The End of Education (10 page)

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 endure 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. Like in Florida.

America has always been a nation of nations, our schools always multicultural. But educators have not always been concerned to emphasize this fact, in part because of the belief that through schooling a common culture could be created; in part because immigrant cultures were thought to be inferior to Anglo-Saxon cultures. The second idea is in justifiable disgrace. The first is still functional, as reflected, for example, in the popularity of the idea of “cultural literacy,” as developed by E. D. Hirsch, Jr. He argues that the role of schooling is to create a common culture but that we cannot have one unless our citizens share a common core of knowledge—that is,
facts
, about history, literature, science, philosophy, wars, cities, popular arts. After consulting with appropriate experts in a variety of fields, Hirsch took the trouble to list thousands of names, places, and events that comprise the store of facts of a “culturally literate” person. He insists that most of these be given attention in the course of our children’s schooling. I have, in another place, criticized Hirsch’s project on several grounds, among them his indifference to providing meaning to schooling, and the clear impossibility in an “information age” of making such a list without being maddeningly arbitrary.
For almost every item on Hirsch’s list, there are at least ten others that are not on it and whose importance can be argued with equal justification. In other words, Hirsch’s list is not a solution to the problem of how to create a common culture, but an unintentional expression of the problem itself. That is why in this book, which is also concerned with how to form a common culture, I have placed little emphasis on what facts can be known, much on what narratives can be believed. (In providing our children with a sense of meaning, we would do much better to take as a guide Schindler’s list than Hirsch’s list.)

But one thing may be said clearly in Hirsch’s defense. His list is no argument against diversity. It is, in fact, a celebration of diversity. Even a casual perusal of the list will reveal that it includes names, places, events, and ideas from all over the world, and implies significant artistic, intellectual, and social contributions from diverse ethnic groups. To the extent that Hirsch’s list is intended for American students, its diversity was inevitable.

The idea of diversity is a rich narrative around which to organize the schooling of the young. But there are right reasons to do this, and wrong ones. The worst possible reason, as I have already discussed, is to use the fact of ethnic diversity to inspire a curriculum of revenge; that is, for a group that has been oppressed to try to even the score with the rest of America by singling itself out for excessive praise and attention. Although the impulse to revenge is in itself understandable, such a view will lead to weird falsifications, divisiveness, and isolation. There is a joke about this that Jews tell to each other about themselves: One day, in a small town in Russia, circa 1900, a Jew notices many people in panic, running this way and that, shouting for help. He stops another Jew and asks
what is happening. He is told that there is a circus in town and the lions have escaped from their cages. “Is this good or bad for the Jews?” he asks.

The joke is intended to mock a self-absorbed attitude that allows for no larger identification than with one’s own group. One may as well ask, Is Shakespeare good for the Jews? Are Newton’s laws good for the Jews? There are, to be sure, certain Jewish sects whose answer to these questions is, in fact, “bad for the Jews,” because secular learning of any sort is considered a distraction from Talmudic studies, and a threat to piety. But that is exactly the point. Such sects have their own schools and their own narratives, and wish to keep their young away from public education. Any education that promotes a near-exclusive concern with one’s own group may have value, but is hostile to the idea of a public education and to the growth of a common culture. Certainly, there may be occasions when it is natural and appropriate to ask, for example, Was this good or bad for blacks, or Latinos, or Koreans? But the point of the joke is that if everything is seen through the lens of ethnicity, then isolation, parochialness, and hostility, not to mention absurdity, are the inevitable result.

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.”
³
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.

Fortunately, there is such a narrative. It has both a theoretical and a practical component, which gives it special force. The theoretical component comes to us from science, expressed rather abstractly in the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The law tells us that although matter can be neither created nor destroyed (the First Law), it tends toward becoming useless. The name given to this tendency is entropy, which means that everything in the universe moves inexorably toward sameness, and when matter reaches a state in which there is no differentiation, there is no employable energy. This would be a rather relentlessly depressing notion if not for the fact that there are “negentropic” forces in the universe, energies that retard sameness and keep things moving, organized, and (from a human point of view) useful. Every time we clean our homes, or our streets, or use information to solve a problem, or make a schedule, we are combating entropy, using intelligence and energy to overcome (that is, postpone) the inevitable decay of organization.

The physicists describe all of this in mathematical codes and do not always appreciate the ways in which the rest of us employ their ideas of entropy and negentropy. Still, the universe is as much our business as it is theirs, and if there are lessons to be learned from the universe, attention must be
paid. 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 is a relatively young language, not much more than six hundred years old (assuming Chaucer to be our first major English author). It began its journey as a Teutonic tongue, changed itself by admitting the French language, then Italian, and then welcomed new words and forms from wherever its speakers moved around the globe. T. S. Eliot once remarked that English is the best language for a poet to use, since it contains, for the poet’s choice, the rhythms of many languages. This is an arguable point, perhaps. But it is not arguable that English is rapidly becoming the global language, has more words in it, by far, than any other language, and exerts its influence everywhere (much to the chagrin of the French, who, failing to grasp the importance of diversity, are using their energies to prevent changes in their language). 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 influenced by Japanese techniques.

We even find the law of diversity operating in the genetic information we pass on when procreating. In cases where marriage is confined to those of the same family—where people, as it were, clone themselves—entropic defects are more likely to occur than when differences are admitted. We may go so far as to say that sameness is the enemy not only of vitality but of excellence, for where there are few or no differences—in genetic structure, in language, in art—it is not possible to develop robust standards of excellence. I am aware that there are those who have come to the opposite conclusion. They argue that diversity in human affairs makes it impossible to have a standard of anything because there are too many points of view, too many different traditions, too many purposes; thus, diversity, they conclude, makes relativists of us all.

At a theoretical level, we may have an interesting argument here. But from a practical point of view, we can see how diversity works to provide an enriched sense of excellence. During the weeks of the latest World Cup tournament, nations from every part of the world were participating—Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Cameroon, Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Italy, and many others. Each team brought a special tradition and a unique style to the games. The Germans were methodical and efficient, the Brazilians flamboyant, the Italians emotional. They were all good but different, and they all knew what “good” means. The Americans didn’t have much of a style and even less of a tradition, and though they played bravely, they were eliminated fairly early. I am not aware of
their complaining that they lost because they have a different standard of “good.” (For example, the team that scores the fewest goals wins.) Indeed, such a claim would be demeaning to them, as it would be demeaning to Japanese or Peruvian artists to say that their works are so different from those of other traditions that no judgments can be made of them. Their works, of course, are different from others, but what that means is not that excellence becomes meaningless but that the rest of the world expands and enriches its ideas of “good.” At the same time, because we are all human, our expanded ideas of “good” are apt to be comprehensible and recognizable. In painting, we look for delicacy, simplicity, feeling, craftsmanship, originality, symmetry, all of which are aspirations of painters all over the world, as character, insight, believability, and emotion are aspirations of playwrights. No one faults Arthur Miller for failing to use iambic pentameter in writing
Death of a Salesman
. But what makes his play “good” is not so different from what makes
Macbeth
“good.” 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 and 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 García Márquez to make Hispanic students happy, but because of the excellence of his novels. That Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay were women is
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 was 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.