kebaux

Chapter 1: The Necessity of Gods

Of course, there are many learnings that are little else but a mechanical skill, and in such cases, there well may be a best way. But to become a different person because of something you have learned - to appropriate an insight, a concept, a vision, so that your world is altered - that is a different matter. For that to happen, you need a reason. And this is the metaphysical problem I speak of.

A reason, as I use the word here, is different from a motivation. Within the context of schooling, motivation refers to a temporary psychic event in which curiosity is aroused and attention is focused. I do not mean to disparage it. But it must not be confused with a reason for being in a classroom, for listening to a teacher, for taking an examination, for doing homework, for putting up with school even if you are not motivated.

Our genius lies in our capacity to make meaning through the creation of narratives that give point to our labors, exalt our history, elucidate the present, and give direction to our future. To do their work, such narratives do not have to be “true” in a scientific sense. There are many enduring narratives whose details include things that are false to observable fact. The purpose of a narrative is to give meaning to the world, not to describe it scientifically. The measure of a narrative’s “truth” or “falsity” is in its consequences: Does it provide people with a sense of personal identity, a sense of community life, a basis for moral conduct, explanations of that which cannot be known?

Without a narrative, life has no meaning. Without meaning, learning has no purpose. Without a purpose, schools are houses of detention, not attention.

It is worth noting of this god that its first storytellers - Descartes, Bacon, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton, for example - did not think of their story as a replacement for the great Judeo-Christian narrative, but as an extension of it. In fact, the point has been made more than once that the great age of science was based on a belief in a God who was himself a scientist and technician, and who would therefore approve of a civilization committed to such an enterprise.

To be able to hold comfortably in one’s mind the validity and usefulness of two contradictory truths is the source of tolerance, openness, and most important, a sense of humor, which is the greatest enemy of fanaticism.

… the idea of public education depends absolutely on the existence of shared narratives and the exclusion of narratives that lead to alienation and divisiveness. What makes public schools public is not so much that the schools have common goals but that the students have common gods (narratives). The reason for this is that public education does not serve a public. It creates a public. And in creating the right kind of public, the schools contribute towards strengthening the spiritual basis of the American Creed. That is how Jefferson understood it, how Horace Mann understood it, how John Dewey understood it. And, in fact, there is no other way to understand it. The question is not, Does or doesn’t public schooling create a public? The question is, What kind of public does it create? A conglomerate of self-indulgent consumers? Angry, soulless, directionless masses? Indifferent, confused citizens? Or a public imbued with confidence, a sense of purpose, a respect for learning, and tolerance? The answer to this question has nothing whatever to do with computers, with testing, with teacher accountability, with class size, and with the other details of managing schools. The right answer depends on two things, and two things alone: the existence of shared narratives and that capacity of such narratives to provide an inspired reason for schooling.

Chapter 2: Some Gods That Fail

Having once been president of Czechoslovakia, and having lost the Slovaks to their own gods, Havel knows, better than anyone, that the almost worldwide return to “tribalism” signifies a search to recover a source of transcendent identity and values. He also knows, as many others do, how dangerous such searches can be, which is why no one need be surprised by the rise i the west of skinheads, who have revived the symbols and programs of Nazism, or, as I write, the emerging popularity in Russia of Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the “Russian Hitler,” who promises the masses a future more fully articulated than a conversion to a market economy. Zhirinovsky takes his story from hell, but we must grant him this: He knows as well as Havel that people need gods as much as food.

As Theodore Roszak has written: “Too much apparatus, like too much bureaucracy, only inhibits the natural flow [of teaching and learning]. Free human dialogue, wandering wherever the agility of the mind allows, lies at the heart of education. If teachers do not have the time, the incentive, or the wit to provide that; if students are too demoralized, bored or distracted to muster the attention their teachers need of them, then that is the educational problem which has to be solved - and solved from inside the experience of the teachers and the students.”

Generally, young people have too much curiosity about the world and far too much vitality to be attracted to an idea that reduces them to a single dimension. I did know a youngster once - he was in the second grade - who, upon being asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, answered without hesitation, “An orthodontist.” It is hard to imagine a more depressing answer. It is unnatural for children to regard themselves as economic units except under extreme circumstances, and probably not even then. Nonetheless, since his parent had clearly put that idea into his head, I assume they would have approved. Many parents, in fact, are apt to like the idea of school as a primary training ground for future employment, as do many corporate executives. This is why the story of Economic Utility is told and retold in television commercials and political speeches as the reason why children should go to school, and stay in school, and why schools should receive public support.

