technologies?

  I do not say, of course, that schools can solve the problems of poverty, alienation, and family disintegration. But schools can respond to them. And they can do this because there are people in them, because these people are concerned with more than algebra lessons or modern Japanese history, and because these people can identify not only one’s level of competence in algebra but one’s level of rage and confusion and depression. I am talking here about children as they really come to us, not children who are invented to show us how computers may enrich their lives. Of course, I suppose it is possible that there are children who, waking at night, want to study algebra or who are so interested in their world that they yearn to know about Japan. If there be such children, and one hopes there are, they do not require expensive computers to satisfy their hunger for learning. They are on their way, with or without computers—unless, of course, they do not care about others, or have no friends, or little respect for democracy, or are filled with suspicion about those who are not like them. When we have machines that know how to do something about these problems, that is the time to rid ourselves of the expensive burden of schools or to reduce the function of teachers to “coaches” in the uses of machines (as Ravitch envisions). Until then, we must be more modest about this god of Technology and certainly not pin our hopes on it.

  We must also, I suppose, be empathetic toward those who search with good intentions for technological panaceas. I am a teacher myself and know how hard it is to contribute toward the making of a civilized person. Can we blame those who want to find an easy way, through the agency of technology? Perhaps not. After all, it is an old quest. As early as 1918, H. L. Mencken (although completely devoid of empathy) wrote, “… there is no sure-cure so idiotic that some superintendent of schools will not swallow it. The aim seems to be to reduce the whole teaching process to a sort of automatic reaction, to discover some master formula that will not only take the place of competence and resourcefulness in the teacher but that will also create an artificial receptivity in the child.”8

  Mencken was not necessarily speaking of technological panaceas, but he may well have been. In the early 1920s, a teacher wrote the following poem:

  Mr. Edison says

  That the radio will supplant the teacher.

  Already one may learn languages by means of Victrola records.

  The moving picture will visualize

  What the radio fails to get across.

  Teachers will be relegated to the backwoods.

  With fire-horses,

  And long-haired women;

  Or, perhaps shown in museums.

  Education will become a matter

  Of pressing the button.

  Perhaps I can get a position at the switchboard.9

  I do not go as far back as the introduction of the radio and the Victrola, but I am old enough to remember when 16-millimeter film was to be the sure cure, then closed-circuit television, then 8-millimeter film, then teacherproof textbooks. Now computers.

  I know a false god when I see one.

  There is still another false god that has surfaced recently, and we must not neglect it. Like the gods of Economic Utility, Consumership, and Technology, it leads us to a dead end. But unlike them, it does not merely distort or trivialize the idea of public education. It directs us to its end.

  This god has several names: the god of Tribalism or Separatism; most often, in its most fervently articulated form, the god of Multiculturalism. Before saying anything about it, I should specify that it must not be confused with what has been called “cultural pluralism.” Cultural pluralism is a seventy-year-old idea whose purpose is to enlarge and enrich the American Creed—specifically, to show the young how their tribal identities and narratives fit into a more inclusive and comprehensive American story. The term multiculturalism is sometimes used as a synonym for cultural pluralism, and in such cases, we have a semantic problem that can be clarified with relative ease. But more often than not, the term is used to denote a quite different story. In its extreme form, which is the god I will confront here, I would judge it to be a psychopathic version of cultural pluralism, and, of course, extremely dangerous. In what follows, I will put quotation marks around the term multiculturalism to indicate that no argument is being made against the acknowledgment of cultural differences among students. I am using the term to denote a narrative that makes cultural diversity an exclusive preoccupation.

  Although this god is by no means as widely accepted as the others I have discussed, there are several states (for example, New York and Oregon) that have been deeply influenced by it and serious about urging that schooling be organized around it. Because of an expanding interest in “multiculturalism,” as well as the passion of its adherents, it has been deemed dangerous enough to have provoked the distinguished historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., to write a refutation of it, The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society. Although Schlesinger’s book will, I believe, stand as the definitive critique of “multiculturalism,” there is at least one point he does not stress enough, and which should be the beginning of any discussion of this reversion to undiluted tribalism. I refer to the fact that those who advocate a “multicultural” curriculum, especially those who speak for an Afrocentric bias, understand better than most (certainly better than, say, the U.S. Secretary of Education) the need for a god to serve; they understand that the reason why students are demoralized, bored, and distracted is not that teachers lack interesting methods and machinery but that both students and teachers lack a narrative to provide profound meaning to their lessons. It does not go too far to say that the “multiculturalists” are the most active and dedicated education philosophers we have at the moment. They are not especially interested in methods or machinery and, generally, are not competent to speak on such matters. But they have a story to tell, and they believe their story can serve as a foundation to schooling. The trouble is that it is a terrible story, at least for public schools.

  Like many important narratives, this one includes concepts of good and evil. In its most frightening version, evil inheres in white people, especially those of European origin and learning. Goodness inheres in nonwhites, especially those who have been victims of “white hegemony.” At least one “multiculturalist,” Professor Leonard Jeffries, of City College of New York, has a biological explanation for these characteristics. He believes that the qualities of good and evil are determined by the respective quantities of melanin in the bloodstreams of different races: the more melanin, the more good; the less melanin, the more evil. One might say that this is the equivalent of the concept of Original Sin in the Christian story, with this difference: The Christian story provides a means by which Original Sin can be overcome. Jeffries’s account of the source of evil leaves no opportunity for redemption.

  Of course, many adherents of “multiculturalism” do not agree with Jeffries and, in any case, do not require a biological basis for believing in white, European evil. History, they argue, provides abundant reasons, most particularly in the fact of white oppression of nonwhite people. To “multiculturalists,” such oppression is the key to understanding white history, literature, art, and most everything else of European origin. It follows from this that all the narratives of the white, European races are to be seen as propagandistic means of concealing their evil, or, even worse, making their evil appear virtuous. There is no possibility of proceeding in a fair-minded way, the “multiculturalists” believe, unless the narratives of white Europeans are overthrown. A particularly vigorous expression of this view is provided by four authors from the Rochester, New York, school district: “[The] legitimation of dominance, naturalization of inequality, and filtration of knowledge are being challenged in the current debate over what is ‘standard’ school knowledge. At issue in this debate is the struggle over accuracy versus misrepresentation
, emancipatory versus hegemonic scholarship, and the constructed supremacy of Western cultural knowledge transmitted in schools versus the inherent primacy of the multiple and collective origins of knowledge.”10