“Nontrivial schooling can provide a point of view from which what is can be seen clearly, what was as a living present, and what will be as filled with possibility. What this means is that at its best, schooling can be about how to make a life, which is quite different from how to make a living.”

“A god, in the sense I am using the word, is the name of a great narrative, one that has sufficient credibility, complexity, and symbolic power to enable one to organize one’s life around it.”

“My intention here is neither to bury nor to praise any gods, but to to claim that we cannot do without them, that whatever else we may call ourselves, we are the god-making species. Our genius lies in our capacity to make meaning through the creation of narratives that give point to our labors, exalt our history, elucidate the present, and give direction to our future.”

“The purpose of a narrative is to give meaning to the world, not to describe it scientifically. The measure of a narrative’s “truth” or “falsity” is in its consequences: Does it provide people with a sense of personal identity, a sense of a community life, a basis for moral conduct, explanations of that which cannot be known?”

“We are unceasing in creating histories and futures for ourselves through the medium of narrative. Without a narrative, life has no meaning. Without meaning, learning has no purpose. Without a purpose, schools are houses of detention, not attention. This is what my book is about.”

“The great story of science … is a story that exalts human reason, places criticism over faith, disdains revelation as a source of knowledge, and, to put a spiritual cast upon it, postulates that our purpose on Earth is to discover reliable knowledge. Of course, the great narrative of science shares with the great religious narratives the idea that there is order to the universe, which is a fundamental assumption of all important narratives.”

“The great strength of the science-god is, of course, that it works. … Its theories are demonstrable and cumulative; its errors, correctable; its results, practical. … It is a mighty god and, like more ancient ones, gives people a measure of control over their lives, which is one of the reasons why gods are invented in the first place.”

“[Science] places itself at the service of both the beneficent and the cruel, and its grand moral impartiality, if not indifference, has made it welcome the world over.”

God —> Son & Holy Ghost; science —> technology

“Whereas the science-god speaks to us of both understanding and power, the technology-god speaks only of power. It demolishes the assertion of the Christian God that heaven is only a posthumous reward. It offers convenience, efficiency, and prosperity here and now; and it offers its benefits to all, the rich as well as the poor, as does the Christian God. But it goes much further. For it does not merely give comfort to the poor; it promises that through devotion to it the poor will become rich. Its record of achievement—there can be no doubt—has been formidable, in part because it is a demanding god, and is strictly monotheistic.”

“I wish to stress that all gods are imperfect, even dangerous. A belief too strongly held, one that excludes the possibility of a tolerance for other gods, may result in a psychopathic fanaticism.”

“To be able to hold comfortably in one’s mind the validity and usefulness of two contradictory truths is the source of tolerance, openness, and, most important, a sense of humor, which is the greatest enemy of fanaticism.”

“What makes public schools public is not so much that the schools have common goals but that the students have common gods. The reason for this is that public education does not serve a public. It creates a public.”

Not good century or two for gods: Darwin with evolution, Marx against nationalism/capitalism, Freud against reason, Einstein against Newton’s science-god

On research on the engineering of learning: “The evidence for the superiority of one method over another, usually given in the language of statistics, which, in spite of its abstract nature, is strangely referred to as “hard evidence.”

Theodore Roszak: “Too much apparatus, like too much bureaucracy, only inhibits the natural flow [of teaching and learning]. Free human dialogue, wandering wherever the agility of the mind allows, lies at the heart of education. If teachers do not have the time, the incentive, or the wit to provide that; if students are too demoralized, bored or distracted to muster the attention their teachers need of them, then that is the educational problem which has to be solved—and solved from inside the experience of the teachers and the students.” A problem that’s metaphysical, not technical 

The god of Economic Utility tells the story that “we are first and foremost economic creatures, and that our sense of worth and purpose is to be found in our capacity to secure material benefits.”

