The End of Education (20 page)

Earlier, I have discussed introducing, as a major subject, anthropology, of which the study of customs is a part. But it is also a part of sociology. I once had a conversation with Margaret Mead about the difference between the two subjects. She said that sociology grew out of anthropology, mostly because there were anthropologists who wanted to avoid the personal discomfort of studying “primitive” peoples in their faraway native habitats. They preferred to study the customs of people in, say, Omaha, Nebraska, rather than in the Trobriand Islands. The result was a new subject: sociology. I don’t know if there is any truth in this. (Since I knew Margaret Mead as a sober scholar, I ruled out the possibility that she was pulling my leg.) But there is little doubt that the two subjects make similar inquiries: How do the people of a particular culture communicate with one another? How do they define law, truth, intelligence? How do they educate their young? What roles do they assign to the sexes? How do they organize kinship? What authority do they respect? What role does their history play?

I mention the connection between anthropology and sociology because the study of diverse customs need not confine itself to people of faraway places. In most American classrooms, the student population will embody several different traditions, and it is likely that there is widespread ignorance about some of them. A teacher who has, let us say, Latinos, Koreans, African-Americans, Greeks, and Italians in class has enough material to last several semesters. He or she has available what the anthropologists call “native informants,” who can speak with some degree of authority about the beliefs and attitudes of their respective cultures. Of course, like all native informants, they will often try to conceal certain aspects of their culture and cannot be expected to be entirely objective.
It is the role of the teacher to provide objectivity, which means to guide the inquiry with as much open-mindedness as possible. This is especially important to do, and quite difficult, when the study concerns people who have not been “Americanized” or who have nothing to do with America—for example, if the inquiry has shifted away from the student population to the people of Singapore or Iraq or China. Until 1994, most Americans knew very little about Singapore. And then, an American teenager, convicted in Singapore of what most Americans would regard as a minor crime, was cruelly punished by caning. This event provides (that is, would have provided) a valuable opportunity to study cultural differences. How do the people of Singapore view crime, teenagers, democracy? How are their views different from those of Americans? Is it possible for a teacher, not to mention students, to be objective about such differences?

I think it is, in the following sense: Through an act of scholarly imagination, one tries to understand the meanings Singaporeans give to the relevant concepts, to grasp how such meanings hold the culture together, to find in these meanings, if not virtue, a sense of necessity. It helps greatly if one compares Singaporean meanings to American meanings of the same concepts. One usually finds a measure of arbitrariness in customary ways of thinking. This does not mean that there is no basis for judging one set of meanings to be better than another. It means that a culture’s history, geography, economy, and religion shape what comes to be thought seemly, natural, even inevitable. Before rushing to judgment, one must make an honest attempt to
understand
, and to teach the young how to understand.

It is easier said than done. Imagine how difficult it would be for an American teacher to stay open-minded about Iraqi
customs regarding women, or about the Chinese practice (by no means just recent) of aborting or killing female infants in the belief that females are less valuable than males. Primitive, barbaric, evil? But then what of the American custom of killing those convicted of certain crimes, not out of economic necessity, but for revenge? Primitive, barbaric, evil, a Chinese sociologist might say. Not the same thing, we might reply. If we could explain to you our situation, if you knew how we think about these things, if you could simply understand the phrase “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” you would see that this makes quite good sense. It is, in fact, an affirmation of the value of life, and an indispensable collective catharsis. Well, maybe.

I am not arguing here for or against the custom known as capital punishment. I am talking about what it means to be open-minded and about the ways in which various cultures might explain their customs. There is always time to decide if a culture’s customs are wasteful, ignorant, inhuman. Such decisions should await a study of why they exist. In the course of such studies, students may discover that there are striking similarities in how different cultures justify what at first seem to be unjustifiable customs.

But these are dark matters, and although they must be part of the study of customs, they are by no means all of it. We ought to be examining, for example, marriage ceremonies, education systems, manners, and parent-child relations. Students usually find the last two of special interest. I recall the bemusement—bordering on wonder—of some American tenth graders upon learning that in Thailand, children of
any
age will not disagree with their parents, and that it is almost as bad to disagree with their teachers. I tried to convince them that this was an altogether splendid idea. In their attempts to
convince me that these customs were inappropriate in America, they learned much about America, Thailand, themselves, and the richness of diversity. So did I.

I do not wish to give the impression that art is to be taught solely or even mostly to support the principle of diversity. But in studying the creative arts, one inevitably learns the value of diversity—let us say it is an inescapable side effect. Imagine a concert that features Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo, and José Carreras. Zubin Mehta conducts; Yo-Yo Ma and Itzhak Perlman are soloists. Imagine that, after the intermission, Leontyne Price sings Wagner, while James Levine conducts, after which Van Cliburn plays Chopin and Tchaikovsky. Besides the fact that it would be nearly impossible to get tickets for such a concert, it would also be impossible for those who got in not to notice the contributions of people from all over the world. (Including the composers, I count musicians from nine different countries.)

But the audience has not come for a lesson in diversity or even, if you prefer, the universality of Western music. Neither do people go to museums and plays and read novels and poetry to learn about the cosmopolitan nature of artistic creation. They do these things to nourish their souls. Art, it has been said, is the language of the heart, and if we teach about music, painting, architecture, and literature in schools, we ought to be doing it to help our youth understand that language so that it may penetrate to their hearts. That is a very difficult thing to do, and I will make no attempt to disguise the fact that, save for literature, I have little experience (that is, none) in teaching the arts for this purpose. I will, therefore,
confine my remarks to certain additional reasons for taking the arts and a culture’s artifacts more seriously than we are accustomed to doing. All of these reasons have to do with diversity in one way or another.

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.