The End of Education (24 page)

It should also be said that technology education does not imply a negative attitude toward technology. It does imply a critical attitude. To be “against technology” makes no more sense than to be “against food.” We can’t live without either. But to observe that it is dangerous to eat too much food, or to eat food that has no nutritional value, is not to be “antifood.” It is to suggest what may be the best uses of food. Technology education aims at students’ learning about what technology helps us to do and what it hinders us from doing; it is about how technology uses us, for good or ill, and about how it has
used people in the past, for good or ill. It is about how technology creates new worlds, for good or ill.

But let us assume that we may overcome any obstacles to making the story of technology a core subject in schools. What is it we would want students to know? Well, for one thing, we would want them to know the answers to all the questions I have cited. But in addition, I would include the following ten principles.

1. All technological change is a Faustian bargain. For every advantage a new technology offers, there is always a corresponding disadvantage.
   
2. The advantages and disadvantages of new technologies are never distributed evenly among the population. This means that every new technology benefits some and harms others.
   
3. Embedded in every technology there is a powerful idea, sometimes two or three powerful ideas. Like language itself, a technology predisposes us to favor and value certain perspectives and accomplishments and to subordinate others. Every technology has a philosophy, which is given expression in how the technology makes people use their minds, in what it makes us do with our bodies, in how it codifies the world, in which of our senses it amplifies, in which of our emotional and intellectual tendencies it disregards.
   
4. A new technology usually makes war against an old technology. It competes with it for time, attention, money, prestige, and a “worldview.”
   
5. Technological change is not additive; it is ecological. A new technology does not merely add something; it changes everything.
   
6. Because of the symbolic forms in which information is encoded, different technologies have different
   intellectual
   and
   emotional
   biases.
   
7. Because of the accessibility and speed of their information, different technologies have different
   political
   biases.
   
8. Because of their physical form, different technologies have different
   sensory
   biases.
   
9. Because of the conditions in which we attend to them, different technologies have different
   social
   biases.
   
10. Because of their technical and economic structure, different technologies have different
    content
    biases.
    

All of these principles being deeply, continuously, and historically investigated by students, I would then propose the following final examination, which is in two parts.

Part I: Choose one pre-twentieth century technology—for example, the alphabet, the printing press, the telegraph, the factory—and indicate what were the main intellectual, social, political, and economic advantages of the technology, and why. Then indicate what were the main intellectual, social, political, and economic disadvantages of the technology, and why.

Part II: Indicate, first, what you believe are or will be the main advantages of computer technology, and why; second, indicate what are or will be the main disadvantages of computer technology, and why.

Any student who can pass this examination will, I believe, know something worthwhile. He or she will also have a sense of how the world was made and how it is being remade, and may even have some ideas on how it
should
be remade.

T
he title of my book was carefully chosen with a view toward its being an ambiguous prophecy. As I indicated at the start,
The End of Education
could be taken to express a severe pessimism about the future. But if you have come this far, you will know that the book itself refuses to accept such a future. I have tried my best to locate, explain, and elaborate narratives that may give nontrivial purposes to schooling, that would contribute a spiritual and serious intellectual dimension to learning. But I must acknowledge—here in my final pages—that I am not terribly confident that any of these will work.

Let me be clear on this point. I would not have troubled anyone—least of all, written a book—if I did not think these ideas have strength and usefulness. But the ideas rest on several assumptions which American culture is now beginning to question. For example, everything in the book assumes that the idea of “school” itself will endure. It also assumes that the idea of a “public school” is a good thing. And even further, it assumes that the idea of “childhood” still exists.

As to the first point, there is more talk than ever about schools’ being nineteenth-century inventions that have outlived their usefulness. Schools are expensive; they don’t do
what we expect of them; their functions can be served by twenty-first-century technology. Anyone who wants to give a speech on this subject will draw an audience, and an attentive one. An even bigger audience can be found for a talk on the second point: that the idea of a “
public
school” is irrelevant in the absence of the idea of a public; that is, Americans are now so different from each other, have so many diverse points of view, and such special group grievances that there can be no common vision or unifying principles. On the last point, while writing this book, I have steadfastly refused to reread or even refer to one of my earlier books in which I claimed that childhood is disappearing. I proceeded as if this were not so. But I could not prevent myself from being exposed to other gloomy news, mostly the handwriting on the wall. Can it be true, as I read in
The New York Times
, that every day 130,000 children bring deadly weapons to school, and not only in New York, Chicago, and Detroit but in many venues thought to provide our young with a more settled and humane environment in which to grow? Can it be true, as some sociologists claim, that by the start of the twenty-first century, close to 60 percent of our children will be raised in single-parent homes? Can it be true that sexual activity (and sexual diseases) among the young has increased by 300 percent in the last twenty years? It is probably not necessary for me to go on with the “can it be true’s?.” Everyone agrees and all signs point to the fact that American culture is not presently organized to promote the idea of childhood; and without that idea schooling loses much of its point.

