The End of Education by Neil Postman Read Free Book Online

learn that your neighbors’ vacation will last for three weeks; yours must last only one.
    The path to redemption requires that one believe the advice given in the commercial and then act upon it. Those who do both, as shown in the parable, will have found their way to Heaven, more or less in a state of ecstasy. It is probably unnecessary to say that all traditional religions reject the god of Consumership, claiming that devotion to it is a false spirituality, if not outright blasphemy. One would think that our schools would also be in explicit opposition to such a god, since education is supposed to free the young from the bondage of crude materialism. But, in fact, many of our schools, especially in recent times, have allied themselves with this god in a most emphatic way. I refer, for example, to the fact that approximately ten thousand schools have accepted the offer made by Christopher Whittle to include, daily, two minutes of commercial messages in the curriculum—the first time, to my knowledge, that an advertiser has employed the power of the state to force anyone to watch commercials. In exchange for this opportunity, Whittle offers his own ten-minute version of the news of the day and free, expensive television equipment, including a satellite dish.
    That schools would accept such an arrangement reveals two things simultaneously. The first, of course, is that there is widespread support for the god of Consumership. That is to say, the schools see no contradiction between anything they might wish the students to learn and what commercials wish them to learn. The second is that there is equally wide support for the god of Technology, to which I will turn in the following chapter. Here, it is necessary to say that no reasonableargument can be made against educating the young to be consumers or to think about the kinds of employment that might interest them. But when these are elevated to the status of a metaphysical imperative, we are being told that we have reached the end of our wits—even worse, the limit of our wisdom.

3 • Some New Gods That Fail
    I f one has a trusting relationship with one’s students (let us say graduate students) and the subject under discussion is the same as the subject of this book, it is not altogether gauche to ask them if they believe in God (with a capital G). I have done this three or four times, and most students say they do. Their answer is preliminary to the next question: If someone you love were desperately ill and you had to choose between praying to God for his or her recovery or administering an antibiotic (as prescribed by a competent physician), which would you choose?
    Most say the question is silly, since the alternatives are not mutually exclusive. Of course. But suppose they were; which would you choose? God helps those who help themselves, some say in choosing the antibiotic, and thereby getting the best of two possible belief systems. But if pushed to the wall (for example, God does not always help those who help themselves; God helps those who pray and who believe), most say the antibiotic, after noting that the question is asinine and proves nothing. Of course, the question was not asked, in the first place, to prove anything, but to begin a discussion of the nature of belief. And I do not fail to inform the students, by the way, that there has recently emerged at least some (though not conclusive) evidence of a scientific nature thatwhen sick people are prayed for, they do better than those who aren’t. 1
    As the discussion proceeds, important distinctions are made among the different meanings of “belief,” but at some point it becomes far from asinine to speak of the god of Technology—in the sense that people believe technology works, that they rely on it, that it makes promises, that they are bereft when denied access to it, that they are delighted when they are in its presence, that for most people it works in mysterious ways, that they condemn people