Postman: the end of education

Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see…
At its best, schooling can be about how to make a life, which is quite different from how to make a living…

Neil Postman, The End of Education

As a new-made parent, I’ve been dwelling on these ideas and much else besides.
I was taught how to make a life for the majority of my educated years. This was an incredible blessing. It’s something that instills a deep-seated knowledge of what matters in life. Thoreau said, “rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth,” and while I tend towards the latter three qualifications, I believe progressive culture’s favorite monastic saw love in his day as something trivial, consumptive, and selfish (not much has changed in our definitions). In this regard, I agree- truth wins out and is the sole currency we can teach our kids to uncover throughout their formative years.

Postman and I wouldn’t push back on the alternative. You could make an argument that school should teach students to make a living. However, I’d sooner reason that capitalism is the best system for economic governance than give credence to this method of pedagogy (the theories and practice may find validation in some aspects of flourishing, but certainly not all). I use our financial system as an example intentionally as it, more than almost anything else, has had the unintended effect of turning our institutions, especially education, into factories replicating “productive members of (a money-obsessed) society.”

In a post-war, manual labor and factory-filled environment, this may have been a valuable function for education (read statement with extreme skepticism). Whatever the reasons for absolving the thoughtful establishments of the past, we live in a new economy, culture, and geo-political environment. Knowledge work requires a new kind of worker.

The current (educational) structure, which seeks low-cost uniformity that meets minimum standards, is killing our economy, our culture, and us… One of the things that school is for is to teach our children to understand and relish the idea of intellectualism, to develop into something more than a purpose-driven tool for the industrial state.

- Seth Godin, Stop Stealing Dreams

I quote this argument from an entrepreneur who paid his dues “making a living” off his early education. Seth built and sold a tech company to Yahoo in the early internet days and understood the value of economic motivators as well as anyone when he wrote these thoughts. His drive has always been to create change-makers in society, starting his own alternative-MBA program to rewrite the laws for education laid down by the industrial revolution. Making a living has become a language, an attitude, and a way of life. It can be impossible to separate the intertwined nature of school and this paradigm. It’s even harder to convince someone that financial increase is not something we should encourage for students.

Find my vote thrown in with the former purpose of schooling: to create adults who understand how to make a life. How to live by morals and a communal vision of the good life (which requires philosophical and theological education) and how to navigate the protean currents of culture (which requires a strong grip on history and sociology).

When you give a man a fish, you help him survive poverty…

When you teach him to use the rod, you help him heap piles of aquatic life upon a shore ad infinitum…

When you teach a man to be a fisherman (with all the accoutrements that lifestyle entails), you create a man connected to his local economy, willing to serve the greater good, and prone to finding creative, holistic, and healthy solutions to the problems of our time.

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Technology is on a relentless warpath to create cogs in a machine that serve its end. Through our purpose and methods for education, we have coopted what was once vital and made it subservient to financial ends. We must reinvent and restore education for the modern era because of our today and their tomorrow. Our world is suffering from a lack of wisdom. When we teach prudence, we gain it. At the same time that we gain it, we impart it to those “living messages we send to a time we will not see.” In this, we find the true end of education.