I teach English in a small village north of Ithaca, New York. It is a small place, composted mainly of farmers, recycled hippies, and professionals masquerading as weekend squires. The school district has about 1500 students, most of them bussed to class, almost all of them white, vaguely Protestant, thoroughly normal. Educational problems seem to occur somewhere else: in seething New York, Boston, Washington, D.C., but not here. School goes on in much the same fashion as the planting and harvesting. If there are problems it is with students tardy to class, smoking in the bathrooms, budget requests for new window shades. The village is a hotbed of educational normality. So, sequestered in this oasis, freed from the trauma of violent students and racial faction, I have an unalloyed chance to observe my charges and think considerately about them. What I see disturbs me, not so pure and not so simple, and I would like to share that.
Most people are aware of the calamity of public education in this country and there have been no dearth of Jeremiahs tolling the end of American civilization because of it. Yet, while all prophets speak some truth, it is not always a relevant truth. The "back to basics" people believe that if we turn the clock back, we'll turn the kids on; if we tinker with the system, we'll get the desired product. But there is something more profound going on here than the failure of a system to deliver the goods. What unsettles many people, including myself, is not just that children today, in some relative subjective sense, seem "dumber" than children of other generations, but that they lack some spark of curiosity, some ingredient of character, that would give them some presence. The adolescents I see for the most part wear an armor of just "being there," a cultivated inviolability that will not open to ideas or hard work or sequential thought. Adolescence has always had a built-in blandness to it, a sort of tribal agreement not to be like the adults, but this goes beyond that. They are more like ciphers waiting to be filled rather than jealous guardians of secrets. It is strange to teach and hear no echo, ask for an idea and get silence. And the schools seem increasingly incapable of reaching them, of breaking the code. If this happens in my benign little village, what must be happening elsewhere? What, indeed, has happened?
Fortunately, two books exist that give some sort of Baedeker out of today's educational slough of despond. In 1969, Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner wrote Teaching As A Subversive Activity, bracketing an era of intense social motion. Approximately a decade later, Neil Postman offers as an appropriate parentheses to the 1970s, Teaching As A Conserving Activity. Even though they are twelve years apart in time, they tailor Thomas Jefferson's dictum, that education must help people protect themselves from tyranny, to fit a world clothed in the polyester of a hyped media culture. Moreover, and most helpfully, the two books offer practical suggestions on how to teach children in a democratic fashion to live in a democratic society.
In 1969, Postman and Weingartner believed that the primary failure of the schools was to teach children to be "crap-detectors," good questioners who could ferret out and judge what was worth knowing and what wasn't. Instead, they stated, schools were so addicted to fragmented curricula and useless fact-knowledge that they produced anachronistic children in a culture fast moving out of their reach. It was as if, they said, a person were driving a multimillion dollar sports car screaming "Faster! Faster!" while peering fixedly into the rearview mirror.
Conserving appears in a different social context, which Postman artfully annotates in his Introduction. In 1969, people were fired with a zest for change; in 1981, Postman sees people battered by it, retreating to nostalgic dreams of certainty. Subversive's effervescence has been replaced by a good measure of humility. But the problems still remain: children are no more literate or flexible questioners than they were in 1969. To Postman, the present problem of education is the result of an imbalance that schools have failed to correct. The outside culture, dominated as it is by the media, encourages a state of being that is nonanalytical, continuous in time yet isolated in space, discontinuous in content, and desirous of immediate gratification. So powerful is this media culture that schools find themselves like a wise spinster competing against the young girls: the spinster may have more brains but it is no real contest. And schools themselves are partly to blame for this imbalance because, like the old spinster, they've prettied themselves up with all the proper media cosmetics only to find that they are still foolish and inept. The victim in this charade is the child in the classroom. The child is partly victimized by the media culture; partly by social instability in the family; partly by schools that have not defined their purpose or program well.
There are, of course, inconsistencies in how the two books state the situation. Postman and Weingartner saw media studies and the inquiry method as the breakthrough to the future. Postman now sees these things as the breakthrough to the past. Postman and Weingartner saw the child as the suppressed individual who, once the oppression was lifted, would discover the proper bearings and, like a pigeon, head for home. In Conserving, Postman sees the child not as suppressed but duped. But whether denied or deceived, the resultant child is the same: a person incapable or unwilling to share in the heritage of human knowledge and human endeavor. The children become like free-floating electrons trapped by any atom that needs them, unable to combat the attraction.
What, then, is the solution? In 1969, Postman and Weingartner told teachers that they must teach their charges how to ask questions, how to inquire about what it is they need to know. The only curriculum would be the person's own intellectual requirements. Media education was central to this, especially instruction on how the media structure one's view of reality. Out of this new education would come a "new kind of person...an actively inquiring, flexible, creative, innovative, tolerant, liberal personality." Postman, in Conserving, is more modest but no less insistent. The schools must provide a thermostatic balance against the media culture so that children will have the "sane management of their information life." Schools should, as much as possible, become the conservers of everything the media culture disdains: subject matter, words, reason, hierarchy, coherence, quality. Schools, in short, should teach children not to bow to any tyranny, political or otherwise, and actually question the culture in which they reside, weighing for themselves the validity of what they see.
If this picture of the child's weakness is true, and I think it is, then this brings us to a question not often asked, or if asked, not clearly apprehended: What must the goals of a democratic mass education system be? Stated like this, the question is unanswerable. But there is another way to phrase the question. In a recent article in the Atlantic Monthly, Richard Hawley said that the teacher's only sustaining motive for teaching is love of learners. Assuming that parents also feel that way about their children, what Postman and Weingartner offer is a way for this love to be institutionalized without its urgency being diluted or obscured. If we act to make people good questioners, "crap-detectors," then we can subsume all of the usual educational concerns, such as grammar, spelling, testing, and so on, into a more coherent strategy aimed at girding a child to take on a world in rapid flux. Teaching children to be questioners, to have balance and resource, will not make them atomized and isolated, morally or culturally, despite what many "back to basic" adherents believe. If anything, the children will truly share the values of the society instead of merely receive them at graduation because those values will be their own property, weighed and judge and evaluated. Both these books should be taken together, not because they provide blueprints, but because they provide a better question: not, What should the goals of the mass education system be?, but, How can the system best love its students? The answer to that question may open up our children.