• originally from The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School

In considering how to conduct the schooling of our young, adults have two problems to solve. One is an engineering problem; the other, a metaphysical one. The engineering problem, as all such problems are, is essentially technical. It is the problem of the means by which the young will become learned. It addresses the issues of where and when things will be done, and, of course, how learning is supposed to occur. The problem is not a simple one, and any self-respecting book on schooling must offer some solutions to it.

But it is important to keep in mind that the engineering of learning is very often puffed up, assigned an importance it does not deserve. As an old saying goes, "There are one and twenty ways to sing tribal lays, and all of them are correct." So it is with learning. There is no one who can say that this or that is the best way to know things, to feel things, to see things, to remember things, to apply things, to connect things and that no other will do as well. In fact, to make such a claim is to trivialize learning, to reduce it to a mechanical skill.

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.

This kind of reason is somewhat abstract, not always present in one's consciousness, not at all easy to describe. And yet for all that, without it schooling does not work. For school to make sense, the young, their parents, and their teachers must have a god to serve, or, even better, several gods. If they have none, school is pointless. Nietzsche's famous aphorism is relevant here: "He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how." This applies as much to learning as to living.

To put it simply, there is no surer way to bring an end to schooling than for it to have no end. By a god to serve, I do not necessarily mean the God, who is supposed to have created the world and whose moral injunctions as presented in sacred texts have given countless people a reason for living and, more to the point, a reason for learning. In the Western world, beginning in the thirteenth century and for five hundred years afterward, that God was sufficient justification for the founding of institutions of learning, from grammar schools, where children were taught to read the Bible, to great universities, where men were trained to be ministers of God. Even today, there are some schools in the West, and most in the Islamic world, whose central purpose is to serve and celebrate the glory of God. Wherever this is the case, there is no school problem, and certainly no school crisis. There may be some disputes over what subjects best promote piety, obedience, and faith; there may be students who are skeptical, even teachers who are nonbelievers. But at the core of such schools, there is a transcendent, spiritual idea that gives purpose and clarity to learning. Even the skeptics and nonbelievers know why they are there, what they are supposed to be learning, and why they are resistant to it. Some also know why they should leave.

A few years ago, I had a sad conversation with a brilliant and popular philosophy professor at Principia College, in Elsah, Illinois. Principia was and, as far as I know, still is, the only institution of higher learning of the Christian Science Church. He told me that his years at Principia had been the happiest he had known, but that he had taken a job at a secular university because he no longer believed in the tenets of Christian Science. The courses he taught, I should say, did not include discussions of, let alone instruction in, those tenets. No one other than himself need ever have known of his disaffection. But he no longer believed in the purpose of the institution, and every course, irrespective of its content, was infused with the spirit of a narrative he could not accept. So he left. I have always hoped that this forlorn professor eventually found another god to serve, another narrative to give meaning to his teaching.

With some reservations but mostly with conviction, I use the word narrative as a synonym for god, with a small g. I know it is risky to do so, not only because the word god, having an aura of sacredness, is not to be used lightly, but also because it calls to mind a fixed figure or image. But it is the purpose of such figures or images to direct one's mind to an idea and, more to my point, to a story—not any kind of story, but one that tells of origins and envisions a future, a story that constructs ideals, prescribes rules of conduct, provides a source of authority, and, above all, gives a sense of continuity and purpose. A god, in the sense I am using the word, is the name of a great narrative, one that has sufficient credibility, complexity, and symbolic power to enable one to organize one's life around it. I use the word in the same sense, for example, as did Arthur Koestler in calling his book about communism's deceptions and disappointments The God That Failed. His intention was to show that communism was not merely an experiment in government or social life, and still less an economic theory, but a comprehensive narrative about what the world is like, how things got to be the way they are, and what lies ahead. He also wished to show that for all of communism's contempt for the "irrational" narratives of traditional religions, it relied nonetheless on faith and dogma. It certainly had its own conception of blasphemy and heresy, and practiced a grotesque and brutal method of excommunication.

