Free The End of Education by Neil Postman Page A

the public schools to create a public of hyphenated Americans. But our students already come to school as hyphenated Americans. The task of the public schools, properly conceived, is to erase the hyphens or to make them less distinct. The idea of a public school is not to make blacks black, or Koreans Korean, or Italians Italian, but to make Americans. The alternative leads, quite obviously, to the “Balkanization” of public schools—which is to say, their end. An Afrocentric curriculum for Afro-Americans? Then why not a Sinocentric curriculum for the Chinese? An Italocentric curriculum for Italians? A Judeocentric curriculum for Jews? A Teutocentric for Germans? A Graecocentric for Greeks?
    This path not only leads to the privatizing of schooling but to a privatizing of the mind, and it makes the creation of a public mind quite impossible. The theme of schooling would then be divisiveness, not sameness, and would inevitably engenderhate. In December 1993, Minister Louis Farrakhan gave a talk in Madison Square Garden, during which he made reference to a young African-American man who had, only a few days before, been arrested for gunning down passengers on the Long Island Railroad. Most of the victims were white; a few were Asians. Although there is no evidence that Farrakhan encouraged their response, members of the audience cheered either the young man or his deed. It is not clear which. One may explain this response by reference to a sense of generalized rage on the part of African-Americans against European culture. If that is the case, then surely the role of the public school is not to intensify it, but to help create a sane alternative to it.

4 • Gods That May Serve
    W ho writes the songs that young girls sing? Or the tales that old men tell? Who creates the myths that bind a nation and give purpose and meaning to the idea of a public education? In America, it is the advertisers and, of course, the popular musicians and filmmakers; maybe even the hollow men gathered around swimming pools in Beverly Hills, inventing stories we call television sitcoms.
    This does not exhaust the list, but teachers are not on it. It must be clear at the beginning that schools have not and have never been organized to create forceful, inspiring narratives. They collect them, amplify them, distribute them, ennoble them. They sometimes refute them, mock them, or neglect them. But they create nothing, and this is, I suppose, as it should be. As those who would privatize schooling correctly point out, our public schools are state-run agencies and have no license to reconstruct society on their own authority; they are given neither permission nor encouragement to promote a worldview that has no resonance in the society at large. Schools, we might say, are mirrors of social belief, giving back what citizens put in front of them. But they are not fixed in one position. They can be moved up and down and sideways, so that at different times and in different venues, they will reflect one thing and not another. But always they show somethingthat is
there
, not of the schools’ invention, but of the society that pays for the schools and uses them for various purposes. This is why the gods of Economic Utility, Consumership, Technology, and Separatism are to be found in our schools now, exerting their force and commanding allegiance. They are gods that come from outside the walls of the classroom.
    All of this must be quite obvious, and a reader may well ask, When did the coauthor of a book called
Teaching as a Subversive Activity
grasp the point? As Joseph Heller might say it, I never didn’t grasp the point. I understood, in 1969, as now, that at any given time in the symbolic universe of a community, there dwell multiple narratives—some shining at the forefront, vivid and unmistakable; some in the background, indistinct and half-forgotten; some sleeping, some recently awakened, and many in uneasy contradiction to others. If an author wishes