The god of Consumership basic moral axiom is “whoever dies with the most toys, wins” 

“The majority of important television commercials take the form of religious parables organized around a coherent theology. Like all religious parables, these commercials put forward a concept of sin, intimations of the way to redemption, and a vision of Heaven. This will be obvious to those who have taken to heart the Parable of the Person with Rotten Breath, the Parable of the Stupid Investor, the Parable of the Lost Traveler’s Checks, the Parable of the Man Who Runs Through Airports, or most of the hundreds of others that are part of our youth’s religious education. In these parables, the root cause of evil is technological innocence, a failure to know the particulars of the beneficent accomplishments of industrial progress. This is the primary source of unhappiness, humiliation, and discord in life.“

“At some point it becomes far from asinine to speak of the god of Technology—in the sense that people believe technology works, that they rely on it, that it makes promises, that they are bereft when denied access to it, that they are delighted when they are in its presence, that for most people it works in mysterious ways, that they condemn people who speak against it that they stand in awe of it, and that, in the born-again mode, they will alter their lifestyles, their schedules, their habits, and their relationships to accommodate it. If this be not a form of religious belief, what is?”

“In the case of cars, what we needed to think about in the early twentieth century was not how to drive them but what they would do to our air, our landscape, our social relations, our family life, and our cities.” — not just informational instruction but philosophical inquiry

“I am not arguing against using computers in school. I am arguing against our sleepwalking attitudes toward it, against allowing it to distract us from more important things, against making a god of it.”

School not primarily about transmitting information; about teaching how to behave in groups, social cohesion, responsibility

H.L. Mencken, 1918: “There is no sure-cure so idiotic that some superintendent of schools will not swallow it. The aim seems to be to reduce the whole teaching process to a sort of automatic reaction, to discover some master formula that will not only take the place of competence and resourcefulness in the teacher but that will also create an artificial receptivity in the child.”

“Narratives are not exactly histories at all, but a special genre of storytelling that uses history to give form to ideals.”

Claude Lévi-Strauss: “The purpose of myth is to provide a model capable of overcoming a contradiction.”

The god of Separatism/Multiculturalism (as opposed to cultural pluralism) in school curriculum divides, leads to Balkanization, privatizes schooling and the mind (instead of creating public mind), and engenders hate

“Who writes the songs that young girls sing? Or the tales that old men tell? Who creates the myths that bind a nation and give purpose and meaning to the idea of a public education? In America, it is the advertisers and, of course, the popular musicians and filmmakers; maybe even the hollow men gathered around swimming pools in Beverly Hills, inventing stories we call television sitcoms.”

“At any given time in the symbolic universe of a community, there dwell multiple narratives, some shining at the forefront, vivid and unmistakable; some in the background, indistinct and half-forgotten; some sleeping, some recently awakened, and many in uneasy contradiction to others.”

“Our citizens believe in two contradictory reasons for schooling. One is that schools must teach the young to accept the world as it is, with all of their culture’s rules, requirements, constraints, and even prejudices. The other is that the young should be taught to be critical thinkers, so that they become men and women of independent mind, distanced from the conventional wisdom of their own time and with strength and skill enough to change what is wrong.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The American Constitution is not a catechism, but a hypothesis.”

On humans: “We are the world makers, and the word weavers. That is what makes us smart, and dumb; moral and immoral; tolerant and bigoted. That is what makes us human.”

Recommends changing major school subjects to archaeology, anthropology, and astronomy

“Archaeology is among the best subjects we have for helping to cultivate in the young a sense of earthly perspective.” 

“[Anthropology] presents to us living cultures that differ widely in their worldviews and therefore helps the young to defend themselves against idolatry and false absolutes.”

“Anthropology is clearly a subject of global dimensions, and its early introduction to our young and its continued study throughout schooling would help to give them an awe-inspiring sense of humanity’s range of difference, as well as a sense of our common points. In learning about difference, we become less afraid and therefore more courageous. In learning about commonalities, we become more hopeful.”

