The End of Education Read Online Free PDF Page A

contradiction of the romance of a blended society, all the more so because they are not immigrants at all, but as native as most Americans get. Although there has been an astonishing growth of a black middle class, which is supposed to be the test of a group’s acceptance into the mainstream, for millions of blacks the American dream is a nightmare of poverty, family disintegration, violence, and joblessness. These matters were supposed to have been addressed by a forty-year commitment to social equality, which included such amendments to the melting-pot-story as school integration, the Civil Rights Act, open admissionpolicies, and affirmative action. And yet for all of that, blacks remain, as Ralph Ellison would say it, invisible people. On the day I am writing this, for example, Americans have been cheered by some news issued by the Bureau of Labor Statistics: Unemployment is down, indicating the economy is on the rise and better times are ahead. Barely commented upon and of almost no interest is the fact that black unemployment has increased, as has (other figures show) black homelessness, especially among children. It is as if America wishes to proceed with its business without the inclusion of blacks. And yet, it is one of the truly remarkable (and largely ignored) facts of American culture that millions of blacks continue to believe in America’s promises and in its great narratives, perhaps more deeply than do any others.
    There are, of course, other groups—Latinos, for example—who seem unable to find a welcoming place for themselves in the melting pot and who therefore find something less than inspiration in the promise embedded in its story. As for the rigorous tale of the blessedness of Hard Work, too many Americans no longer believe in it. The great school of the Higher Learning, television, teaches them that a dream deferred is a dream forever denied—which is to say, no dream at all; that they are, in fact, entitled to the fruits of technology’s largesse; and that the god of Consumership confers its graciousness more freely than can any god of Labor.
    I will come to the promise of the god of Consumership in a few pages. Here it needs only to be said that in America, as elsewhere, there exists what Vaclav Havel calls “a crisis in narrative.” Old gods have fallen, either wounded or dead. New ones have been aborted. “We are looking,” he said, “for new scientific recipes, new ideologies, new control systems, new institutions.…” In other words, we seek new gods who can provide us with “an elementary sense of justice, the abilityto see things as others do, a sense of transcendental responsibility, archetypal wisdom, good taste, courage, compassion, and faith.” 1
    Havel does not underestimate the difficulties in this. He knows that skepticism, disillusionment, alienation—and all the other words we use to describe a loss of meaning—have come to characterize our age, affecting every social institution, not least the schools. Having once been president of Czechoslovakia, and having lost the Slovaks to their own gods, Havel knows, better than anyone, that the almost worldwide return to “tribalism” signifies a search to recover a source of transcendent identity and values. He also knows, as many others do, how dangerous such searches can be, which is why no one need be surprised by the rise in the West of skinheads, who have revived the symbols and programs of Nazism, or, as I write, the emerging popularity in Russia of Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the “Russian Hitler,” who promises the masses a future more fully articulated than a conversion to a market economy. Zhirinovsky takes his story from hell, but we must grant him this: He knows as well as Havel that people need gods as much as food.
    Neither should we be surprised that there has arisen, especially though not exclusively in American academic circles, a kind of metaphysics of meaninglessness, known popularly as the philosophy of