by Neil Postman
We may give prominence to the arts because their subject matter offers the best evidence we have of the unity and continuity of human experience. Painting, for example, is more than three times as old as writing, and contains in its changing styles and themes a fifteen-thousand-year-old record of the ascent of humanity. And in showing this, it reveals how different peoples at different times have chosen to say what is in their hearts—their fears, their exaltations, their questions. I realize that in suggesting that we include the study of the history of art forms, I am coming close to subsuming art under the heading of archaeology, but I see no problem in this as long as we keep in mind the multiple purposes of art education. Indeed, I would suggest we might go even further. I recommend a subject that, so far as I know, has never been taught in American public schools. I am referring to the study of museums—not only art museums but museums of all kinds; that is to say, we would broaden our view of art to include artifacts of various forms and meanings. Why such a subject? Because a museum is an answer to a fundamental question: What does it mean to be a human being?
No museum I know of, not even the British Museum, gives a complete answer to this question, and none can be expected to. Every museum gives only a partial answer. Each one makes an assertion about the nature of humanity—sometimes supporting and enriching one another’s claims but just as often contradicting one another.
There is a great museum in Munich that is filled with old automobiles, trains, and airplanes, all of which are meant to signify that human beings are preeminently toolmakers and are at their best when solving practical problems. The Guggenheim Museum in New York City rejects that claim; there is nothing displayed in the Guggenheim that is, or ever was, of any practical value. The museum seems to argue that what makes us human is our need to express our feelings in symbolic forms. We are human precisely because so many of our creations are impractical. To this, the Imperial War Museum in London says, “Nonsense. You are both wrong. We are at our most human when devising ways to kill one another.” To which Yad Vashem in Jerusalem adds with inconsolable sadness, “That is true. But we are not merely killers like sharks and tigers; we are cruel, pointless, and systematic killers. Remember this above all.”
Go to any museum in the world, even one that serves only as an archive, and ask, “What is this museum’s definition of humanity?” You will be rewarded with some kind of an answer. In some cases, the answer will be timid and even confused; in others, bold and unmistakable. Of course, it is folly to say which museums convey the right answers. All of them are correct: We are toolmakers and symbol makers and war makers. We are sublime and ridiculous, beautiful and ugly, profound and trivial, spiritual and practical. So it is not possible to have too many museums, because the more we have, the more detailed and comprehensive will be the portrait of humanity.
But in saying that every museum gives us part of the picture, I am not saying that every museum is equally useful. To paraphrase George Orwell, all museums tell the truth, but some tell more important truths than others. And how important a truth is depends on the time and place of its telling. For at different times, cultures need to know, remember, contemplate, and revere different ideas in the interest of survival and sanity. A museum that was useful fifty years ago might be quite pointless today. But I would never wish that such a museum be closed, for someday, in changed circumstances, its usefulness may be restored (and in any case, the dialectic of museums requires that all the voices be counted). Nonetheless, for a specific time and place, the truths conveyed by a particular museum can be irrelevant and even harmful. Scores of museums—some of them new—celebrate ideas that are not needed.
To help clarify my point, imagine that the year is 1933, that you have been given unlimited funds to create a museum in Berlin, and that it has not occurred to you that you might be shot or otherwise punished for anything you will do. What kind of museum would you create? What ideas would you sanctify? What part of the human past, present, or imagined future would you wish to emphasize, and what part would you wish to ignore? In brief, what would you want your German visitors to the museum to contemplate?
In asking these questions, I mean to suggest that a museum is, in a fundamental sense, a political institution. For its answers to the question, “What does it mean to be a human being?” must be given within the context of a specific moment in history and must inevitably be addressed to living people who, as always, are struggling with the problems of moral, psychological, and social survival. I am not urging that museums be used as instruments of cheap and blatant propaganda; I am saying that a museum is an instrument of survival and sanity. A museum, after all, tells a story. And like the oral and written literature of any culture, its story may serve to awaken the better angels of our nature or to stimulate what is fiendish. A museum can serve to clarify our situation or obfuscate it, to tell us what we need to know or what is useless.
In his The Quintessence of Ibsenism, George Bernard Shaw tells us precisely why museums are necessary. He addressed the question, Why do we need theater? But his answer applies just as well to museums. He said, “It is an elucidator of social consciousness, a historian of the future, an armory against darkness and despair, and a temple in the ascent of man.”
Can you imagine “museums” as a specific subject in high school or college? Can you imagine a high school or college without such a subject? I am perhaps expecting too much. But in case I am not, may I propose a project that asks students to write a prospectus for a new museum in their community. They would be required to indicate what the museum would try to say, as well as what objects of art, custom, and technology would best say it. Such a project might be the final exam of a year-long course devoted to an analysis of whatever museums are accessible in the community. The course would probably require two or three teachers working together, for it would certainly be, to paraphrase a notorious Iraqi leader, the mother of all interdisciplinary courses. But I believe it is not beyond the range of high school faculties, certainly not of college faculties, and I can think of few better approaches for demonstrating the great story of human diversity.
