The End of Education (11 page)

I once had the good fortune to attend a lecture by Elizabeth Eisenstein, author of a monumental two-volume study of the printing press as an agent of cultural change. During the question period, she was asked how she had come by her interest in the subject. She appeared to welcome the question. She told the audience that when she was a sixth-grade student, her teacher remarked that the invention of the printing press with movable type represented one of the great advances of human civilization, almost the equal of the invention of speech itself. Young Elizabeth took this remark to heart. But then a strange thing happened—in a word, nothing. The subject was never mentioned again. It did not come
up in junior high school, senior high school, or college. Fortunately, it remained in her mind during all that time, and the result was that she eventually devoted herself to a detailed explication of what her sixth-grade teacher must have meant.

That such a thing could happen is at once startling and yet unsurprising. School is notorious for neglecting to mention, let alone study, some of the more important events in human history. In fact, something quite similar to what happened to Elizabeth Eisenstein happened to me when I was in Mrs. Soybel’s fifth-grade class. In that class, considerable attention was paid to public speaking, especially pronunciation, since the school was in Brooklyn, New York, and it was generally believed (and still is) that people from Brooklyn do not pronounce their words correctly. One of my classmates, Gerald Melnikoff, was whispering and mumbling his weekly oral presentation and thereby aroused Mrs. Soybel’s pedagogical wrath. She told Gerald that he was speaking as if he had marbles in his mouth; then, addressing the rest of the class, she told us that language was God’s greatest gift to humanity. Our ability to speak, she said, was what made us human, and this we must never forget. I took the remark seriously. (I recall that for some reason I was even frightened by it.) But as with Elizabeth Eisenstein and the printing press, the matter was never mentioned again, certainly not by Mrs. Soybel. She gave us excellent lessons in spelling, grammar, and writing and taught us to remove the marbles from our mouths when we spoke. But the role of language in making us human disappeared. I didn’t hold this against her—after all, she did mention the idea—but I waited for the subject to come up again in junior high, senior high, and college. I waited in vain. Whenever language was discussed, it was done so within the context of its being a useful tool—definitely not as a gift from God, and not even as a tool that makes us human.

Of course, one does not need to call on God, either literally or metaphorically, to tell the story of language and humanness, of human beings as the word weavers of the planet. This does not mean the story is without mystery. No one knows, for example, when we began to speak. Was it 50,000 years ago, or 100,000 years, or longer? No one even knows
why
we began to speak. The usual answer is that speech arose exclusively as a functional mechanism; that is, without speech, the species could not have survived. Someone absolutely had to learn to say, “The tiger is hiding behind the tree!” But Susanne Langer thought otherwise.
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Something happened to our brains, she believed, that created in us a need to transform the world through symbols. Perhaps to give us something interesting to do in our spare time, or for the sheer aesthetic joy of it. We became symbol makers, not to spare us from the teeth of the tiger but for some other reason, which remains mysterious. Of course, we eventually discovered how speech could assist us in survival, but that was not the reason we began to speak to ourselves and to others. I place speaking to ourselves first because we surely spend more time, use more words, are affected more deeply in talking to ourselves than to others. Each of us is, to borrow a phrase from Wendell Johnson, “our own most enchanted listener.” Perhaps Langer was right. Why do we talk to ourselves? Does it enhance our survival? What is so important that we are impelled to talk to ourselves so incessantly—indeed, not only when awake but when sleeping as well?

One answer that can provide schooling with a profound organizing principle is that we use language to create the world—which is to say, language is not only a vehicle of thought; it is, as Wittgenstein said, also the driver. We go where it leads. We see the world as it permits us to see it. There is, to be sure, a world of “not-words.” But, unlike all the
other creatures on the planet, we have access to it only through the world of words, which we ourselves have created and continue to create. 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 is a product of how we describe it. 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. Is anyone in our schools taking this seriously?

