Even as city streets became unsafe for exploration, as a mostly rural environment gave way to a relatively sterile suburban one, and as physical labor gave way to the information age, schools never responded to the cultural shift toward abstraction by moving in the opposite direction. ![]() Marshall McLuhan, for example, proposed that schools would have to serve as “civil defense against media fallout.” That didn’t happen, of course. ![]() A few observers quickly recognized the significance of this inundation. Those children who spent an inordinate amount of time in the world of abstractions were typically chastised for being “bookworms” and pushed outside to get some fresh air.Īll of this changed with television, which threw iconic rather than textual representations at children (and adults) at a mind-numbing pace. Rarely, however, was it allowed to supercede it. The abstract character of the texts and numbers found in schools complemented the intensely physical character of life outside. From the seventeenth century through the first half of the twentieth, schools were places children went to gain entry into the world of symbols. To a large degree, American schools were invented out of a need to heat up children’s access to media. To be sure, this effort would represent a radical reversal of schools’ traditional relationship with media. By helping our youth become good at and appreciate the value of profound human engagement, we may help cool the attraction to mediated experiences expressed by my student. It seems to me that in such a society one task of schools would be to stress the kind of deeply caring, fully present, and wholly human interaction that long ago disappeared from ordinary public life and is now rapidly evaporating from private experience as well. In a society in which adults so commonly treat each other mechanically, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that our youth are more attracted to machines. I do feel deeply disturbed when I can run errand after errand, and complete one task after another with the help of bank clerks, cashiers, postal employees, and hairstylists without ANY eye contact at all! After a wicked morning of that, I am ready to conduct all business online. The next day a student sent me an e-mail that included the following: I presented the study, with unconcealed scorn, to a graduate class I was teaching at the time. Several years ago a study found that young people actually prefer ATMs and automated phone systems to bank tellers and clerks. But one place where we would do well to employ this thermostatic approach is in our relationship to technology and the fundamental ways that a vast number of electronic tools mediate and shape our children’s experiences. Schools can’t be expected to solve all of our social ills. Postman and Weingartner recognized that there are limits to this role. If a culture becomes too enamored with competition, schools would emphasize cooperation if it overemphasizes individuality, schools would emphasize community responsibility if it allows poor children to go hungry, schools would (and do) develop lunch and breakfast programs to feed them and so on. In Teaching as a Subversive Activity, Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner argued that one of the roles of schools in a free society is to serve as a cultural thermostat - to take the temperature of the culture, determine where the culture is over- and underheated, and then gear instruction to compensate for those extremes. I first encountered the idea of the compensatory role of schools in 1970, while preparing to become a teacher. They won’t eat it if it doesn’t taste like fast food.”Īside from their stunning capitulation of adult responsibility, these comments illustrate what has become a common disregard for one of schooling’s most important tasks: to compensate for, rather than intensify, society’s excesses. The only way I can teach them anything is by showing them videos.” Or this from a middle school principal who defended serving children junk food every day by telling me, “That’s what they’re used to eating. Consider this from a high school social studies teacher who told me, “Kids don’t read anymore.
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