The study of museums is likely to lead students in many different directions, perhaps as much away from artistic creations as toward them. Artifacts are not necessarily art, and it is important to keep in mind that the study of the former is no substitute for the study of the latter. I referred earlier to art as the language of the heart. But not all hearts are equally open to the variety of languages in which art speaks. There are, as we know, different levels of sensibility. In the case of music, for example, most American students are well tuned to respond with feeling, critical intelligence, and considerable attention to forms of popular music, but are not prepared to feel or even to experience the music of Haydn, Bach, or Mozart; that is to say, their hearts are closed, or partially closed, to the canon of Western music. I am not about to launch into a screed against rock, metal, rap, and other forms of teenage music. In fact, readers should know that Roger Waters, once the lead singer of Pink Floyd, was sufficiently inspired by a book of mine to produce a CD called Amused to Death. This fact so elevated my prestige among undergraduates that I am hardly in a position to repudiate him or his kind of music. Nor do I have the inclination for any other reason. Nonetheless, the level of sensibility required to appreciate the music of Roger Waters is both different and lower than what is required to appreciate, let us say, a Chopin étude. And we have a somewhat similar situation in respect to other art forms. There is, in short, something missing in the aesthetic experience of our young.
The problem may be stated in the following way: Because of the nature of the communications industry, our students have continuous access to the popular arts of their own time—its music, rhetoric, design, literature, architecture. As a consequence, their receptivity to popular forms is well developed and appropriate. But their capacity to respond with educated imaginations to traditional or classical forms of art is severely limited.
What is
to be done? In the interests of cultivating resourcefulness and diversity in levels of sensibility, I would say there is no excuse for schools to sponsor rock concerts when students have not heard the music of Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, or Chopin, or for students to have graduated from high school without having read, for example, Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, Dickens, Whitman, Twain, Melville, or Poe, or for students not to have seen at least a photograph of paintings by Goya, El Greco, David. It is not to the point that many of these composers, writers, and painters were in their own times popular artists. What is to the point is that they spoke, when they did, in a language and from a point of view different from our own. It is also to the point that the popular arts tend to mute the voices of these artists and render their standards of excellence invisible.
I am—to reiterate—not speaking against popular art forms. I am speaking against our allowing them to monopolize the souls of our students. So far as art education is concerned, our schools ought to serve as a “counterenvironment,” as if to say, “The equipment you now have to respond to the arts is incomplete. Your capacity for nourishing your feeling life will be expanded and, yes, elevated.”
This brings me to three highly charged arguments about the arts (and about culture): first, whether or not there are higher and lower levels of sensibility; second, whether or not the canons of literature and other art forms have legitimacy; and third, whether or not schools can justify transmitting, indeed celebrating, Eurocentric culture, especially as it is dominated by dead white males.
I can be brief, since I think that for all the sound and fury, there is not much to argue about. I have, for example, already given my answer to the first question, and I would only add that if there are not higher and lower levels of sensibility in responses to art, language, and other forms of human communication, then there is no need for education. This applies to intelligence as well. Even if there are, as Howard Gardner has postulated, various kinds of intelligences, we must assume that there are higher and lower expressions of each one. The task of a school is to increase students’ capacities. That means to have them move from lower to higher modalities of thought and feeling.
As to the legitimacy of canons, the word simply refers to agreed-upon examples of excellence in various genres of creativity. Any canon can be added to, modified, or even discarded if it no longer serves, in part or whole, as a model of excellence. This means that any canon is a living, dynamic instrument, and it is certainly not limited to those artists who are dead, and long dead. The long dead dominate for the obvious reason that their works have given pleasure and instruction to diverse people over long periods of time. They have earned, so to speak, their place. To the extent that teachers believe in the importance of conveying a sense of continuity in artistic creation, they must give respectful attention to the long dead. But, of course, teachers must not be reluctant to include models of excellence produced by living artists. If teachers know of better examples of Western dramatic art than have been provided by Shakespeare, Molière, Ibsen, Shaw, Williams, and O’Neill, then they must let us know about it and explain why they think it so. If there are better examples of symphonic music than those produced by Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart, and Tchaikovsky, then we should hear them, along with explanations as to why they should be preferred.
A problem does arise, however, when someone injects a confusing, irrelevant point into the argument. I refer, for example, to Saul Bellow’s rhetorical question concerning the absence of Swahili novels (or was it Navajo novels?) that are the equal or superior to the novels of Proust. I think he meant to justify Proust’s place in the canon and to ridicule the largely political motive of including Third World writers on the list. Of course, if we are talking about the canon of the genre known as novels, then Bellow has a point. There are no Swahili or Navajo novelists who will threaten Proust’s place in the canon (although there may be Chinese or Japanese novelists who do). But the speakers of Swahili or Navajo and scores of other languages do not normally write the kind of literature we call novels. They express themselves in other genres, often associated with the oral tradition. There is, I am sure, a canon (that is, examples of excellence) in every form of literature from Navajo poetry to Japanese Noh dramas. In the interest of diversity, our students ought to experience some of these forms, and teachers may introduce them as additions to the conceptions of excellence developed in our own culture.
