Education and literacy are intimately related. One seems
impossible without the other. Nevertheless, there was education
before the written word. And there is education that does not
rely on literacy, or at least not exclusively. With this in mind,
let us focus, in these preliminary words, on what brought
literacy into education, and on the consequences of their
reciprocal relation.
The state of education, like the state of many other institutions
embodying characteristics of literacy-based practical
experiences, is far from what is expected. Literacy carried the
ideal of permanency into the practical experience of education.
In a physical world perceived as limited in scale and
fragmented, captive to sequentiality, characterized by periodic
changes and intercommunal commitments aimed at maintaining
permanency, literacy embodied both a goal and the means for
achieving it. It defined a representative, limited set of
choices. Within this structure, education is the practical
experience of stabilizing optimal modes of interaction centered
around values expressed in language. Education based on
literacy is adapted to the dynamics of change within the reduced
scale of humankind that eventually led to the formation of
nations-entities of relative self-sufficiency. Within national
boundaries, population growth, resources, and choices could be
kept in balance.
Purposely simplified, this view allows us to understand that
education evolved from its early stages-direct transmission of
experience from one person to another, from one generation to
another-to religion-based educational structures. Filtered by a
set of religious premises, education later opened a window beyond
the immediate and the proximity of life, and evolved, not
painlessly, into schools and universities concerned with
knowledge and scholarship. This, too, was a long process, with
many intermediate steps, which eventually resulted in the
generalized system of education we now have in place, and which
reflects the separation of church and state. Liberal education
and all the values attached to it are the foundational matrix of
the current system of general education.
If you give someone a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. If
you give someone an alphabet, every problem becomes one of
literacy and education-this would probably be a good paraphrase,
applicable to the discussions on education in our day. It should
not follow, however, that with the World Wide Web, education is
only a matter of on-line postings of classes and the accidental
matching of educational needs to network availabilities. In our
world of change and discontinuity, the end of literacy, along
with the end of education based on literacy, is not a symptom,
but a necessary development, beyond on-line studies. This
conclusion, which may appear to be a criticism of the digital
dissemination of knowledge, might seem hasty at this point in
the text. The arguments to follow will justify the conclusion.
"Know the best"
Resulting from our self-constitution in a world obsessed with
efficiency and satisfaction, the insatiable effort to exhaust
the new-only to replace it with the newer- puts education in a
perspective different from that opened by literacy. Education
driven by literacy seems to be condemned to a sui generis
catch-up condition, or "damned if you do, damned if you don't."
In the last 30 years, education has prepared students for a
future different from the one education used to shape in a
reactive mode. Under the enormous pressure of expectations
(social, political, economic, moral) it simply cannot fulfill,
unless it changes as the structure of the pragmatic framework
changed, the institution of education has lost its credibility.
Classes, laboratories, manuals, any of the educational methods
advanced, not to mention the living inventory of teachers,
account for contents and ways of thinking only marginally (if at
all) linked to the change from a dominant literacy to numerous
literacies. IBM, fighting to redefine itself, stated bluntly in
one of its educational campaigns, "Since 1900, every institution
has kept up with change, except one: Education."
More money than ever, more ideals and sweat have been invested in
the process of educating the young, but little has changed
either the general perception of education or the perception of
those educated. The most recent laboratory of the high school or
university is already outdated when the last piece of equipment
is ordered. The competence of even the best teachers becomes
questionable just as their students start their first journey in
practical life. The harder our schools and colleges try to keep
pace with change, the more obvious it becomes that this is a
wrong direction to pursue, or that something in the nature of
our educational system makes the goal unreachable-or both of
these alternatives. Some people believe that the failure is due
to the bureaucracy of education. Much can be said in support of
this opinion. The National Institute for Literacy is an example
of how a problem can become a public institution. Other people
believe that the failure is due to the inability of educators to
develop a good theory of education, based on how people learn and
what the best way to teach is. Misunderstanding the implications
of education and setting false priorities are also frequently
invoked. Misunderstanding too often resulted in expensive
government projects of no practical consequence.
Other explanations are also given for the failure of
education-liberalism, excessive democracy in education,
rejection of tradition, teaching and learning geared to tests,
the breakdown of the family. (Listing them here should not be
misconstrued as an endorsement.) It seems that every critic of
today's education has his or her own explanation of what each
thinks is wrong. Some of these explanations go well back,
almost to the time when writing was established: education
affects originality, dampens spontaneity, and infringes upon
creativity. Education negates naturalness during the most
critical period of development, when the minds of young people,
the object of education, are most impressionable.
