The End of Education

by Neil Postman

  Astronomy is, of course, the subject that most explicitly depicts our planet as a spaceship, and its study inevitably raises fundamental questions about ourselves and our mission. Are we, for example, alone in the universe? In surveying the multitude of galaxies, Thomas Carlyle addressed the question with a sullen comment. “A sad spectacle,” he remarked. “If they be inhabited, what a scope for misery and folly. If they not be inhabited, what a waste of space.” But most young people are inspired rather than depressed by the vastness of the universe and the possibility of life on other spaceships. The fascination with space takes different forms, of course. The young ones may find excitement in imagining through art what the crews of other spaceships would look like. Older students, if they have some rudimentary physics, may enjoy speculating on how Earthlings might communicate with the crews in other parts of our galaxy. There may even be students who will find spiritual meaning in the fact that our ship and all that is on it appear to be at one with the universe. As far as we can tell, everything in the universe is made of the same stuff and follows the same rules. Thus, astronomy offers confirmation of an intuitive idea expressed over centuries by people of different cultures. Heraclitus wrote that all things are one. Lao-tzu said all things are ruled by a single principle. The Suquamish Indian chief Seattle declared that all things are connected. So it would seem. Even those who are believers in creation theory may find it encouraging that the Big Bang theory of modern astronomers is not so far from the story of the Beginning as found in Genesis. The thought that a group of camel-riding Bedouins huddling around a fire in the desert night four thousand years ago might ponder the question of how the universe began and come up with a narrative that is similar to one accepted by MIT professors in the late twentieth century speaks of a continuity of human imagination that cannot fail to inspire. That is not to say that in teaching astronomy, one must distort what is known in order to accommodate other narratives (although one might help Creationists to accommodate their story to astronomy). We know, for example, something about how our spaceship was created. We know when our spaceship was created—about 5 billion years ago. We know where we are in the universe—on a planet orbiting a star that is situated at the edge of a spiral galaxy, which is near the outskirts of a supercluster of galaxies. Of course, we do not know what we are here for, which is a question astronomy provokes but declines to address. Indeed, most astronomers are likely to agree that asking the question doesn’t make any sense. They will refer us to other narratives if we wish to discuss it. But astronomers will agree that since we are here, and know that we are here, we have important responsibilities to our planet, such as not destroying our atmosphere or depleting the available oxygen or polluting the oceans. They will agree that human greed, ignorance, and indifference are a greater threat to the planet than comets.

  Astronomy, then, is a key subject if we wish to cultivate in our young a sense of awe, interdependence, and global responsibility. But here something must be said about how the subject ought to be taught—in a word, historically. Every subject has a history, and as I will try to show in the next chapter, there is no better way to reveal how humans have overcome their mistakes than by tracking the history of subjects. But astronomy is especially well suited to an historical treatment because the record of its mistakes and corrections is so well documented. We know what Aristotle believed, what Ptolemy believed, what Copernicus believed, and what Galileo believed. We even know the price some of them paid for their beliefs. Giordano Bruno said that God “is glorified not in one but in countless suns; not in a single earth but in a thousand, I say, in an infinity of worlds.” For this belief, which, unlike Galileo, he did not recant, he was burned alive on February 19, 1600, even though fifteen hundred years before that, Lucretius expressed the same idea, and five hundred years before that, Metrodorus said the same.

  The point is that astronomy is a human story, filled with the same emotions, drama, triumphs, and tragedies one finds in Shakespeare’s plays. There is ambition, greed, deceit, superstition, nobility, wonder, and, always and above all else, curiosity. One may properly call astronomy science, but when taught as a struggle to discover where our spaceship is and how it comes to be there, we may also say the subject is one of the humanities. We may take as a guide here remarks made by William James on what constitutes a humanistic subject. He said: “You can give humanistic value to almost anything by teaching it historically. Geology, economics, mechanics, are humanities when taught with reference to the successive achievements of the geniuses to which these sciences owe their being. Not taught thus, literature remains grammar, art a catalogue, history a list of dates, and natural science a sheet of formulas and weights and measures.”3 To which I might add, not taught thus, astronomy becomes names of objects, which provokes nervous students to cheat on examinations.

  In bringing this chapter to a close, I must also say that the teaching of foreign languages (so that students can actually speak one) and the study of comparative religion are indispensable means of enhancing the story of the spaceship Earth. But since I will discuss these in detail in chapters to follow, I am content here merely to note their importance.

  6 • The Fallen Angel

  I am not sure who said it (possibly Northrop Frye), but it has been remarked that there are three characters from literature who are known all over the world: Hamlet, Alice, and Sherlock Holmes. I don’t know how Shakespeare and Lewis Carroll felt about their creations, but it is known that Arthur Conan Doyle believed Holmes to be something of a nuisance and thought that his stories about Holmes did not represent his best work. The irony, of course, is that no one reads what Doyle regarded as his best work, but everybody reads about Holmes.

