The End of Education Read Online Free Page A

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 commongoals 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.

2 • Some Gods That Fail
    I t has not been a good century for gods, or even a good century and a half. Charles Darwin, we might say, began the great assault by revealing that we were not the children of God but of monkeys. His revelation took its toll on him; he suffered from unrelieved stomach and bowel pains for which medical historians have failed to uncover a physical cause. Nonetheless, Darwin was unrepentant and hoped that many people would find inspiration, solace, and continuity in the great narrative of evolution. But not many have, and the psychic trauma he induced continues barely concealed to our own day. Karl Marx, who invited Darwin to write an introduction to
Das Kapital
(Darwin declined), tore to shreds the god of Nationalism, showing, with theory and countless examples, how the working classes are deluded into identifying with their capitalist tormentors. Sigmund Freud, working quietly in his consulting room at Bergasse 19 in Vienna, bid fair to become the world’s most ferocious god-buster. He showed that the great god of Reason, whose authority had been certified by the Age of Enlightenment, was a great imposter, that it served mostly to both rationalize and conceal the commands of our most primitive urgings. The cortex, as it were, is merely the servant of Genitalia. An original but soul-searing idea, it may even be true. All of this not being enough,Freud destroyed the story of childhood innocence and, for good measure, tried to prove that Moses was not a Jew (for which he apologized but did not recant) and argued that our belief in deities was a childish and neurotic illusion. Even the gentle Albert Einstein, though not himself an Einsteinian, contributed to the general disillusionment, wreaking havoc on Isaac Newton’s science-god—a Freudian instance, if ever there was one, of the son slaying the father. Einstein’s revolutionary papers led to the idea that we do not see things as they are but as
we
are. The oldest axiom of survival—seeing is believing—was brought to heel. Its opposite—believing is seeing—turned out to be at least as true. Moreover, Einstein’s followers have concluded, and believe they have proved, that complete knowledge is unattainable. Try as we will, we can
never
know certain things—not because we lack intelligence, not even because we are enclosed in a prison of protoplasm, but because the universe is, well, malicious.
    The odd thing is that though they differed in temperament, each of these men intended to provide us with a firmer and more humane basis for our beliefs. And someday that may yet happen. Meanwhile, humanity reels from what has