Technopoly (24 page)

There are a hundred other things to remember that may help one to warm to the United States, including the fact that it has been, and perhaps always will be, a series of experiments that the world watches with wonder. Three such experiments are of particular importance. The first, undertaken toward the end of the eighteenth century, posed the question, Can a nation allow the greatest possible degree of political and religious freedom and still retain a sense of identity and purpose? Toward the middle of the nineteenth century, a second great experiment was undertaken, posing the question, Can a nation retain a sense of cohesion and community by allowing into it people from all over the world? And now comes the third—the great experiment of Technopoly—which poses the question, Can a nation preserve its history, originality, and humanity by submitting itself totally to the sovereignty of a technological thought-world?

Obviously, I do not think the answer to this question will be as satisfactory as the answers to the first two. But if there is an awareness of and resistance to the dangers of Technopoly, there is reason to hope that the United States may yet survive its Ozymandias-like hubris and technological promiscuity. Which brings me to the “resistance fighter” part of my principle. Those who resist the American Technopoly are people

who do not regard the aged as irrelevant;

A resistance fighter understands that technology must never be accepted as part of the natural order of things, that every
technology—from an IQ test to an automobile to a television set to a computer—is a product of a particular economic and political context and carries with it a program, an agenda, and a philosophy that may or may not be life-enhancing and that therefore require scrutiny, criticism, and control. In short, a technological resistance fighter maintains an epistemological and psychic distance from any technology, so that it always appears somewhat strange, never inevitable, never natural.

I can say no more than this, for each person must decide how to enact these ideas. But it is possible that one’s education may help considerably not only in promoting the general conception of a resistance fighter but in helping the young to fashion their own ways of giving it expression. It is with education, then, that I will conclude this book. This is not to say that political action and social policy aren’t useful in offering opposition to Technopoly. There are even now signs that Technopoly is understood as a problem to which laws and policies might serve as a response—in the environmental movement, in the contemplation of legal restrictions on computer technology, in a developing distrust of medical technology, in reactions against widespread testing, in various efforts to restore a sense of community cohesion. But in the United States, as Lawrence Cremin once remarked, whenever we need a revolution, we get a new curriculum. And so I shall propose one. I have done this before to something less than widespread acclamation.
¹
But it is the best way I can think of for the culture to address the problem. School, to be sure, is a technology itself, but of a special kind in that, unlike most technologies, it is customarily and persistently scrutinized, criticized, and modified. It is America’s principal instrument for correcting mistakes and for addressing problems that mystify and paralyze other social institutions.

In consideration of the disintegrative power of Technopoly, perhaps the most important contribution schools can make to
the education of our youth is to give them a sense of coherence in their studies, a sense of purpose, meaning, and interconnectedness in what they learn. Modern secular education is failing not because it doesn’t teach who Ginger Rogers, Norman Mailer, and a thousand other people are but because it has no moral, social, or intellectual center. There is no set of ideas or attitudes that permeates all parts of the curriculum. The curriculum is not, in fact, a “course of study” at all but a meaningless hodgepodge of subjects. It does not even put forward a clear vision of what constitutes an educated person, unless it is a person who possesses “skills.” In other words, a technocrat’s ideal—a person with no commitment and no point of view but with plenty of marketable skills.

Of course, we must not overestimate the capability of schools to provide coherence in the face of a culture in which almost all coherence seems to have disappeared. In our technicalized, present-centered information environment, it is not easy to locate a rationale for education, let alone impart one convincingly. It is obvious, for example, that the schools cannot restore religion to the center of the life of learning. With the exception of a few people, perhaps, no one would take seriously the idea that learning is for the greater glory of God. It is equally obvious that the knowledge explosion has blown apart the feasibility of such limited but coordinated curriculums as, for example, a Great Books program. Some people would have us stress love of country as a unifying principle in education. Experience has shown, however, that this invariably translates into love of government, and in practice becomes indistinguishable from what still is at the center of Soviet or Chinese education.

Some would put forward “emotional health” as the core of the curriculum. I refer here to a point of view sometimes called Rogerian, sometimes Maslovian, which values above all else the development of one’s emotional life through the quest for one’s
“real self.” Such an idea, of course, renders a curriculum irrelevant, since only “self-knowledge”—i.e., one’s feelings—is considered worthwhile. Carl Rogers himself once wrote that anything that can be taught is probably either trivial or harmful, thus making any discussion of the schools unnecessary. But beyond this, the culture is already so heavy with the burden of the glorification of “self” that it would be redundant to have the schools stress it, even if it were possible.

One obviously treads on shaky ground in suggesting a plausible theme for a diverse, secularized population. Nonetheless, with all due apprehension, I would propose as a possibility the theme that animates Jacob Bronowski’s
The Ascent of Man
. It is a book, and a philosophy, filled with optimism and suffused with the transcendent belief that humanity’s destiny is the discovery of knowledge. Moreover, although Bronowski’s emphasis is on science, he finds ample warrant to include the arts and humanities as part of our unending quest to gain a unified understanding of nature and our place in it.