By giving this example, I do not mean to suggest that gods must fail—far from it, although, of course, there are many that do. My own life has been contemporaneous with the emergence of three catastrophic narratives: the gods of communism, fascism, and Nazism, each of which held out the promise of heaven but led only to hell. As you will see if you proceed to succeeding chapters, there are several other gods that have captured the hearts and minds of people but that, I believe, are inadequate to provide a profound reason either for living or for learning. And if you proceed even further, you will see that I believe there are life- and learning-enhancing narratives that are available if only we would give them sufficient attention: These are gods that serve, as well as gods to serve.

Nonetheless, my intention here is neither to bury nor to praise any gods, but to claim that we cannot do without them, that whatever else we may call ourselves, we are the god-making species 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 a community life, a basis for moral conduct, explanations of that which cannot be known?

You will recognize that this kind of storytelling goes by many different names. Joseph Campbell and Rollo May refer to it as "myth." Freud, who understood better than anyone the creative source and psychic need of such tales, nonetheless called them "illusions." One may even say, without much of a stretch, that Marx had something of this in mind in using the word ideology. But it is not my point to differentiate with scholarly nuance the subtle variations among these terms. The point is that, call them what you will, we are unceasing in creating histories and futures for ourselves through the medium of narrative. Without a narrative, life has no meaning. Without meaning, learning has no purpose. Without a purpose, schools are houses of detention, not attention. This is what my book is about.

The most comprehensive narratives are, of course, found in such texts as the Old Testament, the New Testament, the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita. But beginning in the sixteenth century, at least in the West, there began to emerge narratives of a different sort, although with power enough to serve as alternate gods. Among the most enduring is the great narrative known as "inductive science." 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. "For all we know," Eric Hoffer wrote, "one of the reasons that other civilizations, with all their ingenuity and skill, did not develop a machine age is that they lacked a God whom they could readily rum into an all-powerful engineer. For has not the mighty Jehovah performed from the beginning of time the feats that our machine age is even now aspiring to achieve?"1 Galileo, Kepler, and Newton would largely agree, conceiving of God, as they did, as a great clock-maker and mathematician. In any case, there is no doubt that from the beginning of the age of science, its creators believed in the great narrative of Jehovah. Their discoveries were made in the service of the Judeo-Christian God. And could they know of Stephen Hawking's remark that the research permitted by the (now abandoned) supercollider would give insight into the mind of God, they would be pleased. The difference between them and Hawking is that Hawking, as an avowed atheist, does not believe what he said. To him, the story of Jehovah's wonders is only a dead metaphor, perhaps a tale told by an idiot. Apparently, the great story of science, all by itself, is enough for Hawking, as it has been for many others. It is a story that exalts human reason, places criticism over faith, disdains revelation as a source of knowledge, and, to put a spiritual cast upon it, postulates (as Jacob Bronowski has done) that our purpose on Earth is to discover reliable knowledge. Of course, the great narrative of science shares with the great religious narratives the idea that there is order to the universe, which is a fundamental assumption of all important narratives.

In fact, science even has a version (of sorts) of the concept of the "mind of God." As Bertrand Russell once put it, if there is a God, it is a differential equation. Kepler, in particular, would probably have liked that way of thinking about the matter; and perhaps that, after all, is what Stephen Hawking meant. In any case, the great strength of the science-god is, of course, that it works—far better than supplication, far better than even Francis Bacon could have imagined. Its theories are demonstrable and cumulative; its errors, correctable; its results, practical. The science-god sends people to the moon, inoculates people against disease, transports images through vast spaces so that they can be seen in our living rooms. It is a mighty god and, like more ancient ones, gives people a measure of control over their lives, which is one of the reasons why gods are invented in the first place. Some say the science-god gives more control and more power than any other god before it.

