The End of Education Read Online Free Page B

been lost. God is dead, Nietzsche said before he went insane. He may have meant gods are dead. If he did, he was wrong. In this century, new gods have rushed in to replace the old, but most have had no staying power (which is, perhaps, what Nietzsche was prophesying). I have already alluded to three of them: the gods of communism, Nazism, and fascism. The first claimed to represent the story of history itself, and so could be supposed to serve as an inspiration until the final triumph of the proletariat. It ended rather suddenly, shockingly, and without remorse, in a rubble of stone on the outskirts of West Berlin, leaving the proletariat to wonder if history, like the universe, is also malicious. Hitler’s great tale had an evenshorter run. He prophesied that the Third Reich would last a thousand years, perhaps longer than history itself. His story began with a huge bonfire whose flames were meant to consume, once and for all, the narratives of all other gods. It ended twelve years later, also in fire and also in Berlin, the body of its godhead mutilated beyond recognition.
    Of fascism we may say it has not yet had its final hour. It lingers here and there, though hardly as a story worth telling. Where it still exists, people do not
believe
in it, they endure it. And so, Francis Fukuyama tells us in
The End of History
, the great narrative of liberal democracy has triumphed at last and brings an end to history’s dialectic. Which is why so many people look to America with anxious eyes to see if its gods may serve them as well.
    So far, America’s answer has largely been, Believe in a market economy, which is not much of a story, not much of an answer. The problem is that America’s better gods have been badly wounded. As America has moved toward the status of an empire (known today, with moral ambiguity, maybe even irony, as the world’s only “superpower”), its great story of liberal democracy has lost much of its luster. Of Tocqueville’s “civic participation,” there is less in America than in any other industrialized nation. Half of America’s eligible voters do not take the trouble to go to the polls in presidential elections, and many who do form their opinions by watching, leaden-eyed, television campaign commercials. It would be frightening to contemplate how few know the names of their representatives in Congress, or who is the secretary of state, or how many even know that there
is
such a cabinet post. Some of this civic indifference is doubtless connected to the cynicism generated by the crude fabrications of recent American leaders, especially Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, the latter of whom made the term
cover-up
commonplace inpolitical discourse. Moreover, the idea that America, through an enlightened foreign policy, may serve as a moral light unto nations was dimmed, to say the least, in the jungles of Vietnam, and then made ridiculous in Granada, Panama, and Kuwait. Could Marx have had something like this in mind when he said that history repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce?
    I do not say the idea of America as a moral metaphor is dead. Were it dead, the students in Tienanmen Square would not have used the Statue of Liberty as their symbol; the students in Prague would not have surged through the streets reading aloud from the works of Thomas Jefferson; and armies of immigrants would not be landing each day at John F. Kennedy Airport yearning to breathe free. Through all the turmoil, it is well to keep in mind that a wounded god is different from a dead one. We may yet have need of this one.
    Meanwhile, the narrative of the great melting-pot has also suffered as many insults as an imperfect god can bear. For some, for example, Koreans, Chinese, and Russians, it has worked tolerably well, but too many others have been blocked from sharing in the fullness of the American promise because of their race or native language. The case of African-Americans in particular is a grotesque