Perhaps Mrs. Soybel did, but thought we were too young to grasp the idea. If so, she was mistaken. There are many ways to teach the young the connections between language and world-making. But she made still another mistake, one common enough, by giving her students the impression that the important thing about language is to know the difference between “he don’t” and “he doesn’t,” to spell “recommendation” correctly, and never to pronounce the name of our city, “Noo Yawk.” Some might say that if she taught those lessons well, she did enough. But what, then, of the junior high teachers, the high school teachers, the college teachers? By failing to reveal the story of human beings as world-makers through language, they miss several profound opportunities. They
fail, for example, to convey the idea that there is an inescapable moral dimension to how we use language. We are instructed in the Bible never to take the name of the Lord in vain. What other names must we never take in vain? And why? A fair answer is that language distinguishes between the sacred and the profane, and thereby provides organization to our moral sense. 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 blur distinctions, to say more than you know or
can
know, to take the name of the 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 a teacher, at any level, could miss it?

Of course, language also has a social dimension. Mrs. Soybel understood this well enough, but only part of it. Her idea was that by abandoning homegrown dialects, her gaggle of Brooklyn ragamuffins could become linguistically indistinguishable from Oxford dons, or at least American corporate executives. What she may have missed is that in changing our speech, we would be changing our politics, our taste, our passions, our sense of beauty, even our loyalties. Perhaps she did know this, but the matter was never explained or discussed, and no choice was offered. Would such changes alienate us from our parents, relatives, and friends? Is there something
wrong with being from the “working class”? What new prejudices will become comfortable and what old ones despicable? In seeing the world through the prism of new ways of speaking, would we be better or worse? These are questions of large import, and they need to be raised these days in the context of the effort to have us speak in “politically correct” ways. By changing our names for things, how do we become different? What new social attitudes do we embrace? How powerful are our habitual ways of naming?

These are matters that ought to be at the heart of education. They are not merely about how we sound to others but about how we are sounding out the world. Of course, they are no more important than how language controls the uses of our intellect—that is to say, how our ideas of ideas are governed by language. Aristotle believed he had uncovered universal laws of thought, when, in fact, all he had done was to explain the logical rules of Greek syntax. Perhaps if the Greeks had been interested in other languages, he would have come to different conclusions. The medieval churchmen thought that if their language contained a word, there must necessarily be something in the world to which it corresponded, which sent them on a fruitless intellectual journey to discover how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. The well-known German philosopher Martin Heidegger believed that only the German language could express the subtlest and most profound philosophical notions. Perhaps he meant incomprehensible notions. In any case, his claim is weakened by the fact that he was an ardent supporter of Adolf Hitler and a member of the Nazi party. Apparently, he was somewhat unclear about what constitutes subtlety and profundity. But to the extent to which any of us is clear about anything, it will be through an awareness of how we use language,
how language uses us, and what measures are available to clarify our knowledge of the world we make.

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 of all 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.

H
aving just remarked that the narratives described in the last chapter may appear abstract and that I intend here to bring them down to earth, I take a risk in beginning with a fable. What could be more abstract than that? The reader may help to ease my mind by remembering, first, that this is a fable and not a curriculum and, second, that you need not burden it or yourself with doubts about its practicality. There will be time for that in addressing the moral of the fable.

Once upon a time in the city of New York, civilized life very nearly came to an end. The streets were covered with dirt, and there was no one to tidy them. The air and rivers were polluted, and no one could cleanse them. The schools were rundown, and no one believed in them. Each day brought a new strike, and each strike brought new hardships. Crime and strife and disorder and rudeness were to be found everywhere. The young fought the old. The workers fought the students. The poor fought the rich. The city was bankrupt.

When things came to their most desperate moment, the
city fathers met to consider the problem. But they could suggest no cures, for their morale was very low and their imaginations dulled by hatred and confusion. There was nothing for the mayor to do but to declare a state of emergency. He had done this before during snowstorms and power failures, but now he felt even more justified.

“Our city,” he said, “is under siege, like the ancient cities of Jericho and Troy. But
our
enemies are sloth and poverty and indifference and hatred.”