But I find it especially revealing that in the preceding scenario, we have an example of a technological solution to a psychological problem that would seem to be exceedingly serious. We are presented with a student who is “bored with the real world.” What does it mean to say someone is bored with the real world, especially one so young? Can a journey into virtual reality cure such a problem? And if it can, will our troubled youngster want to return to the real world? Confronted with a student who is bored with the real world, I don’t think we can get away so easily by making available a virtual reality physics library.

But like all important technologies of the past, they are Faustian bargains, giving and taking away, sometimes in equal measure, sometimes more in one way than the other. It is strange - indeed, shocking - that with the twenty-first century so close on our heels, we can still talk of new technologies as if they were unmixed blessings, gifts, as it were, from the gods. Don’t we all know what the combustion engine has done for us and against us? What television is doing for us and against us? At the very least, what we need to discuss about Little Eva, Young John, and McIntosh’s trio is what they will lose, and what we will lose, if they enter a world in which computer technology is their chief source of motivation, authority, and apparently, psychological sustenance.

Chapter 3 - Some New Gods That Fail

These are serious matters, and they need to be discussed by those who actually know something about children from the planet Earth, and whose vision of children’s needs, and the needs of a society, go beyond thinking of school mainly as a place for the convenient distribution of information. Schools are not now and have never been chiefly about getting information to children. That has been on the schools’ agenda, of course, but it has always been way down on the list. In a moment, I will mention a few school functions that are higher, but here it needs saying that for technological Utopians, the computer vaults information access to the top. This reshuffling of priorities comes, one might say, at a most inopportune time. The problem of giving people greater access to more information, faster, more conveniently, and in more diverse forms was the main technological thrust of the nineteenth century. Some folks haven’t noticed it, but that problem was largely solved, so that for almost one hundred years, there has been more information available to the young outside the school than inside. That fact did not make the schools obsolete, and it does not make them obsolete now. Yes, it is true that Little Eva, the insomniac from Mars, could turn on an algebra lesson, thanks to the computer, in the wee hours of the morning. She could also, if she wished, read a book or magazine, watch television, pop a video into the VCR, turn on the radio, or listen to music. All of this she could have done before the computer. The computer does not solve any problem she has but exacerbates one. For Little Eva’s problem is not how to get access to a well-structured algebra lesson, but what to do with all the information available to her during the day, as well as during sleepless nights. Perhaps this is why she couldn’t sleep in the first place. Little Eva, like the rest of us, is overwhelmed by information. She lives in a culture which has 260,000 billboards, 17,000 newspapers, 12,000 periodicals, 27,000 video outlets for renting tapes, 400 million television sets, and well over 500 million radios, not including those in automobiles. There are 40,000 new book titles published every year, and each day 41 million photographs are taken. And, thanks to the computer, over 60 billion pieces of advertising junk mail arrive in our mailboxes every year. Everything from telegraphy and photography in the nineteenth century to the silicon chip in the twentieth has amplified the din of information intruding on Little Eva’s consciousness. From millions of sources all over the globe, through every possible channel and medium - light waves, air waves, ticker tapes, computer banks, telephone wires, television cables, satellites, and printing presses - information pours in. Behind it in every imaginable form of storage - on paper, on video, on audiotape, on discs, film, and silicon chips - is an even greater volume of information waiting to be retrieved. In the face of this, we might ask, What can schools do for Little Eva besides making still more information available? If there is nothing, then new technologies will indeed make schools obsolete. But in fact, there is plenty.

One thing that comes to mind, of which something will be said later in the book, is to provide her with a serious form of technology education, something quite different from instruction in using computers to process information, which, it strikes me, is a trivial thing to do, for two reasons. In the first place, approximately 35 million people have already learned how to use computers without the benefit of school instruction. If the schools do nothing, most of the population will know how to use computers in the next ten years, just as most of the population learned how to drive cars without school instruction. In the second place, what we needed to know about cars - as we need to know about computers, television, and other important technologies - is not how to use them but how they use us. In the case of cars, what we needed to think about in the early twentieth century was not how to drive them, but what they would do to our air, our landscape, our social relations, our family life, and our cities. Suppose that in 1946, we had started to address similar questions about television: What would be its effects on our political institutions, our psychic habits, our children, our religious conceptions, our economy? Wouldn’t we be better positioned today to control television’s massive assault on American culture.

I am talking here about making technology itself an object of inquiry, so that Little Eva and Young John in using technologies will not be used or abused by them, so that Little Eva and Young John become more interested in asking questions about the computer than in getting answers from it.