Nonetheless, like all gods, it is imperfect. Its story of our origins and of our end is, to say the least, unsatisfactory. To the question, How did it all begin?, science answers, Probably by an accident. To the question, How will it all end?, science answers. Probably by an accident. And to many people, the accidental life is not worth living. Moreover, regarding the question, What moral instruction do you give us?, the science-god maintains a tight-lipped silence. It places itself at the service of both the beneficent and the cruel, and its grand moral impartiality, if not indifference, has made it welcome the world over. More precisely, it is its offspring that is so welcomed. For like another god, the God who produced a Son and a Holy Ghost, the science-god has spawned another—the great narrative of technology. This is a wondrous and energetic story, which, with greater clarity than its father, offers us a vision of paradise. Whereas the science-god speaks to us of both understanding and power, the technology-god speaks only of power. It demolishes the assertion of the Christian God that heaven is only a posthumous reward. It offers convenience, efficiency, and prosperity here and now; and it offers its benefits to all, the rich as well as the poor, as does the Christian God. But it goes much further. For it does not merely give comfort to the poor; it promises that through devotion to it the poor will become rich. Its record of achievement—there can be no doubt—has been formidable, in part because it is a demanding god, and is strictly monotheistic. Its first commandment is a familiar one: "Thou shalt have no other gods before me." This means that those who follow its path must shape their needs and aspirations to the possibilities of technology. No other god can be permitted to impede, slow down, frustrate, or, least of all, oppose the sovereignty of technology. Why this is necessary is explained with fierce clarity in the second and third commandments. "We are the Technological Species," says the second, "and therein lies our genius." "Our destiny," says the third, "is to replace ourselves with machines, which means that technological ingenuity and human progress are one and the same."

Those who are skeptical about these propositions, who are inclined to take the name of the technology-god in vain, are condemned as reactionary renegades, especially when they speak of gods of a different kind. Among those who have risked heresy was Max Frisch, who remarked, "Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we do not experience it."2 But he and other such heretics have been cast aside and made to bear the damning mark of "Luddite" all of their days. There are also those, like Aldous Huxley, who believed that the great god of Technology might be sufficiently tamed so that its claims were more modest. He once said that if he had rewritten Brave New World, "...he would have included a sane alternative, a society in which 'science and technology would be used as though, like the Sabbath, they had been made for man, not (as at present and still more so in the Brave New World) as though man were to be adapted and enslaved to them.'"3

Although both my words and tone will suggest I believe with Frisch and Huxley that the technology-god is a false one (I do, of course), I will hold that point until later. Here, I wish to stress that all gods are imperfect, even dangerous. A belief too strongly held, one that excludes the possibility of a tolerance for other gods, may result in a psychopathic fanaticism. That is what Jesus meant (and Huxley in referring to it) when he said, "The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath." We may recall here a remark made by Niels Bohr that bears on this point. He said: "The opposite of a correct statement is an incorrect statement, but the opposite of a profound truth is another profound truth."4 He meant to teach us, as have other wise people, that it is better to have access to more than one profound truth. 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. Nonetheless, it is undoubtedly better to have one profound truth, one god, one narrative, than to have none.

What happens to people when they have no gods to serve? Some commit suicide. There is more of this in the United States, particularly among our young, than in most other places in the world. Some envelop themselves in drugs, including alcohol. Some take whatever pleasure is to be found in random violence. Some encase themselves in an impenetrable egoism. Many, apparently, find a momentary and pitiful release from dread in commercial re-creations of once-powerful narratives of the past.

I have before me an account of the proliferation of "theme parks" in both the United States and Europe. As I write, one of them is about to arise in Poland, where, according to Travel and Leisure magazine, its staff will dress in replica uniforms of the Luftwaffe and Wehrmacht to inspire nightly dances at "Hitler's Bunker Disco." Another, an amusement park near Berlin, will take as its theme "East Germany under Communism." Its service people will pretend to be agents of the secret police, and will put those making critical remarks about the government into a fake jail. Across the ocean, near Atlanta, Georgia, an amusement park is being developed around the theme "Gone With the Wind Country." Not to be outdone, the Walt Disney Company, whose prosperity is entirely based on the timely and romantic re-creation of narratives, has drawn up plans for still another amusement park near Manassas, Virginia, with the theme "The Civil War Experience." Apparently, the exhibits are to include a dramatization of the experience of slavery—whether for it or against is not yet clear (nor indeed, as I write, is the future of this project).5