These are realistic worries and must raise serious doubts for anyone who wishes to say something about schooling. Nonetheless, I offer this book in good faith, if not as much confidence as one would wish. My faith is that school will endure
since no one has invented a better way to introduce the young to the world of learning; that the public school will endure since no one has invented a better way to create a public; and that childhood will survive because without it we must lose our sense of what it means to be an adult.

1.
Eric Hoffer,
The Ordeal of Change
(New York: Harper & Row), 62.

2.
Quoted in Rollo May,
The Cry for Myth
(New York: Norton), 57.

3.
Quoted in “The West’s Deepening Culture Crisis,”
The Futurist
, November-December 1993, 12.

4.
Quoted in Shlain Leonard,
Art & Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time and Light
. (New York: William Morrow), 430.

5.
Gary Krist, “Tragedyland,”
New York Times
, November 27, 1993, 19.

6.
See the February 18 and 25, 1915, issues of
The Nation
. The articles were written by Horace Kallen.

1.
Quoted in
Prognosis
16, no. 3 (August 6, 1993): 4.

2.
John T. Bruer, “The Mind’s Journey from Novice to Expert,”
American Educator
, Summer 1993, 6–7.

3.
Theodore Roszak,
The Cult of Information
:
The Folklore of Computers and the True Art of Thinking
(New York: Pantheon), 62–63.

4.
For a full analysis of this point, see the work of Henry Levin of Stanford University.

5.
See Robert J. Samuelson, “The Useless ‘Jobs Summit,’ ”
Newsweek
, March 14, 1994, 50.

6.
New York Times
, February 23, 1994, B7.

7.
“Tying Education to the Economy.”
New York Times
, February 20, 1994, 21.

1.
Although I find myself reluctant to accept such studies, there are three or four that claim that when hospitalized patients are prayed for (without their knowledge or the knowledge of their physicians), they tend to improve at a greater rate than those who are not prayed for. See
Healing Words
by Larry Dossey, M.D. (HarperCollins, 1993).

2.
Diane Ravitch, “When School Comes to You,”
The Economist
, September 11, 1993, 45–46.

3.
Hugh McIntosh,
National Research Council News Report
, Summer 1993, 2.

4.
Theodore Roszak,
The Cult of Information
:
The Folklore of Computers and the True Art of Thinking
(New York: Pantheon), x.

5.
Ravitch,
The Economist
, 46.

6.
See Robert Fulghum,
All I Ever Really Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten
(New York: Villard).

7.
New York Times
, April 12, 1994, A13.

8.
H. L. Mencken,
A Mencken Chrestomathy
(Philadelphia: The Franklin Library), 334.

9.
Quoted in Larry Cuban,
Teachers and Machines: The Classroom Use of Technology Since 1920
(New York: Teachers College Press), 5.

10.
Warren Crichlow et al., “Multicultural Ways of Knowing: Implications for Practice,”
Journal of Education
, 172, no. 2 (1990): 102.

11.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, “The Structure of Myth,” in
The Structural Anthropology
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 119.

12.
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.,
The Disuniting of America
(New York: Norton), 29–30.

13.
Ibid., 94.

1.
Much of this conversation has been printed in German in
Über Morgen: Das Magazin Für Reise in Die Zukunft
, Summer 1994, 12–14.

2.
Jacob Bronowski,
The Ascent of Man
(Boston: Little, Brown), 374.

3.
Cornel West,
Race Matters
(New York: Vintage), 159.

4.
See Susanne Langer in
Feeling and Form
(New York: Scribner’s).

1.
See Harvey Kantor, “Managing the Transition from School to Work: The False Promise of Youth Apprenticeship,”
Teachers College Record
, 95, no. 1 (Summer 1994): 442–461.

2.
Both quotes are found in James Reston, Jr.,
Galileo: A Life
(New York: HarperCollins), 136, 142.

3.
Quoted in Jacques Barzun,
The Culture of Desire
(Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press), 110.

1.
Washington Post
, July 29, 1994, B3, col. 1.

1.
See Eva Berger, “Metaphor, Mind & Machine: An Assessment of the Sources of Metaphors of Mind in the Works of Selected Education Theorists” (Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1991).

2.
I. A. Richards,
Interpretation in Teaching
(New York: Harcourt Brace), 384.

“No contemporary essayist writing about American pop culture is more fun to read and more on target.”—
Los Angeles Times