If one reads the first chapter of Robert Fulghum’s All I Ever Really Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, one will find an elegant summary of a few things Ravitchs scenario has left out. They include learning the following lessons: share everything, play fair, don’t hit people, put things back where you found them, clean up your own mess, wash your hands before you eat, and, of course, flush. The only thing wrong with Fulghum’s idea is that no one actually has learned all these things at kindergarten’s end. We have ample evidence that it takes many years of teaching these values in school before they are accepted and internalized. That is why it won’t do for children to learn in isolation. The point is to place them in a setting that emphasizes collaboration, as well as sensitivity to and responsibility for others. That is also why schools require children to be in a certain place at a certain time and to follow certain rules, such as raising their hands when they wish to speak, not talking when others are talking, not chewing gum, not leaving until the bell rings, and exhibiting patience toward slower learners. This process is called making civilized people. The god of Technology does not appear interested in this function of schools. At least, it does not come up much when technology’s virtues are enumerated.

I have before me an account of a 1994 Carnegie Corporation Report, produced by the National Center for Children in Poverty. It states that in 1960, only 5 percent of our children were born to unmarried mothers. In 1990, the figure was 28 percent. In 1960, 7 percent of our children under three lived with one parent. In 1990, 27 percent. In 1960, less than 1 percent of our children under eighteen experienced the divorce of their parents. In 1990, the figure was almost 50 percent.

Narratives are not exactly histories at all, but a special genre of storytelling that uses history to give form to ideals. “The purpose of myth,” Claude Levi-Strauss reminds us, “is to provide a model capable of overcoming a contradiction.” That is why no serious harm is done to the great story of Christianity by revealing that a particular Pope was an ambitious, unscrupulous schemer. Neither is it lethal to speak of the Inquisition. The reality is that there has never been a Chirstian - not even St. Francis or Mother Teresa - who has lived in every particular a Chirstian life. The story of Christianity is only in part a history of Christians. It is largely the story of the poignant struggle of people to give life to a set of transcendent ideals. That they have stumbled on the way is embarrassing and sometimes shameful, but it does not discredit the purpose of the story, which in fact is about the discrepancy between reality and the ideal.

The argument is sometimes made that a “multicultural” curriculum is justified where an entire student population is African-American (or Mexican or Puerto Rican), as is often the case in our large cities. This might make sense if it were the task of public schools to create a public of hyphenated Americans. But our students already come to school as hyphenated Americans. The task of the public schools, properly conceived, is to erase the hyphens or to make them less distinct. The idea of pa public school is not to make blacks black, or Koreans Korean, or Italians Italian, but to make Americans. The alternative leads, quite obviously, to the “Balkanization” of public schools - which is to say, their end. An Afrocentric curriculum for Afro-Americans? Then why not a Sinocentric curriculum for the Chinese? An Italocentric curriculum for Italians? A Judeocentric curriculum for Jews? A Teutocentric for Germans? A Graecocentric for Greeks?

This path not only leads to the privatizing of schooling but to a privatizing of the mind, and it makes the creation of a public mind quite impossible.

Chapter 4: Gods That May Serve

We have here, then a narrative of extraordinary potential: the story of human beings as stewards of the Earth, caretakers of a vulnerable space capsule. It is a relatively new narrative, not fully developed and fraught with uncertainties and even contradictions. (For example, I hesitate to invoke the image of the starship Enterprise from Star Trek, because for all its dramatic appeal, Captain Kirk is essentially a benevolent tyrant, democracy being rejected as an appropriate form of social organization for penetrating the “final frontier.”) Nonetheless, the story of Spaceship Earth has the power to bind people. It makes the idea of racism both irrelevant and ridiculous, and it makes clear the interdependence of human beings and their need for solidarity. If any part of the spaceship is poisoned, then all suffer - which is to say that the extinction of the rain forest is not a Brazilian problem; the pollution of the oceans ins not a Miami problem; the depletion of the ozone layer is not an Australian problem. It follows from this, of course, that genocide is not a Bosnian problem, hunger not a Somalian problem, political oppression not a Chinese problem. “Never send to know for whom the bell tolls,” wrote John Donne. “It tolls for thee.” If ever there was a narrative to animate that idea, the Earth as our one and only spaceship is it."

