The End of Education by Neil Postman Page B

fact, by itself, will turn no one away. Most serious narratives are rooted in a spiritual or metaphysical idea, even those narratives—inductive science, for example—that are suspicious of metaphysics. In fact, as I shall have occasion to say in a moment, science is more committedto the story of the fallen angel than any other system of belief.
    This is the story: If perfection is to be found anyplace in the universe, it is assumed to exist in God or gods. There may have been a time when human beings were perfect, but at some point, for various reasons, their powers were diminished, so that they must live forever in a state of imperfect understanding. Indeed, for us to believe that we are godlike, or perfect, is among the most serious sins of which we are capable. The Greeks called the sin “hubris.” The Christians call it “pride.” Scientists call it “dogmatism.”
    The major theme of the story is that human beings make mistakes. All the time. It is our nature to make mistakes. We can scarcely let an hour go by without making one. “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ,” Oliver Cromwell pleaded, “think it possible that you may be mistaken.” That we may be mistaken, and probably are, is the meaning of the “fall” in the fallen angel. The meaning of “angel” is that we are capable of correcting our mistakes, provided we proceed without hubris, pride, or dogmatism; provided that we accept our cosmic status as the error-prone species. Therein lies the possibility of our redemption: Knowing that we do not know and cannot know the whole truth, we may move toward it inch by inch by discarding what we know to be false. And then watch the truth move further and further away. It is a sad story, to be sure; its melancholy poignancy is captured in the myth of Sisyphus, the story of Job, and scores of other tales the world over. It is a noble story, as well, and a funny one, its humor expressed in the wise Yiddish saying,
Man tracht un Got lacht
(“Man thinks and God laughs”). The saying tells us exactly where we stand, as do the famous lines of Omar in
The Rubáiyát:
“The Moving Finger writes; and having writ / Moveson: nor all your piety nor wit / Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line / Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.” And yet the struggle goes on, does it not?
    The most explicit and sophisticated example of how this narrative improves the human condition is, of course, science. This would hardly be worth noting except for the fact that in the popular mind, and certainly in school, science is thought to be something other than a method for correcting our mistakes—namely, a source of ultimate truth. Such a belief is, in itself, an instance of the sin of pride, and no self-respecting scientist will admit to holding it. “The scientific method,” Thomas Henry Huxley once wrote, “is nothing but the normal working of the human mind.” That is to say, when the mind is working; that is to say further, when it is engaged in correcting its mistakes.
    Taking this point of view, we may conclude that science is not physics, biology, or chemistry—is not even a “subject”—but a moral imperative drawn from a larger narrative whose purpose is to give perspective, balance, and humility to learning.
    It is strange, then, that there are scientists who, putting aside their acceptance of uncertainty in their “subject,” are true and unshakable believers in some social or political doctrine; stranger still that there are devout individuals who, knowing fully of their fall, believe nonetheless that their understanding has penetrated the will of their god. We have here a mystery that goes to the heart of education. How can we explain the quest for certainty, which is so easily converted to an unseemly, unjustified, and often lethal dogmatism? This is the question John Dewey struggled with, as well as Bertrand Russell and scores of other modern education philosophers, including those who answer,