The End of Education by Neil Postman

have been astonished and pleased to discover I share most of them. By this, I do not mean I can speak for Americans, only about them. I have also gained some confidence in these judgments from many lectures in Europe, discovering, without surprise, that Alexis de Tocqueville was right: Americans are different—in some ways better, in some worse—but different. And when one is in a foreign land, the differences emerge with uncommon clarity.
    I mention all of this not as a warranty of the soundness of my proposals but as assurance that they are grounded in a focused conception of those for whom they are intended. I think I know what gods are possible in America and what gods are not. Otherwise, there would be no point in proceeding.
    If you judge what follows to be unrealistic, superficial, orotherwise unsound, Part II of this book will, indeed, be pointless. But if you agree that these ideas move us in the right direction, Part II will provide specific examples of how one might bring these ideas to life, and the implications of doing so. The detail I will provide in Part II leads me to be as brief as possible in describing the narratives that follow. There is, in any case, nothing astonishing about them. Each is part of our symbolic landscape. We talk about them. We wonder about them. We sometimes forget about them. But they are there, and the question is, Can we use them to provide an end—that is, a purpose—to schooling?
The Spaceship Earth
    Not long ago, I found myself in an extended conversation with Marvin Minsky, the distinguished scientist who is famous (some say notorious) for his passionate advocacy of “artificial intelligence.” 1 In providing a context for his fertile imagination, Minsky referred to the influence on his thinking of several science-fiction writers, remarking that science-fiction writers are our true philosophers. It is significant, I thought, that he failed to include among a rather extensive list Mary Shelley (
Frankenstein
), Aldous Huxley (
Brave New World
), George Orwell (
1984
), and Ray Bradbury (
Fahrenheit 451
). I will come to these gloomy philosophers later on, but surely Minsky has a point, and I wish to pursue it by focusing on the most popular of all our science-fiction philosophers, Steven Spielberg. Spielberg is sometimes near-Homeric in his capacity to give form to myths that resonate deeply, especially with our youth. I put aside, for the moment,
Jurassic Park
(which connects him with the tradition of
Frankenstein
) and
Schindler’s List
(in which he forgoes the prophetic traditionaltogether) and refer to
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
and
E.T.
, each of which asks us to believe that we are not alone in the universe. Perhaps we are, perhaps not; most likely, we will never know. But what his stories make clear is that from both a metaphorical and a literal point of view the Earth is a spaceship and we are its crew members.
    This is by no means an original idea, but, unlike, for example, H. G. Wells or Jules Verne, who also wrote on this subject, Spielberg puts the idea in a form that is essentially religious, or at least spiritual; that is to say, he does not merely excite our imaginations about our Spaceship Earth. He insists on our moral obligation to it. Anyone who has talked to young people about either of these films will know how clearly they grasp the sense of responsibility urged on them, as well as how deeply runs their emotional response to the idea that we can no longer take for granted the well-being of the planet.
    We have here, then, a narrative of extraordinary potential: the story of human beings as stewards of the Earth, caretakers of a vulnerable space capsule. It is a relatively new narrative, not fully developed and fraught with uncertainties and even contradictions. (For example, I hesitate to invoke the image of the starship
Enterprise
from
Star Trek
, because for all its dramatic appeal, Captain Kirk is essentially a benevolent tyrant, democracy