I should add that the remarks above are not intended to suggest that art and especially literature teachers should confine themselves, and their students, to models of excellence. There are many reasons to ask students to read a particular book, and only one of them is that the book is an exemplary example of literary art. Teachers may choose even badly written books if such books are of sociological or political interest. At the same time, there are books that have earned a place in the canon but are not suitable for students at a particular stage in their development. (Proust in high school? Not a good idea.) The main point, however, is that teachers ought to have a conception of models of excellence; indeed, they are obliged to.
Last, there is the nonproblem of the dead white males. I believe it was Camille Paglia who remarked that if not for the dead white males, we would all be living in grass huts. A more refined but equally definitive comment was made by James Earl Jones (when interviewed by Charlie Rose). He noted that, for good or ill, our culture was formed from the religion, politics, literature, science, technology, philosophy, and art of mostly dead white males who lived in Europe and Asia Minor. There is, he said, no use pretending otherwise. What the dead white males gave us is now being enacted, criticized, and re-created by living black males, by living white females, and by several other interesting combinations, including quite a number of living white males. I should not be taken to mean that the cultures of dead Chinese or dead Africans ought to be ignored. Anyone who has urged that anthropology and archaeology be major subjects in school must be exempt from the charge of cultural chauvinism. I would add that in the interest of a robust diversity, studies of Asian, African, and other significant cultures would be highly desirable, provided they were available to all students. I am keeping in mind that the purpose of public education is to help the young transcend individual identity by finding inspiration in a story of humanity.
Meanwhile, it is well to remember that (by my count and my canons) the dead white males who gave us our religious, scientific, and artistic traditions came from at least thirty-seven different cultures. They were as diverse a group as one could imagine. Could there be any two people more different than Jesus and Martin Luther? Than Kepler and Einstein? Than Milton and Cervantes? Than Dostoyevsky and Emerson? Nonetheless, it was they who somehow taught us that diversity is a great and noble principle. If anyone has argued persuasively to the contrary, I haven’t heard of it.
9 • The Word Weavers/The World Makers
In an effort to clear up confusion (or ignorance) about the meaning of a word, does anyone ask, What is a definition of this word? Just about always, the way of putting the question is, What is the definition of this word? The difference between a and the in this context is vast, and I have no choice but to blame the schools for the mischief created by an inadequate understanding of what a definition is. From the earliest grades through graduate school, students are given definitions and, with few exceptions, are not told whose definitions they are, for what purposes they were invented, and what alternative definitions might serve equally as well. The result is that students come to believe that definitions are not invented; that they are not even human creations; that, in fact, they are—how shall I say it?—part of the natural world, like clouds, trees, and stars.
In a thousand examinations on scores of subjects, students are asked to give definitions of hundreds of things, words, concepts, procedures. It is to be doubted that there are more than a few classrooms in which there has been any discussion of what a definition is. How is that possible?
Let us take the equally strange case
of questions. There will be no disagreement, I think, to my saying that all the answers given to students are the end products of questions. Everything we know has its origin in questions. Questions, we might say, are the principal intellectual instruments available to human beings. Then how is it possible that no more than one in one hundred students has ever been exposed to an extended and systematic study of the art and science of question-asking? How come Alan Bloom didn’t mention this, or E. D. Hirsch, Jr., or so many others who have written books on how to improve our schools? Did they simply fail to notice that the principal intellectual instrument available to human beings is not examined in school?
We are beginning to border on absurdity here. And we cross the line when we consider what happens in most schools on the subject of metaphor. Metaphor does, in fact, come up in school, usually introduced by an English teacher wanting to show how it is employed by poets. The result is that most students come to believe metaphor has a decorative function and only a decorative function. It gives color and texture to poetry, as jewelry does to clothing. The poet wants us to see, smell, hear, or feel something concretely, and so resorts to metaphor. I remember a discussion, when I was in college, of Robert Burns’s lines: “O, my love is like a red, red rose / That’s newly sprung in June. / O my love is like the melodie / That’s sweetly play’d in tune.”
The first questions on the test were: “Is Burns using metaphors or similes? Define each term. Why did Burns choose to use metaphors instead of similes, or similes instead of metaphors?”
I didn’t object to these questions at the time except for the last one, to which I gave a defiant but honest answer: How the hell should I know? I have the same answer today. But today, I have some other things to say on the matter. Yes, poets use metaphors to help us see and feel. But so do biologists, physicists, historians, linguists, and everyone else who is trying to say something about the world. A metaphor is not an ornament. It is an organ of perception. Through metaphors, we see the world as one thing or another. Is light a wave or a particle? Are molecules like billiard balls or force fields? Is history unfolding according to some instructions of nature or a divine plan? Are our genes like information codes? Is a literary work like an architect’s blueprint or a mystery to be solved?