“Astronomy is a key subject if we wish to cultivate in our young a sense of awe, interdependence, and global responsibility.”

“Astronomy is a human story, filled with the same emotions, drama, triumphs, and tragedies one finds in Shakespeare’s plays. There is ambition, greed, deceit, superstition, nobility, wonder, and, always and above all else, curiosity.”

William James: “You can give humanistic value to almost anything by teaching it historically. Geology, economics, mechanics, are humanities when taught with reference to the successive achievements of the geniuses to which these sciences owe their being. Not taught thus, literature remains grammar, art a catalogue, history a list of dates, and natural science a sheet of formulas and weights and measures.”

Teachers should occasionally have to teach a subject they hate to be forced to be a learner again, sympathize with struggling students, and get new ideas

“We can improve the quality of teaching and learning overnight by getting rid of all textbooks.” Badly written, imply subject is boring 

On textbooks: “There is no sense of the frailty or ambiguity of human judgment, no hint of the possibilities of error. Knowledge is presented as a commodity to be acquired, never as a human struggle to understand, to overcome falsity, to stumble toward the truth.”

“Textbooks are enemies of education, instruments for promoting dogmatism and trivial learning. They may save the teacher some trouble, but the trouble they inflict on the minds of students is a blight and a curse.”

Right-wing group monitoring media and academia for left-wing bias (Reed Irvine’s Accuracy in Media/Academia) stumbled upon “the best idea yet invented for achieving what every teacher longs for: first, to get students to pay careful attention; second, to get them to think critically.”

The “story” that infuses so much schooling: “You come to school to learn important facts and enduring truths. Your teacher knows many of these, your textbooks still others. It is not your business to know where they came from or how. It would, in any case, be a waste of valuable time to burden you with the mistakes of those who thought they had discovered important facts and enduring truths. School is not a place for documenting error, but for revealing the true state of affairs.”

“Knowledge of a subject mostly means knowledge of the language of that subject. Biology, after all, is not plants and animals; it is a special language employed to speak about plants and animals. History is not events that once occurred; it is language describing and interpreting events, according to rules established by historians.”

All subjects should be taught from an historical perspective as a means of educating students to be error detectors – “I can think of no better way to demonstrate that knowledge is not a fixed thing, but a continuous struggle to overcome prejudice, authoritarianism, and even “common sense.”

Re: William James on subjects becoming “humanistic” when taught historically: “His point almost certainly was that there is nothing more human than the stories of our errors and how we have managed to overcome them, and then fallen into error again, and continued our efforts to make corrections—stories without end. Robert Maynard Hutchins referred to these stories as the Great Conversation, a dynamic and accurate metaphor, since it suggests not only that knowledge is passed down from one thinker to another but modified, refined, and corrected as the “conversation” goes on.”

“To teach about the atom without including Democritus in the conversation, electricity without Faraday, political science without Aristotle or Machiavelli, astronomy without Ptolemy, is to deny our students access to the Great Conversation.”

Cicero: “To remain ignorant of things that happened before you were born is to remain a child.”

“When we incorporate the lives of our ancestors in our education, we discover that some of them were great error-makers, some great error-correctors, some both. And in discovering this, we accomplish three things. First, we help students to see that knowledge is a stage in human development, with a past and a future. Second, we acquaint students with the people and ideas that comprise “cultural literacy”—that is to say, give them some understanding of where their ideas come from and how we came by them. And third, we show them that error is no disgrace, that it is the agency through which we increase understanding.”

