The End of Education Read Free Page A

tolerance, openness, and, most important, a sense of humor, which is the greatest enemy of fanaticism. Nonetheless, it is undoubtedly better to have one profound truth, one god, one narrative, than to have none.
    What happens to people when they have no gods to serve? Some commit suicide. There is more of this in the United States, particularly among our young, than in most other places in the world. Some envelop themselves in drugs, including alcohol. Some take whatever pleasure is to be found in random violence. Some encase themselves in an impenetrableegoism. Many, apparently, find a momentary and pitiful release from dread in commercial re-creations of once-powerful narratives of the past.
    I have before me an account of the proliferation of “theme parks” in both the United States and Europe. As I write, one of them is about to arise in Poland, where, according to
Travel and Leisure
magazine, its staff will dress in replica uniforms of the Luftwaffe and Wehrmacht to inspire nightly dances at “Hitler’s Bunker Disco.” Another, an amusement park near Berlin, will take as its theme “East Germany under Communism.” Its service people will pretend to be agents of the secret police, and will put those making critical remarks about the government into a fake jail. Across the ocean, near Atlanta, Georgia, an amusement park is being developed around the theme “Gone With the Wind Country.” Not to be outdone, the Walt Disney Company, whose prosperity is entirely based on the timely and romantic re-creation of narratives, has drawn up plans for still another amusement park near Manassas, Virginia, with the theme “The Civil War Experience.” Apparently, the exhibits are to include a dramatization of the experience of slavery—whether for it or against is not yet clear (nor indeed, as I write, is the future of this project). 5
    Is all of this a mere rehearsal for the mass consumption of “virtual reality,” as Joy Gould Boyum suspects? Are we being readied for a time when we will not require expensive theme parks to re-create the nightmare or fantasy of our choice, but can materialize either with the press of a button? Whether we are or not, what is certainly happening here is, to use Rollo May’s phrase, a “cry for myth.” Nightmare or fantasy, these parks allow one to inhabit a world where some powerful narrative once held sway, a narrative that gave people a reason for living, and in whose absence a kind of psychic trauma ensues. Even if a narrative places one in hell, it is better to bethere than to be nowhere. To be nowhere means to live in a barren culture, one that offers no vision of the past or future, no clear voice of authority, no organizing principles. In such a culture, what are schools for? What
can
they be for?
    There was a time when American culture knew what schools were for because it offered fully functioning multiple narratives for its people to embrace. There was, for example, the great story of democracy, which the American artist Ben Shahn once proclaimed “the most appealing idea that the world has yet known.” Alexis de Tocqueville called it “the principle of civic participation.” Gunnar Myrdal encapsulated the idea in the phrase “The American Creed,” which he judged to be the most explicitly articulated system of general ideals of any country in the West. The first chapter of the story opens with “In the beginning, there was a revolution.” As the story unfolds, there arise sacred words such as “government of the people, by the people and for the people.” Because he helped to write the story, Thomas Jefferson, the Moses of the great democracy-god, knew what schools were for—to ensure that citizens would know when and how to protect their liberty. This is a man who produced an essay that could have cost him his life, and that included the words: “We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with