With many changes in education slanted towards the needs of the workplace, is true education being betrayed?
One of the most interesting voices in America on the meaning of education - what it is, why it is, what it ought to be - is Neil Postman, who for three decades has written with great understanding about the nature of education in a technological society.
From Teaching as a Subversive Activity on through Amusing Ourselves to Death and The End of Education, he has challenged America to think about the impact of modern consciousness on life, and particularly on education. Throughout, his concern has been to stand against the subtle seductions inherent in our culture's inescapable negotiation with technology, which 'in sum, is both friend and enemy'. And, perhaps, nowhere more so than in schools and schooling.
Surrender to technology
In Technopoly: the surrender of culture to technology, he argues that technology redefines what we mean by religion, art, family, politics, history, truth, privacy, and intelligence, becoming in effect a 'technopoly'. The final chapter suggests that education take up the task of developing 'loving resistance fighters'. Loving because they need to love the best about American society e.g. to understand why the Chinese students built a 'statue of liberty' in Tiananmen Square. Resistance fighters because they need to feel a profound tension with the friend/enemy nature of technopoly, which flourishes in America like nowhere else on earth. Acknowledging that 'in the United States, as Lawrence Cremin once remarked, whenever we need a revolution, we get a new curriculum. And so I shall propose one . . .'.
Postman writes: 'In consideration of the disintegrative power of Technopoly, perhaps the most important contribution schools can make to the education of our youth is to give them a sense of coherence in their studies, a sense of purpose, meaning and interconnectedness in what they learn. Modern secular education is failing not because it doesn't teach who Ginger Rogers, Norman Mailer and a thousand other people are, but because it has no moral, social or intellectual centre. There is no set of ideas or attitudes which permeates all parts of the curriculum. The curriculum is not, in fact, a 'course of study' at all but a meaningless hodgepodge of subjects. It does not even put forward a clear vision of what constitutes an educated person, unless it is a person who possesses 'skills'. In other words, a technocrat's ideal - a person with no commitment and no point of view but with plenty of marketable skills.' To give them a sense of coherence in their studies, a sense of purpose, meaning and interconnectedness in what they learn.
Postman adds his voice to Kundera and Steiner i.e. that the secularist vision of life and education fails because it has no moral, social or intellectual centre. When all is said and done, is it really 'all about bucks, kid . . . and the rest is conversation'? Or is the deeper reality that that moral vision is profoundly immoral, impoverishing individuals and institutions, because it is always and everywhere a 'bonfire of the vanities'?
What does life, and my life, mean anyway? Is truth possible and knowable? On what basis will I decide right and wrong? Students hunger to be taken seriously and to be given time and space within the curricular requirements to explore those questions. If instead they are offered, in Postman's critique, 'marketable skills' - with no moral, social or intellectual centre to give shape and substance to those skills - they have become the 'technocrat's ideal'. That is not a small thing, for persons or polities.
In The abandoned generation: re-thinking higher education, William Willimon and Thomas Naylor, writing out of their long experience at Duke University, argue that institutions of higher education - like their own - naively nurture an academic atmosphere in which an inarticulate but deeply felt nihilism is rampant. Looking at the study hard/play hard ethos, where students link their disciplined study and high hopes for careers marked by power and privilege with nights and weekends of binge drinking, Willimon and Naylor maintain that universities desperately need to recover their sense of calling as settings in which students can pursue questions that matter. In a chapter eerily titled 'Meaninglessness', they quote Edward Long Jr., whose book Higher education as a moral enterprise, contends: 'Higher education dares not become merely the avenue to success; it must be the gateway for responsibility. It should not be concerned with competence alone, but with commitment to civic responsibility. An academic degree should not be a hunting licence only for self-advancement, but an indication of abilities to seek, cultivate, and sustain a richer common weal. It is not enough to achieve cultural literacy; we must engender social concern. It is not enough merely to open the mind; it is necessary to cultivate moral intentionality in a total selfhood.'
What is the point?
What is it that really matters? And how is that sense of what really matters - moral meaning - formed during the critical years between adolescence and adulthood? For those whose pathway leads them into the world of the university, there are decisions made during that time about what is most important that are determinative for the rest of life. In the modern world, the years between 18-25 are a time for the settling of one's convictions about meaning and morality: Why do I get up in the morning? What do I do after I get up in the morning? One then settles into life with those convictions as the shaping presuppositions and principles of one's life.