This is the story: If perfection is to be found anyplace in the universe, it is assumed to exist in God or gods. There may have been a time when human beings were perfect, but at some point, for various reasons, their powers were diminished, so that they must live forever in a state of imperfect understanding. Indeed, for us to believe that we are godlike, or perfect, is among the serious sins of which we are capable. The Greeks called the sin “hubris.” The Christians call it “pride.” Scientists call it “dogmatism.”

The most explicit and sophisticated example of how this narrative improves the human condition is, of course, science. This would hardly be wroth noting except for the fact that in the popular mind, and certainly in school, science is thought to be something other than a method of correcting our mistakes - namely, a source of ultimate truth. Such a belief is, in itself, and instance of the sin of pride, and no self-respecting scientist will admit to holding it. “The scientific method,” Thomas Henry Huxley once wrote, “is nothing but the normal working of the human mind.” That is to say, when the mind is working; that is to say further, when it is s engaged in correcting its mistakes.

In the last program of his television series, Bronowski is seen standing in a pond on the grounds of the old Auschwitz concentration camp. Near-overwrought by what Auschwitz symbolizes, he resorts, as so many have done before him, to a religious metaphor. “Into this pond,” he says, “were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma… When people believe they have absolute knowledge… this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.”

Our history allows us to claim that the basic question posed by the American experiment is: Can a nation be formed, maintained, and preserved on the principle of continuous argumentation? The emphasis is as much on “continuous” as on “argumentation.” We know what happens when argument ceases - blood happens, as in our Civil War, when we stopped arguing with one another; or in several other wars, when we stopped arguing with other people; or in a war or two when, perhaps, no argument was possible.

Of course, all the arguments have a theme that is made manifest in a series of questions: What is freedom? What are its limits? What is a human being? What are the obligations of citizenship? What is meant by democracy? And so on. Happily, Americans are neither the only nor the first people to argue these questions, which means we have found answers, and may continue to find them, in the analects of Confucius, the commandments of Moses, the dialogues of Plato, the aphorisms of Jesus, the instructions of the Koran, the speeches of Milton, the plays of Shakespeare, the essays of Voltaire, the prophecies of Hegel, the manifestos of Marx, the sermons of Martin Luther King, Jr., and any other source where such questions have been seriously addressed. But which ones are the right answers? We don’t know. There’s the rub, and the beauty and the value of the story. So we argue and experiment and complain, and grieve, and rejoice, and argue some more, without end. Which means that in this story we need conceal nothing from ourselves; no shame need ensure forever; no accomplishment merits excessive pride. All is fluid and subject to change, to better arguments, to the results of future experiments.

This, it seems to me, is a fine and noble story to offer as a reason for schooling: to provide our youth with the knowledge and will to participate in the great experiment; to teach them how to argue, and to help them discover what questions are worth arguing about; and, of course, to make sure they know what happens when arguments cease. No one is excluded from the story. Every group has made good arguments, and bad ones. All points of view are admissible. The only thing we have to fear is that someone will insist on putting in an exclamation point when we are not yet finished.

There is, in addition, another reason for emphasizing diversity, one of which we may be skeptical. I refer to the psychological argument that claims the self-esteem of some students may be raised by focusing their attention on the accomplishments of those of their own kind, especially if the teachers are of their own kind. I cannot say if this is so or not, but it needs to be pointed out that while a diminished self-esteem is no small matter, one of the main purposes of public education - it is at the core of a common culture - is the idea that students must esteem something other than self. This is a point Cornel West has stressed in addressing both whites and blacks. For example, after reviewing the pernicious effects of race consciousness, which include poverty and paranoia, he ends his book Race Matters by saying, “We simply cannot enter the twenty-first century at each other’s throats… We are at a crucial crossroads in the history of this nation - and we either hang together by combating these forces that divide and degrade us or we hang separately.” I take this to be a heartfelt plea for the necessity of providing ourselves and especially our young with a comprehensive narrative that makes a constructive and unifying use of diversity.

The lesson here is that sameness is the enemy of vitality and creativity. From a practical point of view, we can see this in every field of human activity. Stagnation occurs when nothing new and different comes from outside the system. The English Language is a superb example of this point; so is Latin. English, in a word, is the most diverse language on earth, and because of that, its vitality and creativity are assured. Latin, on the other hand, is dead. It is dead because it is no longer open to change, especially change from outside itself. Those who speak and write it, speak and write it as has been done for centuries. Other languages drew upon Latin for strength, picked on its flesh and bones, created themselves from its nourishment. But Latin was not nourished in return, which is why its usefulness is so limited.