Is all of this a mere rehearsal for the mass consumption of "virtual reality," as Joy Gould Boyum suspects? Are we being readied for a time when we will not require expensive theme parks to re-create the nightmare or fantasy of our choice, but can materialize either with the press of a button? Whether we are or not, what is certainly happening here is, to use Rollo May's phrase, a "cry for myth." Nightmare or fantasy, these parks allow one to inhabit a world where some powerful narrative once held sway, a narrative that gave people a reason for living, and in whose absence a kind of psychic trauma ensues. Even if a narrative places one in hell, it is better to be there than to be nowhere. To be nowhere means to live in a barren culture, one that offers no vision of the past or future, no clear voice of authority, no organizing principles. In such a culture, what are schools for? What can they be for?

There was a time when American culture knew what schools were for because it offered fully functioning multiple narratives for its people to embrace. There was, for example, the great story of democracy, which the American artist Ben Shahn once proclaimed "the most appealing idea that the world has yet known." Alexis de Tocqueville called it "the principle of civic participation." Gunnar Myrdal encapsulated the idea in the phrase "The American Creed," which he judged to be the most explicitly articulated system of general ideals of any country in the West. The first chapter of the story opens with "In the beginning, there was a revolution." As the story unfolds, there arise sacred words such as "government of the people, by the people and for the people." Because he helped to write the story, Thomas Jefferson, the Moses of the great democracy-god, knew what schools were for—to ensure that citizens would know when and how to protect their liberty. This is a man who produced an essay that could have cost him his life, and that included the words: "We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." It would not have come easily to the mind of such a man, as it does to political leaders today, that the young should be taught to read exclusively for the purpose of increasing their economic productivity. Jefferson had a more profound god to serve.

As did Emma Lazarus, whose poem celebrates another once-powerful American narrative. "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free," she wrote. Where else, save the great narrative of Jesus, can one find a story that so ennobles the huddled masses? Here, America is portrayed as the great melting pot. Such a story answers many profound questions, including, What are schools for? Schools are to fashion Americans out of the wretched refuse of teeming shores. Schools are to provide the lost and lonely with a common attachment to America's history and future, to America's sacred symbols, to its promise of freedom. The schools are, in a word, the affirmative answer to the question, Can a coherent, stable, unified culture be created out of people of diverse traditions, languages, and religions?

There have been, of course, other narratives that have served to give guidance and inspiration to people, and, especially, that have helped to give purpose to schooling. Among them is one that goes by the name of the Protestant ethic. In this tale, it is claimed that hard work and a disciplined capacity to delay gratification are the surest path toward earning God's favor. Idle hands do the Devil's work, as do lustful and, often, merely pleasurable thoughts. Although this god of self-control is a legacy of the Calvinist Puritans who founded America, its power extended to many of the huddled masses who came from quite different traditions. They, of course, brought with them their own narratives, which in the context of America served—we might say—as "local gods," but gods with sufficient power to give point to schooling.

Here I can offer my own schooling as an example. I grew up learning to love the American Creed while at the same time being inspired by a more "tribal" story, to which I had (and still have) considerable attachment. As the child of Jewish parents, I was required to go to two schools: the American public school, in which the names of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Tom Paine, and Lincoln were icons, and a "Jewish" school, in which the names of Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rebecca, Jacob, Rachel, Leah, and Moses were equally sacred. (It should be noted that the democracy-story has almost no significant women; the chosen-people-story has plenty.) As presented to me, the democracy-story did not conflict with the chosen-people-story; neither did the great melting-pot-story, nor, astonishingly enough, did the Protestant-ethic-story (perhaps because it is not much different from "Jewish guilt," which proceeds from the assumption that whatever happens, it is your fault).

