The following is an excerpt from The End of Education by the culture critic Neil Postman (1931-2003). We covered other works by Postman in Al-Andalus Book Club, including Amusing Ourselves to Death and Technopoly. In this particular book, Postman reflects on the state of public education in the United States, which can arguably apply across the world given the monoculture and globalism that has seeped into all aspects of modern life. The title’s double entendre speaks to what Postman is arguing – when the purpose of education does not guide curriculum development, education ceases to be, well, education. Instead of developing the children’s humanity, modern education erects idols to be served, including economic utility and consumerism (will you be able to make enough money to buy stuff?), technology (children need to code because this is how they’ll be able to participate in the modern technopoly), as well as ethnic/gender separatism and resentment (everything is explained through white supremacy and oppressive patriarchy).
In this passage, Postman briefly explores what diversity in educational sources should be about and why it’s indispensable. We should not be seeking diversity in backgrounds as an end in themselves. Rather, we need to recognize that such diversity entails a diversity in lived experiences, which will result in diversity in perceptions and thoughts. Requiring such diverse representations in education, and elsewhere in other social institutions for that matter, will foster an atmosphere of creativity and growth. This does not mean a surrender of objective standards and criteria for what makes excellence in performance, as Postman argues below. What it does mean is our need to recognize that we cannot reduce everything to quantifiable measures, a scientism that can only be taken for granted when human beings are reduced to mere cogs in a production machine in service of the idols far too many of us worship in the modern world.
Another point to highlight here is on Islamic education. During our better days of the past, Muslim scholars did not restrict their educational pursuits to enrollment in Islamic seminaries erected in the name of traditional education while modeling secular schooling systems. Diversity in their polymathic backgrounds resulted in eclectic minds that were able to synthesize their learning in novel ways that allowed for the counterintuitive result of progressive and novel readings while at the same time remaining conservatively adherent to the Islamic tradition.
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There is, in addition, another reason for emphasizing diversity, one of which we may be skeptical. I refer to the psychological argument that claims the self-esteem of some students may be raised by focusing their attention on the accomplishments of those of their own kind, especially if the teachers are of their own kind. I cannot say if this is so or not, but it needs to be pointed out that while a diminished self-esteem is no small matter, one of the main purposes of public education – it is at the core of a common culture – is the idea that students must esteem something other than self. This is a point Cornel West has stressed in addressing both whites and blacks. For example, after reviewing the pernicious effects of race consciousness, which include poverty and paranoia, he ends his book Race Matters by saying, “We simply cannot enter the twenty-first century at each other’s throats …. We are at a crucial crossroads in the history of this nation – and we either hang together by combating these forces that divide and degrade us or we hang separately.” I take this to be a heartfelt plea for the necessity of providing ourselves and especially our young with a comprehensive narrative that makes a constructive and unifying use of diversity.
Fortunately, there is such a narrative. It has both a theoretical and a practical component, which gives it special force. The theoretical component comes to us from science, expressed rather abstractly in the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The law tells us that although matter can be neither created nor destroyed (the First Law), it tends towards becoming useless. The name given to this tendency is entropy, which means that everything in the universe moves inexorably toward sameness, and when matter reaches a state in which there is no differentiation, there is no employable energy. This would be a rather relentlessly depressing notion if not for the fact that there are “negentropic” forces in the universe, energies that retard sameness and keep things moving, organized, and (from a human point of view) useful. Every time we clean our homes, or our streets, or use information to solve a problem, or make a schedule, we are combating entropy, using intelligence and energy to overcome (that is, postpone) the inevitable decay of organization.
The physicists describe all of this in mathematical codes and do not always appreciate the ways in which the rest of us employ their ideas of entropy and negentropy. Still the universe is as much our business as it is theirs, and if there are lessons to be learned from the universe, attention must be paid. The lesson here is that sameness is the enemy of vitality and creativity. From a practical point of view, we can see this in every field of human activity. Stagnation occurs when nothing new and different comes from outside the system. The English language is a superb example of this point; so is Latin.
English is a relatively young language, not much more than six hundred years old (assuming Chaucer to be our first major English author). It began its journey as a Teutonic tongue, changed itself by admitting the French language, then Italian, and then welcomed new words and forms from wherever its speakers moved around the globe. T. S. Eliot once remarked that English is the best language for a poet to use, since it contains, for the poet’s choice, the rhythms of many languages. This is an arguable point, perhaps. But it is not arguable that English is rapidly becoming the global language, has more words in it, by far, than any other language, and exerts its influence everywhere (much to the chagrin of the French, who, failing to grasp the importance of diversity, are using their energies to prevent changes in their language).