5 narratives “that contain sufficient resonance and power to be taken seek as reasons for schooling”:

• Spaceship Earth: the great human heritage and responsibility
• Fallen Angel: importance of error
• The American Experiment: continuous argument
• The Law of Diversity: differences in language/custom/religion/etc increase overall vitality, excellence, and unity 
• The Word Weavers / World Makers: language as an act of creation and formation of worldview 

“Because we are imperfect souls, our knowledge is imperfect. The history of learning is an adventure in overcoming our errors. There is no sin in being wrong. The sin is in our unwillingness to examine our own beliefs, and in believing that our authorities cannot be wrong. Far from creating cynics, such a story is likely to foster a healthy and creative skepticism, which is something quite different from cynicism. It refutes the story of the student learner as the dummy in a ventriloquism act. It holds out the hope for students to discover a sense of excitement and purpose in being part of the Great Conversation.”

“In steering clear of patriotism, educators miss an opportunity to provide schooling with a profound and transcendent narrative that can educate and inspire students of all ages. I refer, of course, to the story of America as a great experiment and as a center of continuous argument.”

Four important arguments/experiments that characterize American culture:

• “Is it possible to have a coherent, stable culture that allows the greatest possible freedom of religious and political thought and expression?”
• “Is it possible to have a coherent, stable culture made up of people of different languages, religions, traditions, and races?”
• “Is it possible to provide a free public education for all citizens?”
• “Is it possible to preserve the best of American traditions and social institutions while allowing uncontrolled technological development?”

On the study of American experiment: “This is a powerful story that is at the core of what America is about. The story says that experimenting and arguing is what Americans do. It does not matter if you are unhappy about the way things are. Everybody is unhappy about the way things are. We experiment to make things better, and we argue about what experiments are worthwhile and whether or not those we try are any good. And when we experiment, we make mistakes, and reveal our ignorance, and our timidity, and our naïveté. But we go on because we have faith in the future—that we can make better experiments and better arguments. This, it seems to me, is a fine and noble story, and I should not be surprised if students are touched by it and find in it a reason for learning.”

“American English is especially well suited to a celebration of the virtue of diversity, since the multicultural influences on it have been continuous and powerful. There is no group that ever came to America, or was here before anyone came, that has not contributed words, and therefore ideas, to the language.”

“Go to any museum in the world, even one that serves only as an archive, and ask, “What is this museums definition of humanity?” You will be rewarded with some kind of an answer. In some cases, the answer will be timid and even confused; in others, bold and unmistakable. Of course, it is folly to say which museums convey the right answers. All of them are correct: We are toolmakers and symbol makers and war makers. We are sublime and ridiculous, beautiful and ugly, profound and trivial, spiritual and practical.”

“Any canon can be added to, modified, or even discarded if it no longer serves, in part or whole, as a model of excellence. This means that any canon is a living, dynamic instrument, and it is certainly not limited to those artists who are dead, and long dead.”

“A metaphor is not an ornament. It is an organ of perception. Through metaphors, we see the world as one thing or another.”

Definitions, questions, and metaphors are “three of the most potent elements with which human language constructs a worldview.”

10 principles of technology

1. All technological change is a Faustian bargain. For every advantage a new technology offers, there is always a corresponding disadvantage.
2. The advantages and disadvantages of new technologies are never distributed evenly among the population. This means that every new technology benefits some and harms others.
3. Embedded in every technology there is a powerful idea, sometimes two or three powerful ideas. Like language itself, a technology predisposes us to favor and value certain perspectives and accomplishments and to subordinate others. Every technology has a philosophy, which is given expression in how the technology makes people use their minds, in what it makes us do with our bodies, in how it codifies the world, in which of our senses it amplifies, in which of our emotional and intellectual tendencies it disregards.
4. A new technology usually makes war against an old technology. It competes with it for time, attention, money, prestige, and a “worldview.”
5. Technological change is not additive; it is ecological. A new technology does not merely add something; it changes everything.
6. Because of the symbolic forms in which information is encoded, different technologies have different intellectual and emotional biases.
7. Because of the accessibility and speed of their information, different technologies have different political biases.
8. Because of their physical form, different technologies have different sensory biases.
9. Because of the conditions in which we attend to them, different technologies have different social biases.
10. Because of their technical and economic structure, different technologies have different content biases.