On his book The Future of Education: Reimagining Our Schools from the Ground Up
Cover Interview of January 26, 2009
In a nutshell
The Future of Education is an attempt to do precisely what its subheading suggests—reimagine our schools from the ground up. The book begins with a scenario in which a priestess in ancient Athens is holding up the bloody remains of a heifer’s liver, declaring that it is unspotted and that the goddess approves the idea of war with Corinth. One of the men in the audience suggests to his friends that this doesn’t seem like the best way to make foreign policy. His friends treat him like a fool; unpractical and not knowing how the world works—of course one has to sacrifice heifers to discover what the goddess wishes for the state. We then move to the future, in which a historian is trying to account for the bizarre fact that between the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twenty first century all “modern” societies put their children in institutions called schools in order to educate them—despite the fact that all surveys suggested that these schools were hopelessly inadequate at performing this task.
Most people take so for granted the institutions they are born amongst that they find it almost impossible to reflect on them in any serious way. The book begins by trying to show that our schools are dysfunctional because they try to perform three incompatible tasks at the same time—1. socializing children to the norms, conventions and values of their society; 2. shaping their minds to perceive the truth about the world, by engaging them in the academic enterprise that makes them skeptical of the norms, conventions, and values of their and other societies; 3. aiming to ensure the development of each child’s individual potential as far as possible. Having three distinct aims that constantly undermine each other makes for an institution that is ineffective at doing any of them.
The rest of the book outlines an alternative conception of education and shows, in a “history” of education from 2010 to 2060 how this alternative conception of education can be brought into reality, step by step.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
In a nutshell
The Future of Education is an attempt to do precisely what its subheading suggests—reimagine our schools from the ground up. The book begins with a scenario in which a priestess in ancient Athens is holding up the bloody remains of a heifer’s liver, declaring that it is unspotted and that the goddess approves the idea of war with Corinth. One of the men in the audience suggests to his friends that this doesn’t seem like the best way to make foreign policy. His friends treat him like a fool; unpractical and not knowing how the world works—of course one has to sacrifice heifers to discover what the goddess wishes for the state. We then move to the future, in which a historian is trying to account for the bizarre fact that between the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twenty first century all “modern” societies put their children in institutions called schools in order to educate them—despite the fact that all surveys suggested that these schools were hopelessly inadequate at performing this task.
Most people take so for granted the institutions they are born amongst that they find it almost impossible to reflect on them in any serious way. The book begins by trying to show that our schools are dysfunctional because they try to perform three incompatible tasks at the same time—1. socializing children to the norms, conventions and values of their society; 2. shaping their minds to perceive the truth about the world, by engaging them in the academic enterprise that makes them skeptical of the norms, conventions, and values of their and other societies; 3. aiming to ensure the development of each child’s individual potential as far as possible. Having three distinct aims that constantly undermine each other makes for an institution that is ineffective at doing any of them.
The rest of the book outlines an alternative conception of education and shows, in a “history” of education from 2010 to 2060 how this alternative conception of education can be brought into reality, step by step.