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A review by skylarh
The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School by Neil Postman
3.0
I can’t recall what prompted me to pick up this book in the first place. It’s out of date, with a copyright of 1995, but in reading it, I am reminded that the more things change, the more they stay the same. The trends in education he discusses have only become exaggerated. The book is a bit all-over-the-place and doesn’t always seem to stick to the point. That said, his theme seems to be that public education must have a purpose, a narrative, a moral goal of sorts and that the modern gods of education (collectivism, technology, and economic utility) are insufficient purposes. If public education does not find a sufficient sustaining purpose, it will be supplanted by private education, subsumed by technology, or taken over by corporations. Public education must provide moral guidance, a sense of community, and explanation of the past, clarity to the present, and a sense of hope for the future. He’s less clear about how public education should do that.
Postman emphasizes that the thirst for absolute knowledge (which he means as something like dogmatism) is bad for education. But so too is the ethnic separatism that was being encouraged in the 90s and has only grown today. “Every school,” he writes, “save those ripped asunder by separatist ideology, tires to tell a story about America that will enable students to feel a sense of national pride. Students deserve that, and their parents expect it. The question is how to do this and yet avoid indifference, on the one hand, and a psychopathic nationalism, on the other….I propose, then, the story of America as an experiment, a perpetual and fascinating question mark.”
Almost tangentially, he proposes improving teaching by getting rid of all textbooks (this has more or less happened in my kids’ schools, and I don’t see that it has led to improvement in their educations) and by having science teachers teach English and history teachers teach math and such for an experimental period because they’ll have a better idea of what it’s like to be a student struggling to learn a subject if it’s not their subject. That’s a nice idea in theory but in practice it would probably be disastrous.
Postman emphasizes that the thirst for absolute knowledge (which he means as something like dogmatism) is bad for education. But so too is the ethnic separatism that was being encouraged in the 90s and has only grown today. “Every school,” he writes, “save those ripped asunder by separatist ideology, tires to tell a story about America that will enable students to feel a sense of national pride. Students deserve that, and their parents expect it. The question is how to do this and yet avoid indifference, on the one hand, and a psychopathic nationalism, on the other….I propose, then, the story of America as an experiment, a perpetual and fascinating question mark.”
Almost tangentially, he proposes improving teaching by getting rid of all textbooks (this has more or less happened in my kids’ schools, and I don’t see that it has led to improvement in their educations) and by having science teachers teach English and history teachers teach math and such for an experimental period because they’ll have a better idea of what it’s like to be a student struggling to learn a subject if it’s not their subject. That’s a nice idea in theory but in practice it would probably be disastrous.