Whenever a language or an art form becomes fixed in time and impermeable, drawing only on its own resources, it is punished by entropy. Whenever difference is allowed, the result is growth and strength. There is no art form flourishing today, or that has flourished in the past, that has not done so on the wings of diversity - American musicians borrowing from African rhythms, South American architects employing Scandinavian ideas, German painters finding inspiration in Egyptian art, French filmmakers influences by Japanese techniques.

Diversity does not mean the disintegration of standards, is not an argument against standards, does not lead to a chaotic, irresponsible relativism. It is an argument for the growth and malleability of standards, a growth that takes place across time and space that is given form by differences of gender, religion, and all the other categories of humanity.

Thus, the story of how language, art, politics, science, and most expressions of human activity have grown, been vitalized and enriched through the intermingling of different ideas is one way to organize learning and to provide the young with a sense of pride in being human. In this story, we do not read Gabriel Garcia Marquez to make Hispanic students happy, but because of the excellence of his novels. That Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay were women not irrelevant, but we ask students to know their work because their poems are good, not to strike a blow for feminism. We read Whitman and Langston Hughes for the same reason, not because the former was a homosexual and the latter African-American. Do we learn about Einstein because he was Jewish? Marie Curie because she was Polish? Aristotle because he as Greek? Confucius because he was Chinese? Cervantes because he was handicapped? Do we listen to the music of Grieg because he was a short Norwegian, or Beethoven because he was a deaf German? In the story of diversity, we do not learn of these people to advance a political agenda or to raise the level of students’ self-esteem. We learn about these people for two reasons: because they demonstrate how the vitality and creativity of humanity depend on diversity, and because they have set the standards to which civilized people adhere. The law of diversity thus makes intelligent humans of us all.

Language allows us to name things, but, more than that, it also suggests what feelings we are obliged to associate with the things we name. Even more, language controls what things shall be named, what things we ought to pay attention to. Language even tells us what things are things. In English, “lightning” is a thing, and so is a “wave,” and an “explosion.” Even ideas are made to appear as things. English makes us believe, for example, that “time” is moving in a straight line from “yesterday” to “today” to “tomorrow.” If we ask ourselves, Where did yesterday go? Where is tomorrow waiting?, we may get a sense of how much these words are ideas more than things and of how much the world as we imagine it as a product of how we describe. There is no escaping the fact that when we form a sentence, we are creating a world. We are organizing it, making it pliable, understandable, useful. In the beginning, there was the word, and in the end, as well.

The profligate use of language is not merely a social offense but a threat to the ways in which we have constructed our notions of good and bad, permissible and impermissible. To use language to defend the indefensible (as George Orwell claimed some of us habitually do), to use language to transform certain human beings into nonpersons, to use language to lie and to blue distinctions, to say more than you know or can know, to take the name of truth in vain - these are offenses against a moral order, and they can, incidentally, be committed with excellent pronunciation or with impeccable grammar and spelling. Our engagement with language almost always has a moral dimension, a point that has been emphasized by every great Philosopher from Confucius and Socrates to Bertrand Russell and John Dewey. How is it possible that at teacher, at any level, could miss it?

All of this is part of the great story of how humans use language to transform the world and then, in turn, are transformed by their own invention. The story, of course, did not end with the invention of speech. In fact, it begins there, which is what Mrs. Soybel may have meant in saying speech made us human. The story continued to unfold with fantastic twists as human beings invented surrogate languages to widen their scope: ideographs, phonetic writing, then printing, then telegraphy, photography, radio, movies, television, and computers, each of which transformed the world - sliced it, framed it, enlarged it, diminished it. To say all of this that we are merely toolmakers is to miss the point of the story. We are the world makers, and the word weavers. That is what makes us smart, and dumb; moral and immoral; tolerant and bigoted. That is what makes us human. Is it possible to tell this story to our young in school, to have them investigate how we advance our humanity by controlling the codes with which we address the world, to have them learn what happens when we lose control of our own inventions? This may be the greatest story untold. In school.

Chapter 5 - The Spaceship Earth

… for people in distress will sometimes prefer a problem that is familiar to a solution that is not.

… the moral I prefer is that a sense of responsibility for the planet is born from a sense of responsibility for one’s own neighborhood. It is hard to imagine that anyone who fouls his or her own nest could care very much about the tree in which it is lodged. Thus, the fable suggests that we must begin with the story of the Earth as our spaceship by investing ways to engage students in the care of their own schools, neighborhoods, and towns.

