Encyclopedia of Outdated Information

…up until the last generation it was possible to be born, grow up, and spend a life in the United States without moving more than 50 miles from home, without ever confronting serious questions about one’s basic beliefs, and patterns of behavior. Indeed, without ever confronting serious challenges to anything one knew. Stability and consequent predictability — within “natural cycles” — was the characteristic mode. But now, in just the last minute, we’ve reached the stage where change occurs so rapidly that each of us in the course of our lives has continuously to work out a set of values, beliefs, and patterns of behavior that are viable, or seem viable, to each of us personally. And just when we have identified a workable system, it turns out to be irrelevant because so much has changed while we were doing it.

Of course, this frustrating state of affairs applies to our education as well. If you are over 25 years of age, the mathematics you were taught in school is “old”; the grammar you were taught is obsolete and in disrepute; the biology, completely out of date, and the history, open to serious question. The best that can be said of you, assuming that you remember most of what you were told and read, is that you are a walking encyclopedia of outdated information.

(Teaching as a Subversive Activity by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner, 1971)

Postman and Weingartner go on to offer (among other things) a metaphor: our language is a map intended to describe the world outside our skins. When the map corresponds to what’s actually there, a person has a high degree of success in functioning. When it doesn’t, chaos sets in. Education, they suggest, should help students develop an effective language — one that includes an ability to describe the state of continual change we live in.

Before reading any farther, I want to jot down some thoughts about how to do this, because it’s something often on my mind. Mostly it’s something I wonder about: am I a real dinosaur, creating dinosaurs with my educational approach? But I think there are some ways an effective “map” is formed naturally with our educational efforts.

1. Students need information, and not all facts are in a state of flux. I’m not quite as committed to pouring facts into kids in the early stages as some of the more hard-core proponents of the trivium, but certain facts are essential building blocks and should be taught without apology.
2. We need to remember our own orientation — in terms of both worldview and history — at all times when so much around us seems to be in flux. It can be articulated often in lots of areas — study of history or science or literature. The first thing you look for on a map is where you are. Each attempt to clarify where we stand in relation to what we’re studying reinforces identity, and strengthens one’s internal “language.”
3. Cultivate imagination, reading with appreciation, art, creative problem solving, and all creative pursuits. Consider the ethical and spiritual dimensions of current events. Life is about so much more than transient human activity.
4. Nature study. It’s only human innovation and knowledge that change rapidly. Get outside and find some loved places and you discover that nature is more stable. It’s also the larger context in which all human culture exists, and in significant ways it sets the terms whether we acknowledge it or not. The natural world provides one of the most vital external reference points there is.