Other arguments are more contemporary: If the right texts
(whatever right means) were to be taught, using the best methods
to put them in a light that makes them attractive, education
would not lose out to entertainment. Some groups advocate the
digest approach for texts, sometimes presented in the form of
comic strips or Internet-like messages of seven sentences per
paragraph, each sentence containing no more than seven words.
These explanations assume the permanence of literacy. They
concentrate on strategies, from infantile to outlandish, to
maintain literacy's role, never questioning it, never even
questioning whether the conditions that made it necessary might
have changed to the degree that a new structure is already in
place. Educators like to think that their program is defined
through Matthew Arnold's prescription, "Know the best that is
known and thought in the world," an axiom of tradition-driven
self- understanding. This attitude is irrelevant in a context in
which best is an identifier of wares, not of dynamic knowledge.
Some educators would follow Jacques Barzun's recommendation:
"serious reading, serious teaching of reading, and inculcation of
a love for reading are the proper goal of education."
Ideal vs. real
Schools at all levels of education purport to give students a
traditional education and promise to deliver the solid education
of yesteryear. Contrast this claim to reality: Under the
pressure of the market in which they operate, schools maintain
that they prepare students for the new pragmatic context. Some
schools integrate practical disciplines and include training
components. Courses in computer use come immediately to mind.
Some schools go so far as to sign contracts guaranteeing the
appropriateness of the education they provide. In the tradition
of the service industry, they promise to take back pupils unable
to meet the standardized criteria. Every spring, a reality check
is made. In 1996, a poll of 500 graduating seniors revealed that
only 7% succeeded in answering at least 15 of 20 questions
asked. Five of these were on math, the rest on history and
literature-all traditional subject matter.
Experts called to comment on the results of this poll-E.D.
Hirsch, author of Cultural Literacy and active in having his
educational ideas implemented; Diane Ravitch, former Assistant
Secretary of Education; and Stephen Balch, president of the
National Association of Scholars, constitute themselves in the
pragmatic framework of literacy-based education. They declare,
and appropriately so, that educational standards are declining,
that education is failing to produce the type of citizen a
democracy needs. As reputable as they undoubtedly are, these
scholars, and many of those in charge of education, do not seem
to realize what changes have been taking place in the real
world. They live in the richest and probably most dynamic country
in the world, with one of the lowest unemployment rates, and the
highest rate of new business creation, but fail to associate
education with this dynamism. If education is failing, then
something positive must be replacing it.
In modern jargon, one can say that until education is
re-engineered (or should I say rethought?), it has no chance of
catching up with reality. In its current condition of
compromise, education will only continue to muddle along,
upsetting both its constituencies: those captive to an education
based on the literacy model, and those who recognize new
structural requirements.
The reality is that the universality implicit in the literacy
model of education, reflected in the corpus of democratic
principles guaranteeing equality and access, is probably no
longer defensible in its original form. Education should rather
elaborate on notions that better reflect differences among
people, their background, ethnicity, and their individual
capabilities. Instead of trying to standardize, education should
stimulate differences in order to derive the most benefit from
them. Education should stimulate complementary avenues to
excellence, instead of equal access to mediocrity. Some people
may be uneducatable. They might have characteristics impossible
to reduce to the common denominator that literacy-based
education implies. These students might require alternative
education paths in order to optimally become what their abilities
allow them to be, and what practical experience will validate as
relevant and desired, no matter how different.
Equal representation, as applied to members of minority students
or faculty, ethnic groups, sexes or sexual preferences, and the
handicapped, introduces a false sense of democracy in education.
It takes away the very edge of their specific chances from the
people it pretends to help and encourage. Instead of
acknowledging distinctions, expectations of equal representation
suggest that the more melting in the pot, the better for
society, regardless of whether the result is uniform mediocrity
or distributed excellence. Actually the opposite is true: equal
opportunity should be used in order to preserve distinctive
qualities and bring them to fruition.
As a unified requirement, literacy imparts a sense of conformity
and standardization appropriate to the pragmatic framework that
made standardized education necessary. Numerous alternative
means of expression and communication, for which education has
only a deaf ear, facilitate the multiplication of choices. In a
world confronted with needs well beyond those of survival, this
is a source of higher efficiency. The necessary effort to
individualize education cannot, however, take place unless the
inalienable right to study and work for one's own path to
self-improvement is not respected to the same extent as liberty
and equality are.
The globality of human praxis is not a scenario invented by some
entrepreneur. It is the reflection of the scale at which
population growth, shared resources, and choices heading to new
levels of efficiency become critical. In our world many people
never become literate; many more still live at the borderline
between human and animal life, threatened by starvation and
epidemics. These facts do not contradict the dynamics that made
alternatives to literacy necessary. It is appropriate,
therefore, to question the type of knowledge that education
imparts, and how it impacts upon those who are educated.