English, in a word, is the most diverse language on earth, and because of that, its vitality and creativity are assured. Latin, on the other hand, is dead. It is dead because it is no longer open to change, especially changes from outside itself. Those who speak and write it, speak and write it as has been done for centuries. Other languages drew upon Latin for strength, picked on its flesh and bones, created themselves from its nourishment. But Latin was not nourished in return, which is why its usefulness is so limited.
Whenever a language or an art form becomes fixed in time and impermeable, drawing only on its own resources, it is punished by entropy. Whenever difference is allowed, the result is growth and strength. There is no art form flourishing today, or that has flourished in the past, that has not done so on the wings of diversity – American musicians borrowing from African rhythms, South American architects employing Scandinavian ideas, German painters finding inspiration in Egyptian art, French filmmakers influenced by Japanese techniques.
We even find the law of diversity operating in the genetic information we pass on when procreating. In cases where marriage is confined to those of the same family – where people, as it were, clone themselves – entorpic defects are more likely to occur than when differences are admitted. We may go so far as to say that sameness is the enemy not only of vitality but of excellence, for where there are few or no differences – in genetic structure, in language, in art – it is not possible to develop robust standards of excellence. I am aware that there are those who come to the opposite conclusion. They argue that diversity in human affairs makes it impossible to have a standard of anything because there are too many points of view, too many different traditions, too many purposes; thus, diversity, they conclude, makes relativists of us all.
At a theoretical level, we may have an interesting argument here. But from a practical point of view, we can see how diversity works to provide an enriched sense of excellence. During the weeks of the latest World Cup tournament, nations from every part of the world were participating – Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Cameroon, Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Italy, and many others. Each team brought a special tradition and a unique style to the games. The Germans were methodical and efficient, the Brazilians flamboyant, the Italians emotional. They were all good but different, and they all knew what “good” means. The Americans didn’t have much of a style and even less of a tradition, and though they played bravely, they were eliminated fairly early. I am not aware of their complaining that they lost because they have a different standard of “good.” (For example, the team that scores the fewest goals wins.) Indeed, such a claim would be demeaning to them, as it would be demeaning to Japanese or Peruvian artists to say that their works are so different from those of other traditions that no judgments can be made of them. Their works, of course, are different from others, but what that means is not that excellence becomes meaningless but that the rest of the world expands and enriches its ideas of “good”.
At the same time, because we are all human, our expanded ideas of “good” are apt to be comprehensible and recognizable. In painting, we look for delicacy, simplicity, feeling, craftsmanship, originality, symmetry, all of which are aspirations of painters all over the world, as character, insight, believability, and emotion are aspirations of playwrights. No one faults Arthur Miller for failing to use iambic pentameter in writing Death of a Salesman. But what makes his play “good” is not so different from what makes Macbeth “good.” Diversity does not mean the disintegration of standards, is not an argument against standards, does not lead to a chaotic, irresponsible relativism. It is an argument for the growth and malleability of standards, a growth that takes place across time and space and that is given form by differences of gender, religion, and all the other categories of humanity.
Thus, the story of how language, art, politics, science, and most expressions of human activity have grown, been vitalized and enriched through the intermingling of different ideas is one way to organize learning and to provide the young with a sense of pride in being human.
In this story, we do not read Gabriel García Márquez to make Hispanic students happy, but because of the excellence of his novels. That Emily Dickenson and Edna St. Vincent Millay were women is not irrelevant, but we ask students to know their work because their poems are good, not to strike a blow for feminism. We read Whitman and Langston Hughs for the same reason, not because the former was a homosexual and the latter African-American.
Do we learn about Einstein because he was Jewish? Marie Curie because she was Polish? Aristotle because he was Greek? Confusious because he was Chinese? Cervantes because he was handicapped? Do we listen to the music of Grieg because he was a short Norwegian, or Beethoven because he was a deaf German?
In the story of diversity, we do not learn of these people to advance a political agenda or to raise the level of students’ self-esteem. We learn about these people for two reasons: because they demonstrate how the vitality and creativity of humanity depend on diversity, and because they have set the standards to which civilized people adhere. The law of diversity thus makes intelligent humans of us all.
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