Students will have more of their lives to familiarize themselves with the world of work - work is something they will have to do. Caring for their environment is not something they will have to do, and, one fears, most don’t. The purpose of the activities suggested by the fable is to introduce the young to their responsibilities for the planet, beginning with the buildings and streets that are their portion of the planet. The idea is to show that the environment is not something one is given, take it or leave it. The fact is that we cannot leave it, and neither should we take it. Rather, we must make it. And to make it requires a consciousness of our interdependence, as well as an encouragement and legitimization of the effort.

But that message implies still another - that we cannot afford to waste the energy and potential idealism of the young.

… significant learning often produces confusion and even sadness, since knowledge does not always give support to cherished beliefs. I even quotes from Ecclesiastes (1:18) to provide some comfort: “For in much wisdom is much grief; and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.”

Chapter 6 - The Fallen Angel

We are all in need of remedial work, all the time. Can you imagine a school organized around this principle - that whatever ideas we have, we are in some sense wrong? We may have insufficient facts to support an idea; or some of the facts we have may be incorrect, perhaps generated by a festering emotion; or the conclusions we have drawn may not be entirely logical; or some definition we are employing may not be applicable; or we may be merely repeating an idea we have heard expressed by some authority and have not examined its implications carefully. Can you imagine schools whose epistemological story does not aim at producing a flotilla of fanatics, but, rather, people who proceed to learn with full consciousness of their own fallibility, as well as the fallibility of others?

Such books are not normally included as part of the education of teachers. Were they to be used, teachers would be likely to come to three powerful conclusions. The first is that everyone makes errors, including those who write about error. None of us is ever free of it, and we are most seriously endangered when we think we are. That there is an almost infinite supply of error, including our own, should provide teachers with a sense of humility and, incidentally, assurance that they will become obsolete.

The second conclusion is that error is reducible. At present, teachers consume valuable time in pointless debates over whether or not intelligence is fixed, whether it is mostly genetic or environmental, what kinds of intelligences exist, and even how much intelligence one or another different race has. Such debates about error are entirely unnecessary. Error is a form of behavior. It is not something we have; it is something we do. Unlike intelligence, it is neither a metaphor nor a hypothetical construct whose presence is inferred by a score on a test. We can see error, read it, hear it. And it is possible to reduce its presence.

The third conclusion is that error is mostly committed with the larynx, tongue, lips, and teeth - which is to say, error is chiefly embodied in talk. it is true enough that our ways of talking are controlled by the ways we manage our minds, and no one is quite sure what “mind” is. But we are sure that the main expression of mind is sentences. When we are thinking, we are mostly arranging sentences in our heads. When we are making errors, we are arranging erroneous sentences. Even when we make a nonverbal error, we have preceded the action by talking to ourselves in such a way as to make us think the act is correct. The word, in a word, brings forth the act. This fact provides teachers with a specific subject matter in which they may become “experts”: Their expertise would reside in their knowledge of those ways of talking that lead to unnecessary mischief, failure, misunderstanding, and even pain.

He meant to say that as humans we will always have difficulty understanding one another, will always bicker about the meaning of words, always claim we have been injured by another. There is nothing that happens among humans that is not instigated, negotiated, clarified, or mystified by language, including our attempts to acquire knowledge. The Greeks, and, indeed, the medieval Schoolmen, understood well something we seem to have forgotten - namely, that all subjects are forms of discourse and taht therefore almost all education is a form of language education. Knowledge of a subject mostly means knowledge of the language of that subject. Biology, after all, is not plants and animals; it is a special language employed to speak about plants and animals. History is not events that once occurred; it is a language describing and interpreting events, according to rules established by historians. Astronomy is not planets and stars but a special way of talking about planets and stars, quite different from the language poets use to talk about them.

And so a student must know the language of a subject, but that is only the beginning. For it is not sufficient to know the definition of a nouse, or a gene, or a molecule. One must also know what a definition is. It is not sufficient to know the right answers. One must also know the questions that produced them. Indeed, one must also know what a question is, for not every sentence that ends with a rising intonation or begins with an interrogative is necessarily a question. There are sentences taht look like questions but cannot generate any meaningful answers, and, as Francis Bacon said, if they linger in our minds, they become obstructions to clear thinking. One must also know what a metaphor is, and what is the relationship between words and the things they describe. In short, one must have some knowledge of a metalanguage - a language about language - to recognize error, to defend oneself against the seductions of eloquence.