The point is (putting guilt aside) that the great American narratives share with my tribal one certain near-universal themes and principles—for example, family honor, restraint, social responsibility, humility, and empathy for the outcast. Integrating these narratives was not difficult for me or for my public school classmates, who were, among others, Irish, Greek, Italian, and German, and who had their own tribal tales to enrich and mesh with the great narratives being taught in school.

I might add that it did not occur to many of us that the school was obliged to praise our tribal stories or even to discuss them. For one thing, we did not believe our teachers were qualified to do so. For another, the teachers gave no hint that they thought it within their province. For still another, our classes were far too multicultural to make it a practical goal. The schools, it seemed to us, had no business to conduct with "ethnicity." (The term itself, incidentally, was unknown to us at the time, since it was first used in 1940 by W. Lloyd Wamer and did not enter common usage until much later.) The promotion of ethnicity, we believed, was the responsibility of the home, where, among other things, a "tribal" language could be spoken freely (in my case, Yiddish) and where religious traditions and holidays were honored and "non-American" food was consumed. The task was also taken up by one's church or synagogue, by fraternal organizations, and even to some extent by local political associations. Some of our ethnic stories were also told in the popular arts—in movies, for example. In this respect, the Irish did extraordinarily well, being depicted in many films as hardworking, family-oriented, fun-loving people whose priests sang liltingly and whose nuns were beautiful. The Jews and Italians didn't fare as well, the Greeks were ignored, the blacks were humiliated, and, of course, the Germans were savaged. Nonetheless, we did not expect the schools to make compensation. Only to make Americans.

I am aware, of course, that the situation I have just described was not entirely uniform or, I should say, satisfactory. As early as 1915, grievances were expressed against the melting-pot metaphor and more particularly against its supposed reality.6 While it was conceded that the American Creed was based predominantly on an Anglo-Saxon tradition, the argument was made that its principles were being enacted largely by immigrants, who enriched it by their own traditions and who, in any case, would not abandon their tribal identities. Thus, the idea of cultural pluralism entered the schools, mostly beginning in the 1930s. This meant that in many public schools (not mine), the history, literature, and traditions of different immigrant groups were included as part of the great tale of the American Creed. I do not know if the self-esteem and ethnic pride of the children of the huddled masses were elevated by cultural pluralism. Probably yes in some cases; maybe no, with accompanying embarrassment, in a few. Although my own schools were considerably late in adopting cultural pluralism, I do remember an occasion when a teacher, in a rare gesture of accommodation to ethnic diversity, made a point of emphasizing the contribution of the Jew Haim Salomon to the financing of the Revolutionary War. The financing? I would have much preferred if Salomon had been Paul Revere's backup.

Whatever the gains or losses may have been in the self-esteem of the students, cultural pluralism made three positive contributions toward maintaining the vitality and usefulness of the narratives underlying the public school experience. First, it provided a fuller and more accurate picture of American culture and, especially, its history—which is to say, it revealed the dynamic nature of the great American narratives. Melting pot or not, America was shown to be a composite culture from which, in principle, none were excluded. Second, at no point was the inclusion of the immigrant narratives presented as a refutation of the American Creed. Even the horrendous stories of the massacre of "native" Americans, slavery, and the exploitation of "coolie" labor could be told without condemning the ideals of democracy, the melting pot, or the Protestant ethic. Indeed, such stories often served as an inspiration to purify the American Creed, to overcome prejudice, to redeem ourselves from the blighted parts of our history. Third, the inclusion of any immigrant narrative was not intended to promote divisiveness among different groups. The idea was to show that there were substance and richness in each tribal tale, and that we were better for knowing the gods of other people.

It would seem that certain versions of what is now called "multiculturalism" reject all three of these ideas, and this rejection, I will soon argue, seriously threatens the future of public, as opposed to private, schools. Here, I will say only that 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. 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 toward 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 the capacity of such narratives to provide an inspired reason for schooling.