  Something like this will happen, on occasion, to lesser—much lesser—authors—for example, me. Among the many pages I have written about education over the years, I have included a few ideas that seemed to me to rise above the others, and could be expected to be given special consideration by readers. But the ideas have been largely ignored, mostly on the grounds that readers believed they were included as an attempt at humor. This is depressing for two reasons: first, that readers believed my sense of humor was so uninspired; second, that their sense of possibilities was so limited. You may judge for yourself. Here is one of the ideas. We could improve the quality of teaching overnight, as it were, if math teachers were assigned to teach art, art teachers science, science teachers English. My reasoning is as follows: Most teachers, especially high school and college teachers, teach subjects they were good at in school. They found the subject both easy and pleasurable. As a result, they are not likely to understand how the subject appears to those who are not good at it, or don’t care about it, or both. If, let us say, for a semester, each teacher were assigned a subject which he or she hated or always had trouble with, the teacher would be forced to see the situation as most students do, would see things more as a new learner than as an old teacher. Perhaps he or she would discover how boring the textbooks are, would learn how nerve-racking the fear of making mistakes is, might discover that a question that has unsuspectingly aroused his or her interest must be ignored because it is not covered by the syllabus, might even discover that there are students who know the subject better than he or she could ever hope to. Then what?

  All in all, I believe the experience would be chastening and even eye-opening. When teachers returned to their specialties, it is possible they would bring with them refreshing ideas about how to communicate about their subject, and with an increased empathy for their students.

  Here is another idea, not meant to be funny: We can improve the quality of teaching and learning overnight by getting rid of all textbooks. Most textbooks are badly written and, therefore, give the impression that the subject is boring. Most textbooks are also impersonally written. They have no “voice,” reveal no human personality. Their relationship to the reader is not unlike the telephone message that says, “If you want further assistance, press two now.” I have found
the recipes on the backs of cereal boxes to be written with more style and conviction than most textbook descriptions of the causes of the Civil War. Of the language of grammar texts, I will not even speak. To borrow from Shakespeare, it is unfit for a Christian ear to endure. But worse than this, textbooks are concerned with presenting the facts of the case (whatever the case may be) as if there can be no disputing them, as if they are fixed and immutable. And still worse, there is usually no clue given as to who claimed these are the facts of the case, or how “it” discovered these facts (there being no he or she, or I or we). There is no sense of the frailty or ambiguity of human judgment, no hint of the possibilities of error. Knowledge is presented as a commodity to be acquired, never as a human struggle to understand, to overcome falsity, to stumble toward the truth.

  Textbooks, it seems to me, are enemies of education, instruments for promoting dogmatism and trivial learning. They may save the teacher some trouble, but the trouble they inflict on the minds of students is a blight and a curse.

  On one occasion when I made this argument before a group of teachers, one of them asked, “But if we eliminated textbooks, what would replace them?” My answer—again, not meant humorously—was as follows: “When Jonas Salk’s vaccine eliminated polio, did anyone ask, But what will replace it?” You might think I was being a wise guy, and so I was. The teacher deserved a better answer, and I will come to one. But first, I will offer one other idea that has been widely and consistently ignored. This one, I confess, was originated inadvertently by Reed Irvine, who heads a right-wing group called Accuracy in Media (AIM). The group’s purpose is to monitor newspapers, radio, and television in a search for left-wing bias, which, when found, is to be exposed and condemned. A few years ago, Mr. Irvine began to extend his surveillances by forming a group known as Accuracy in Academia (AIA), whose purpose is to expose left-wing bias in the classroom. The idea is to have students secretly and carefully monitor the lectures and remarks of their teachers so that the latter’s inaccuracies, clichés, and unjustified opinions may be brought to light. It is probably not entirely irrelevant to note that those of a “liberal” bent reacted with disdain, chagrin, and righteousness to the thought of student spies evaluating everything their teachers say. Perhaps it was the secrecy of it all that disturbed them. I hope so, because putting the secrecy aside, Accuracy in Academia is about the best idea yet invented for achieving what every teacher longs for: first, to get students to pay careful attention; second, to get them to think critically. Of course, the flaw in Irvine’s idea is that he wishes students to think critically in only one direction. But this is easily corrected. All that is necessary is that at the beginning of each course, the teacher address students in the following way:

  During this term, I will be doing a great deal of talking. I will be giving lectures, answering questions, and conducting discussions. Since I am an imperfect scholar and, even more certainly, a fallible human being, I will inevitably be making factual errors, drawing some unjustifiable conclusions, and perhaps passing along my opinions as facts. I should be very unhappy if you were unaware of these mistakes. To minimize that possibility, I am going to make you all honorary members of Accuracy in Academia. Your task is to make sure that none of my errors goes by unnoticed. At the beginning of each class, I will, in fact, ask you to reveal whatever errors I made in the previous session. You must, of course, say why these are errors, indicate the source of your authority, and, if possible, suggest a truer or more useful or less biased way of formulating what I said. Your grade in this course will be based to some extent on the rigor with which you pursue my mistakes. And to ensure that you do not fall into the torpor that is so common among students, I will, from time to time, deliberately include some patently untrue statements and some outrageous opinions.