To teach about the atom without including Democritus in the conversation, electricity without Faraday, political science without Aristotle or Machiavelli, astronomy without Ptolemy, is to deny our students access to the Great Conversation. “To remain ignorant of things that happened before you were born is to remain a child,” Cicero said. He then added, “What is a human life worth unless it is incorporated into the lives of one’s ancestors and set in an historical context?” When we incorporate the lives of our ancestors in our education, we discover that some of them were great error-makers, some great error-correctors, some both. And in discovering this, we accomplish three things. First, we help students see that knowledge is a stage in human development, with a past and a future. Second, we acquaint students with the people and ideas that comprise “cultural literacy” - that is to say, give them some understanding of where their ideas come from and how we came by them. And third, we show them that error is no disgrace, that it is the agency through which we increase understanding.

At present, there is very little tolerance for error in the classroom. That is one of the reasons students cheat. it is one of the reasons students are nervous. It is one of the reasons many students are reluctant to speak. it is certainly the reason why students (and the rest of us) fight so hard to justify what they think they know. In varying degrees, being wrong is a disgrace; one pays a heavy price for it. But suppose students found themselves in a place where this was not the case?

Because we are imperfect souls, our knowledge is imperfect. The history of learning is an adventure in overcoming our errors. There is no sin in being wrong. The sin is in our unwillingness to examine our own beliefs, and in believing that our authorities cannot be wrong.

I do not say that the arguments over these questions are (or were) always rational. Behind many of them, there lurks fear or ignorance or (worse) misinformation. But as long as there is argument, there is the possibility of reducing fear, overcoming ignorance, correcting misinformation.

And there is one other point to be made: The approach I have outlined here - the study of the arguments about freedom of expression, about a melting-pot culture, about the meaning of education for an entire population, and about the effects of technology - is not simply a theme around which to organize a school curriculum. I mean to say that this is a powerful story that is at the core of what America is about. The story says that experimenting and arguing is what Americans do. It does not matter if youare unhappy about the way things are. Everybody is unhappy about the way things are. We experiment to make things better, and we argue about what experiments are worthwhile and whether or not those we try are any good. And when we experiment, we make mistakes, and reveal our ignorance, and our timidity, and our naivete. But we go on because we have faith in the future - that we can make better experiments and better arguments. This, it seems to me, is a fine and noble story, and I should not be surprised if students are touched by it and find in it a reason for learning.

Chapter 8 - The Law of Diversity

Among the more controversial efforts along these lines is the attempt by some schools to ensure that students cultivate a deep sense of ethnic pride, a task once undertaken mostly by the family. I have, earlier, revealed that I think this to be a bad idea - to the extent that it subordinates or ignores the essential task of public schools, which is to find and promote large, inclusive narratives for all students to believe in. The principle of diversity is such a narrative and it is sometimes, strangely, confused with the idea of ethnic pride. To promote the understanding of diversity is, in fact, the opposite of promoting ethnic pride. Whereas ethnic pride wants one to turn inward, toward the talents and accomplishments of one’s own group, diversity wants one to turn outward, to ward the talents and accomplishments of all groups. Diversity is the story that tells of how our interactions with many kinds of people make us into what we are. It is a story strongly supported by the facts of human cultures. It does not usurp the function or authority of other social institutions. It does not undermine ethnic pride, but places one’s ethnicity in the context of our common culture. It helps to explain the past, give clarity to the present, and provide guidance for the future. It is, in short, a powerful and inspiring narrative available for use in our public schools.

The point here is that tolerance is irrelevant when there is universal agreement. When there is diversity of opinion, tolerance becomes, if you will, a god to serve. But there are several meanings to the word. I do not have in mind the sort of tolerance characterized by a silent superiority. That is surely better than a Pat Buchanan - like vocal and aggressive superiority. But in the education of our young, we are obliged to do much better. I mean to help promote a variety of tolerance that says, “If I had been raised as you have, if I had been in your situation, if I had been led to respect the symbols you do, then it is very likely I would believe as you do.” This kind of tolerance does not require students to abandon their beliefs, or event to think they are wrong. It requires only that they understand that there are more things about heaven than are dreamt of in their religion.

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.

Chapter 9 - The Word Weavers / The World Makers

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?

Korzybski began his quest to discover the roots of human achievement and failure by identifying a critical functional difference between humans and other forms of life. We are, to use his phrase, “time-binders,” while plants are “chemistry-binders,” and animals are “space-binders.” Chemistry-binding is the capacity to transform sunlight into organic chemical energy; space binding, the capacity to move about and control a physical environment. Hummans have these capacities, too, but are unique in their ability to transport their experience through time. As time-binders, we can accumulate knowledge from the past and communicate what we know to the future. Science-fiction writers need not strain invention in their search for interesting time-transporting machinery. We are the universe’s time machines.

