“… the idea of making them less dumb.”
There are any number of writers on education whom I admire, and not only those of much earlier times going back to the Greeks. In my own lifetime there have been many whose words have shown me the way forward, as it were. What they have written on the subject of education has stimulated and released within me an unending stream of thoughts of my own, enough even on one occasion to start, with my wife, a school of our own.
One of these writers whom I admire (and maybe even love for his words, words being the only contact I’ve ever had with him) and whose books are now on my library shelves was Neil Postman. He is no more, that which saddens me. We are almost of the same birth year, and we should still be here together. We’re not, although I still have what he wrote. My regret is that there will be no more writing from him, unless uncovered in up until now hidden manuscripts.
Earlier today I stumbled (my word for the happy meetings on the internet while surfing) upon an interview with Neil Postman appearing in the publication, Aurora, in 1989. One more example of wise people saying the right things about education, but who are rarely listened to, and more rarely heard by the establishment. One more example of how little things have changed. Here is the passage from the interview that got my attention:
“Now, it’s very easy to say we need to teach students how to think, but it is not entirely clear how we can get students to learn to think…. One possible way of doing that is to abandon the whole idea of trying to make students intelligent and focus on the idea of making them less dumb.
This is not just some semantic razzle-dazzle but is exactly the procedure that physicians and lawyers follow, which is one of the reasons I would guess they make so much money. Doctors do not generally concern themselves with what is good health; they concentrate on what is sickness. And lawyers don’t think too much about what is justice; they think about what is injustice. Using this model in teaching would imply identifying and understanding various forms of stupidity and then working to eliminate as many of those as we could.”