Thus, to chart the ascent of man, which I will here call “the ascent of humanity,” we must join art and science. But we must also join the past and the present, for the ascent of humanity is above all a continuous story. It is, in fact, a story of creation, although not quite the one that the fundamentalists fight so fiercely to defend. It is the story of humanity’s creativeness in trying to conquer loneliness, ignorance, and disorder. And it certainly includes the development of various religious systems as a means of giving order and meaning to existence. In this context, it is inspiring to note that the Biblical version of creation, to the astonishment of everyone except possibly the fundamentalists, has turned out to be a near-perfect blend of artistic imagination and scientific intuition: the Big Bang theory of the creation of the universe, now widely accepted by cosmologists, confirms in essential details what the Bible proposes as having been the case “in the beginning.”

In any event, the virtues of adopting the ascent of humanity as a scaffolding on which to build a curriculum are many and various, especially in our present situation. For one thing, with a few exceptions which I shall note, it does not require that we invent new subjects or discard old ones. The structure of the subject-matter curriculum that exists in most schools at present is entirely usable. For another, it is a theme that can begin in the earliest grades and extend through college in ever-deepening and -widening dimensions. Better still, it provides students with a point of view from which to understand the meaning of subjects, for each subject can be seen as a battleground of sorts, an arena in which fierce intellectual struggle has taken place and continues to take place. Each idea within a subject marks the place where someone fell and someone rose. Thus, the ascent of humanity is an optimistic story, not without its miseries but dominated by astonishing and repeated victories. From this point of view, the curriculum itself may be seen as a celebration of human intelligence and creativity, not a meaningless collection of diploma or college requirements.

Best of all, the theme of the ascent of humanity gives us a nontechnical, noncommercial definition of education. It is a definition drawn from an honorable humanistic tradition and reflects a concept of the purposes of academic life that goes counter to the biases of the technocrats. I am referring to the idea that to become educated means to become aware of the origins and growth of knowledge and knowledge systems; to be familiar with the intellectual and creative processes by which the best that has been thought and said has been produced; to learn how to participate, even if as a listener, in what Robert Maynard Hutchins once called The Great Conversation, which is merely a different metaphor for what is meant by the ascent of humanity. You will note that such a definition is not child-centered, not training-centered, not skill-centered, not even problem-centered. It is idea-centered and coherence-centered. It
is also otherworldly, inasmuch as it does not assume that what one learns in school must be directly and urgently related to a problem of today. In other words, it is an education that stresses history, the scientific mode of thinking, the disciplined use of language, a wide-ranging knowledge of the arts and religion, and the continuity of human enterprise. It is education as an excellent corrective to the antihistorical, information-saturated, technology-loving character of Technopoly.

Let us consider history first, for it is in some ways the central discipline in all this. It is hardly necessary for me to argue here that, as Cicero put it, “To remain ignorant of things that happened before you were born is to remain a child.” It is enough to say that history is our most potent intellectual means of achieving a “raised consciousness.” But there are some points about history and its teaching that require stressing, since they are usually ignored by our schools. The first is that history is not merely one subject among many that may be taught;
every
subject has a history, including biology, physics, mathematics, literature, music, and art. I would propose here that every teacher must be a history teacher. To teach, for example, what we know about biology today without also teaching what we once knew, or thought we knew, is to reduce knowledge to a mere consumer product. It is to deprive students of a sense of the meaning of what we know, and of how we know. To teach about the atom without Democritus, to teach about electricity without Faraday, to teach about political science without Aristotle or Machiavelli, to teach about music without Haydn, is to refuse our students access to The Great Conversation. It is to deny them knowledge of their roots, about which no other social institution is at present concerned. For to know about your roots is not merely to know where your grandfather came from and what he had to endure. It is also to know where your ideas come from and why you happen to believe them; to know where your moral and aesthetic sensibilities come from. It is to
know where your world, not just your family, comes from. To complete the presentation of Cicero’s thought, begun above: “What is a human life worth unless it is incorporated into the lives of one’s ancestors and set in an historical context?” By “ancestors” Cicero did not mean your mother’s aunt.

Thus, I would recommend that every subject be taught
as
history. In this way, children, even in the earliest grades, can begin to understand, as they now do not, that knowledge is not a fixed thing but a stage in human development, with a past and a future. To return for a moment to theories of creation, we want to be able to show how an idea conceived almost four thousand years ago has traveled not only in time but in meaning, from science to religious metaphor to science again. What a lovely and profound coherence there is in the connection between the wondrous speculations in an ancient Hebrew desert tent and the equally wondrous speculations in a modern MIT classroom! What I am trying to say is that the history of subjects teaches connections; it teaches that the world is not created anew each day, that everyone stands on someone else’s shoulders.

I am well aware that this approach to subjects would be difficult to use. There are, at present, few texts that would help very much, and teachers have not, in any case, been prepared to know about knowledge in this way. Moreover, there is the added difficulty of our learning how to do this for children of different ages. But that it needs to be done is, in my opinion, beyond question.

The teaching of subjects as studies in historical continuities is not intended to make history as a special subject irrelevant. If every subject is taught with a historical dimension, the history teacher will be free to teach what histories are: hypotheses and theories about why change occurs. In one sense, there is no such thing as “history,” for every historian from Thucydides to Toynbee has known that his stories must be told from a special
point of view that will reflect his particular theory of social development. And historians also know that they write histories for some particular purpose—more often than not, either to glorify or to condemn the present. There is no definitive history of anything; there are only histories, human inventions which do not give us
the
answer, but give us only those answers called forth by the questions that have been asked.