This notion is not new; in fact it is as old as our knowledge of education. The time-span of these critical years has varied over the centuries, as our civilisation has moved from a primarily agrarian culture to a primarily industrial culture. But the movement from childhood to adulthood has been worthy of every culture's greatest attention, and perhaps its finest education. From the beth midrash (the 'house of study' for the most advanced students) of the Hebrew culture, to the Greek gymnasiums and museums (early forums for higher education in the 2nd and 3rd century BC), to the Roman collegia iuvenum ('where gilded youths could learn how to live' in the 1st century BC), onto the Christian schola of the 6th century (the episcopal school founded by Gregory of Tours after the collapse of Rome), there has been a long history of understanding that there are in fact critical years in human life and learning. They are years of deciding how one will make sense of life over the course of life.
T.S. Eliot
In a brilliant series of lectures given at the University of Chicago in 1950, T.S. Eliot offered his own answer to this perennial question. Published as The Aims of Education, he wrote: 'But we can have no clear or useful idea of what education is unless we have some notion of what this training is for. Thus we come to inquire what is the purpose of education, and here we get deeply into the area of conflict . . . I do not suggest for a moment that we should abandon the attempt to define the purpose of education (and the definition of the purpose is an inevitable step from the definition of the word itself).
If we see a new and mysterious machine, I think that the first question we ask is: 'What is that machine for?' and afterwards we ask: 'How does it do it?' But the moment we ask about the purpose of anything, we may be involving ourselves in asking about the purpose of everything. If we define education, we are led to ask: 'What is Man?', and if we define the purpose of education, we are committed to the question: 'What is Man for?' Every definition of the purpose of education, therefore, implies some concealed, or rather implicit philosophy or theology. In choosing one definition rather than another, we are attracted to the one because it fits in better with our answer to the question: 'What is Man for?'.'
Eliot's point is that education, always and everywhere, is about the deepest questions of life and the world. The great tragedy is that in the 20th century, labouring under the myth of neutrality, education in the West attempts to offer a value-free answer to the questions: 'What is Man?' and 'What is Man for?'. Not only is it philosophically and pedagogically impossible to do so - which creates its own problems in terms of truthfulness about what is actually happening in education - but its fruit is Postman's technocrat's ideal, i.e. 'a person with no commitment and no point of view but with plenty of marketable skills'.
Making sense of life
But lest we lose sight of what is at stake . . . Not so long ago, I was riding on Washington's Metro one afternoon, reading The book of laughter and forgetting by Kundera. One of the unspoken protocols of Metro riding is that one does not speak to strangers! How many times have I seen someone's eyes gaze away, rather than meet mine as a basis for conversation? Deep into my own little universe of an open book, I could hardly believe it when someone appeared to be speaking to me. As I came to consciousness, I heard him again say: 'I read a novel by Kundera when I was in college.'
I looked beside me to find someone from Generation X. In his 20s, he was like so many who live and work in Washington. Well-dressed, good-looking, athletic, he was like seeming thousands who swarm into the nation's capital year after year.
I asked him what he had read and what he thought of it. As we talked, I eventually asked him what had brought him to Washington and what he was doing. He had come several years earlier, had earned the much-coveted position 'on the Hill' and had worked very hard for two years. 'But I just got worn out,' he told me, 'the bureaucracy is awful. For someone like me who really wanted to get things done . . . well, it just can't happen.' My heart plummeted, as I know too well how hard it is -especially for those full of youthful energy and idealism. His face brightened almost immediately though, and he went on: 'I've now got the job of my dreams. I'm off the Hill and over in Georgetown, working for a sports marketing firm. The challenges are big,' and he smiled, 'and of course, there's a lot of money to be made.'
Not only was it obvious that he had not taken to heart his reading of Kundera, which in and of itself is not tragic; but it was also obvious that whatever his convictions about life and the world he had left the university with at age 21, at age 25 he had given up on them as a way of making sense of his life. Like countless knights before him, he had charged into the world with lance raised, thinking: 'Political responsibility, I take thee up.' But after a relatively short fight, he came off the Hill, lance broken, shaking his head, muttering: 'It's a dirty world, politics.'
From Stephen Garben's book The Fabric of Faithfulness (IVP, USA). Taken from Critique, a magazine published by Ransom Fellowship, 1150 West Center Street, Rochester, MN 55902, USA, and reprinted with the permission of the author.
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