  There is no need for you to do this alone. You should consult with your classmates, perhaps even form a study group that can collectively review the things I have said. Nothing would please me more than for one or several of you to ask for class time in which to present a corrected or alternative version of one of my lectures.

  I am banking on readers’ agreeing that these three ideas are neither humorous nor impractical. Neither do I see them as gimmicks. To try to renew a teacher’s sense of the difference between teaching and learning, to eliminate packaged truths from the classroom, and to focus student attention on error are part of an uncommon but, I believe, profound narrative capable of generating interest and inspiration in school. It is, in fact, a refutation of a story that infuses so much of schooling as we know it and have known it for so long. I am referring to the story that says the following in a hundred ways to students: You come to school to learn important facts and enduring truths. Your teacher knows many of these, your textbooks still others. It is not your business to know where they came from or how. It would, in any case, be a waste of valuable time to burden you with the mistakes of those who thought they had discovered important facts and enduring truths. School is not a place for documenting error, but for revealing the true state of affairs.

  Do I exaggerate? I don’t think so. The sentences above, with some variations and a few addenda, express the attitude of most schools toward knowledge (especially, by the way, most colleges) and explain why a course or two in “critical thinking” is quite irrelevant. They also explain the easy appeal of the previously mentioned “cultural literacy” project developed by E. D. Hirsch, Jr. The idea there is for students to become acquainted with a thousand facts without pausing to know whose facts they are, how we come to know them, why they are deemed important and by whom. This leads quite directly to the state of mind sometimes called “justificationism.” As used, for example, by Henry Perkinson in The Possibilities of Error, the word refers to the tendency of most people to engage in a rigorous and “natural” defense of their own beliefs, not so much to explain their beliefs as to justify them. Although we are all accustomed to such performances, is there not something strange about this—this idea of education in which everyone is encouraged to justify, fight for, and defend what they believe, as if we did not know that our beliefs are flawed, imperfect, badly in need of improvement? It would take a satirist of Swiftian talent to show, first, how unseemly it is and then how deeply it offends the way people learn. I risk contradicting John Dewey’s most famous aphorism by saying that though we may learn by doing, we learn far more by failing—by trial and error, by making mistakes, correcting them, making more mistakes, correcting them, and so on. We are all in need of remedial work, all the time. And this includes teachers, students, and textbooks. Can you imagine a school organized around this principle—that whatever ideas we have, we are in some sense wrong? We may have insufficient facts to support an idea; or some of the facts we have may be incorrect, perhaps generated by a festering emotion; or the conclusions we have drawn may not be entirely logical; or some definition we are employing may not be applicable; or we may be merely repeating an idea we have heard expressed by some authority and have not examined its implications carefully. Can you imagine schools whose epistemological story does not aim at producing a flotilla of fanatics, but, rather, people who proceed to learn with full consciousness of their own fallibility, as well as the fallibility of others?

  How could such schools be created? Any plan would, of necessity, have its origin in a new way of educating teachers, because it would require a refocusing of the purpose of teaching. As things stand now, teachers are apt to think of themselves as truth tellers who hope to extend the intelligence of students by revealing to them, or having them discover, incontrovertible truths and enduring ideas. I would suggest a different metaphor: teachers as error detectors who hope to extend the intelligence of students by helping them reduce the mistakes in their knowledge and skills. In this way, if I may put it crudely, teachers become less interested in making students smart, more interested in making students less dumb. This is not a question of semantics. Or, if it is, it is not “mere” semantics. It is, in fact, the poi
nt of view taken by those who practice medicine and law. Physicians do, of course, have a conception of what is good health, but their expertise resides in their ability to identify ill health and to provide remedies for it. That is why, upon being consulted, their first and most important question is, What’s wrong?

  The same may be said of lawyers, whose expertise resides in their ability to identify injustice and to pursue methods to eliminate it. In fact, to be realistic about the matter, for most physicians, good health is defined as the absence of illness; for most lawyers, justice is defined as the absence of injustice. Physicians and lawyers, we might say, function as painkillers. The good ones know how to relieve us of illness and injustice. I am suggesting the role of painkiller for teachers whose purpose would be to relieve students of the burdens of error—in their facts, their inferences, their opinions, their skills, their prejudices.