The End of Education by Neil Postman Read Free Book Online Page B

The technologies that make them possible are already here, and today’s youngsters, regardless of economic status, know how to use them. They spend hours with them every week—not in the classroom, but in their own homes and in video game centers at every shopping mall. 3
    It is always interesting to attend to the examples of learning, and the motivations that ignite them, in the songs of love that technophiles perform for us. It is, for example, not easy to imagine research scientists all over the world teleconferencing with thousands of students who are having difficulty with their science projects. I can’t help thinking that most research scientists would put a stop to this rather quickly. But Ifind it especially revealing that in the preceding scenario, we have an example of a technological solution to a psychological problem that would seem to be exceedingly serious. We are presented with a student who is “bored with the real world.” What does it mean to say someone is bored with the real world, especially one so young? Can a journey into virtual reality cure such a problem? And if it can, will our troubled youngster want to return to the real world? Confronted with a student who is bored with the real world, I don’t think we can get away so easily by making available a virtual-reality physics lab.
    The role that new technology should play in schools or anywhere else is something that needs to be discussed without the hyperactive fantasies of cheerleaders. In particular, the computer and its associated technologies are awesome additions to a culture, and they are quite capable of altering the psychic, let alone the sleeping, habits of our young. But like all important technologies of the past, they are Faustian bargains, giving and taking away, sometimes in equal measure, sometimes more in one way than the other. It is strange—indeed, shocking—that with the twenty-first century so close on our heels, we can still talk of new technologies as if they were unmixed blessings, gifts, as it were, from the gods. Don’t we all know what the combustion engine has done for us and against us? What television is doing for us and against us? At the very least, what we need to discuss about Little Eva, Young John, and McIntosh’s trio is what they will lose, and what we will lose, if they enter a world in which computer technology is their chief source of motivation, authority, and, apparently, psychological sustenance. Will they become, as Joseph Weizenbaum warns, more impressed by calculation than human judgment? Will speed of response become, more than ever, a defining quality of intelligence?If, indeed, the idea of a school will be dramatically altered, what kinds of learning will be neglected, perhaps made impossible? Is virtual reality a new form of therapy? If it is, what are its dangers?
    These are serious matters, and they need to be discussed by those who actually know something about children from the planet Earth, and whose vision of children’s needs, and the needs of a society, go beyond thinking of school mainly as a place for the convenient distribution of information. Schools are not now and have never been chiefly about getting information to children. That has been on the schools’ agenda, of course, but it has always been way down on the list. In a moment, I will mention a few school functions that are higher, but here it needs saying that for technological Utopians, the computer vaults information access to the top. This reshuffling of priorities comes, one might say, at a most inopportune time. The problem of giving people greater access to more information, faster, more conveniently, and in more diverse forms was the main technological thrust of the nineteenth century. Some folks haven’t noticed it, but that problem was largely solved, so that for almost one hundred years, there has been more information available to the young outside the school than inside. That fact did not make the schools