The End of Education Read Free Page B

certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” It would not have come easily to the mind of such a man, as it does to political leaders today, that the young should be taught to read exclusively for the purpose of increasing their economic productivity. Jefferson had a more profound god to serve.
    As did Emma Lazarus, whose poem celebrates another once-powerful American narrative. “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,”she wrote. Where else, save the great narrative of Jesus, can one find a story that so ennobles the huddled masses? Here, America is portrayed as the great melting pot. Such a story answers many profound questions, including, What are schools for? Schools are to fashion Americans out of the wretched refuse of teeming shores. Schools are to provide the lost and lonely with a common attachment to America’s history and future, to America’s sacred symbols, to its promise of freedom. The schools are, in a word, the affirmative answer to the question, Can a coherent, stable, unified culture be created out of people of diverse traditions, languages, and religions?
    There have been, of course, other narratives that have served to give guidance and inspiration to people, and, especially, that have helped to give purpose to schooling. Among them is one that goes by the name of the Protestant ethic. In this tale, it is claimed that hard work and a disciplined capacity to delay gratification are the surest path toward earning God’s favor. Idle hands do the Devil’s work, as do lustful and, often, merely pleasurable thoughts. Although this god of self-control is a legacy of the Calvinist Puritans who founded America, its power extended to many of the huddled masses who came from quite different traditions. They, of course, brought with them their own narratives, which in the context of America served—we might say—as “local gods,” but gods with sufficient power to give point to schooling.
    Here I can offer my own schooling as an example. I grew up learning to love the American Creed while at the same time being inspired by a more “tribal” story, to which I had (and still have) considerable attachment. As the child of Jewish parents, I was required to go to two schools: the American public school, in which the names of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Tom Paine, and Lincoln were icons, and a “Jewish”school, in which the names of Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rebecca, Jacob, Rachel, Leah, and Moses were equally sacred. (It should be noted that the democracy-story has almost no significant women; the chosen-people-story has plenty.) As presented to me, the democracy-story did not conflict with the chosen-people-story; neither did the great melting-pot-story, nor, astonishingly enough, did the Protestant-ethic-story (perhaps because it is not much different from “Jewish guilt,” which proceeds from the assumption that whatever happens, it is your fault).
    The point is (putting guilt aside) that the great American narratives share with my tribal one certain near-universal themes and principles—for example, family honor, restraint, social responsibility, humility, and empathy for the outcast. Integrating these narratives was not difficult for me or for my public school classmates, who were, among others, Irish, Greek, Italian, and German, and who had their own tribal tales to enrich and mesh with the great narratives being taught in school.
    I might add that it did not occur to many of us that the school was obliged to praise our tribal stories or even to discuss them. For one thing, we did not believe our teachers were qualified to do so. For another, the teachers gave no hint that they thought it within their province. For still another, our classes were far too multicultural to make it a practical goal. The schools, it seemed to us, had no business to conduct with “ethnicity.” (The term itself, incidentally, was