Our principal means of accomplishing the binding of time is the symbol. But our capacity to symbolize is dependent upon and integral to another process, which Korzybski called “abstracting.” Abstracting is the continuous activity of selecting, omitting, and organizing the details of reality so that we experience the world as patterned and coherent. Korzybski shared with Heraclitus the assumption that the world is undergoing continuous change and that no two events are identical. We give stability to our world only through our capacity to re-create it by ignoring differences and attending to similarities. Although we know that we cannot step into the “same” river twice, abstracting allows us to act as if we can. We abstract at the neurological level, at the physiological level, at the perceptual level, at the verbal level; all o four systems of interaction with the world are engaged in selecting data from the world, organizing data, generalizing data. An abstraction, to put it simply, is a kind of summary of what the world is like, a generalization about its structure.

Korzybski might explain the process in the following way: Let us suppose we are confronted by the phenomenon we call a “cup.” We must understand, first of all, that a cup is not a thing, but an event; modern physics tells us that a cup is made of billions of electrons in constant movement, undergoing continuous change. Although none of this activity is perceptible to us, it is important to acknowledge it, because by so doing, we may grasp the idea that the world is not the way we see it. What we see is a summary - an abstraction, if you will - of electronic activity. But even what we can see is not what we do see. No one has ever seen a cup in its entirety, all at once in space-time. We see only parts of wholes. But usually we see enough to allow us to reconstruct the whole and to act as if we know what we are dealing with. Sometimes, such a reconstruction betrays us, as when we lift a cup to sip our coffee and find that the coffee has settled in our lap rather than on our palate. But most of the time, our assumptions about a cup will work, and we carry those assumptions forward in a useful way by the act of naming. Thus we are assisted immeasurably in our evaluations of the world by our language, which provides us with names for the events that confront us and, by our naming them, tells us what to expect and how to prepare ourselves for action.

The naming of things, of course, is an abstraction of a very high order and of crucial importance. By naming an event and categorizing it as a “thing,” we create a vivid and more or less permanent map of what the world is like. But it is a curious map indeed. The word cup, for example, does not in fact denote anything that actually exists in the world. It is a concept, a summary of millions of particular things that have a similar look and function. The word tableware is at a still higher level of abstraction, since it includes not only all the things we normally call cups but also millions of things that look nothing like cups but have a vaguely similar function.

The critical point about our mapping of the world through language is that the symbols we use, whether patriotism and love or cups and spoons, are always at a considerable remove from the reality of the world itself. Although these symbols become part of ourselves - Korzybski believed they become embedded in our neurological and perceptual systems - we must never take them completely for granted. As Korzybski believed they become embedded in our neurological and perceptual systems - we must never take them completely for granted. As Korzybski once remarked, “Whatever we say something is, it is not.”

Thus, we may conclude that humans live in two worlds - the world of events and things, and the world of words about events and things. In considering the relationship between these two worlds, we must keep in mind that language does much more than construct concepts about the events and things in the world; it tells us what sorts of concepts we ought to construct. For we do not have a name for everything that occurs in the world. Languages differ not only in their names for things but in what things they choose to name. Each language, as Edward Sapir observed, constructs reality differently from all the others.

However, Richards provided each group with its first sentence. Group A had to begin with “Language is like a tree”; Group B with “Language is like a river”; Group C with “Language is like a building.” You can imagine, I’m sure, what happened. The paragraphs were strikingly different, with one group writing of roots and branches and organic growth; another of tributaries, streams, and even floods; another of foundations, rooms, and sturdy structures. In the subsequent discussion, we did not bother with the question, Which is the “correct” description? Our discussion centered on how metaphors control what we say, and to what extent what we say controls what we see.

What we are after here is to tell the story of language as an act of creation. This is what Socrates meant when he said, “When the mind is thinking, it is talking to itself.” Twenty-five hundred years later, the great German philologist Max Muller said the same: “… thought cannot exist without signs, and our most important signs are words.”

Technology education is not a technical subject. It is a branch of the humanities. Technical knowledge can be useful, but one does not need to know the physics of television to study the social and political effects of television. One may not own an automobile, or even know how to drive one, but this is no obstacle to observing what the automobile has done to American culture.

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 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.

  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.

Expanding Vocabulary

I mark words in the books I read which either (A) I have not come across or (B) I am familiar with but need a refresher: