Avg. Customer Rating:(based on 23 reviews) Sales Rank: 56250 Category: Book
Author:Neil Postman Publisher:Vintage Studio:Vintage Manufacturer:Vintage Label:Vintage Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published) Media: Paperback Number Of Items: 1 Pages: 224 Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5 Dimensions (in): 7.8 x 5.2 x 0.6
Product Description Postman suggests that the current crisis in our educational system derives from its failure to supply students with a translucent, unifying "narrative" like those that inspired earlier generations. Instead, today's schools promote the false "gods" of economic utility, consumerism, or ethnic separatism and resentment. What alternative strategies can we use to instill our children with a sense of global citizenship, healthy intellectual skepticism, respect of America's traditions, and appreciation of its diversity? In answering this question, The End of Education restores meaning and common sense to the arena in which they are most urgently needed.
"Informal and clear...Postman's ideas about education are appealingly fresh."--New York Times Book Review
Not worth the time February 9, 2008 1 out of 11 found this review helpful
Postman consistently does two things in this book: mangles the English language and provides arguments with no backing. Time and again he manages to lose track of his original point, leaving the reader lost in anecdotes, parables and less than original suggestions.
While the second half is easily more readable than the first, it doesn't get that much better, and Postman definitely leaves the reader wondering why they bothered when he doesn't provide many actual answers. Those that he does provide are often so drastic that implementation would be nearly impossible.
All in all, if you want a text about education and society, look elsewhere.
Addresses what ought to be rather than what is January 23, 2008 3 out of 3 found this review helpful
This book offers a vision that radically opposes what I've found in the schools of the students I tutor. Postman wants each and every stakeholder in the educational system to reflect on what education is for and why they are learning. He sees schools as something far more than generators of willing workers or transmitters of academic knowledge. He wants thinkers who revel in their courageous mistakes, appreciate America's democracy, care for their fellow man and woman, question technologies around them and are skilled in communication. These are all noble goals and this book deserves much of the high praise it has received for its impassioned articulation of these philosophical ends of education.
I have no idea how one would apply these ideas and I struggle to see how this book can actually have a significant pragmatic impact on education. From the reviews listed, it seems that many professors assign this book to educational school students. That seems like setting teachers up for a shock. You read about all of these noble goals and then you get to the classroom and find that a lot of teaching is establishing a well-managed classroom on the first day and accomodating to No Child Left Behind policy or the college preparation expectations of private school parents.
The opening section on the need for gods in education was very helpful to me, more so than concrete explanations of his five desired ends during the second half of the book. Increasingly kids feel disconnected from school and Postman's description of the gods that rule American society is helpful.
This book would probably best be served for those starting charter schools, homeschooling their children, or other educators who have a large degree of freedom in their choice of curriculum and latitude to experiment. For standard public educators, this book may only serve as another confirmation that the days of true education have already ended. I'm reminded about how I felt about how I felt about Alfie Kohn's "Punished by Rewards": Great book, but everybody is still going to use grades and coerce students into knowledge. So what should I actually do with this knowledge you've given me?
3.5 stars
--SD
One of the most challenging and impactful books I've read March 3, 2007 2 out of 3 found this review helpful
And I don't say that lightly. Postman is able to discern and illuminate why schools are failing, or perhaps more to the point, why our society has failed our schools, and has done so with such a unique perspective that my worldview has been forever changed. Read it!
Rethinking School Functions within a Flat World's Technology March 3, 2007 3 out of 4 found this review helpful
"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 'End of education,' is all about." Neil Postman
Educating for Humanity: Educational policy directives over the last half century have veered away from participation, through the UNESCO and other cultural institutions, in promoting the important concept of educating for an integral humanity, the negligence of which was a main factor in the shock of America and the world on September 11. The promise and necessity of working toward a 'flat world' became evident, a viable aspiration for proper education at a time when the worldwide crises in peace, freedom, social justice, democracy, and ecological integrity have become the defining issues of our times. Educating For a Global Humanity makes the case for a powerful appeal to examine educational purpose and means in light of what is most fundamental and important to human beings everywhere.
Creation of Scholarly Gods: The dawn of the third millennium presents a rare opportunity to take the long view and assess both how far we have come and how far we have yet to go to fully realize our potential as thinking, feeling and valuing human beings with some measure of control over our own destiny. Postman describes the purpose of his book as a creative narrative, giving life a meaning, and learning a purpose. The word End in the title means 'final goal,' not a prophecy for education or schooling systems. In the past, there were the old gods that served schools well giving them guidance, inspiration and purpose while profounding the traditional values of 'family honor, restraint, social responsibility, humility and empathy for the outcast". They included the multiple narratives of democracy, "the great melting-pot-story", and "the Protestant-ethic-story". Those were the gods of the past, up until the last century. The twentieth century, Postman laments, "has not been a good century for gods". Likewise, lack of gods has not been good for education.
Alternative Narratives: As an alternative to these 'gods that fail us,' Postman proposes five new gods or narratives. The first narrative, one which Postman believes has the potential to promote global consciousness, interdependence and cooperation are that of human beings as stewards or caretakers of the Spaceship Earth. This narrative focuses on "inventing ways to engage students in the care of their own schools, neighborhoods and towns". Incorporated into the theme of the Spaceship Earth would be the teaching of archeology, anthropology and astronomy. Archeology would instill in students "an awareness of the preciousness of the earth." The teaching of anthropology would give students "an awe-inspiring sense of humanity's range of difference, as well as a sense of our common points." The teaching of astronomy would be useful because it raises "fundamental questions about ourselves and our mission" and cultivates a "sense of awe, interdependence, and global responsibility".
An Ailing education? Elizabeth Murphy stated that Postman has provided a prescription for an ailing education system. Strait forwardly, she concluded that "If educators have a faith in his diagnosis and follow his plan then, education could be healed, fully resuscitated, revitalized and cured forever of the woes that assail it. Perhaps this description draws too heavily on the medical metaphor." She adds that exaggerating the author's intentions are yet. Nonetheless, the term 'prescription' describes succinctly and clearly Postman's agenda. "Few would disagree with Postman that education is in need of reform. Few would disagree that learning should be driven by goals and purposes. Stating what these goals or purposes 'ought' to be and, furthermore, specifying who decides on them, is where the debate is likely to ensue."
School New Functions: Postman's own perception that Americans need to re-think school functions within a 21st century technology is dealt with in his Technolopy, The Surrender of Culture to Technology. He calls the end of education, gods of cultural conceits, intended to drive students to learn. Postman critiques those failing gods in today's school, starting with god of economic utility, in whose name students may believe that if they pass through school slightly well, they would get a well-paying job. Ellen Rose wrote, "The End of Education offers a new perspective on ideas and viewpoints set forth in his other books--not just in those which focus on education,...Postman on the other hand deliberately resists pressures to reduce his ideas to contextless fragments, offering instead fully articulated, lucid arguments requiring readers to follow a number of carefully presented premises to a logical conclusion. And while Postman is well aware that his methodology and his sometimes curmudgeonly arch-conservatism prevent him from attracting quite so many followers as the "Oracle of the Electronic Age"
Late Neil Postman: One of the best writers among contemporary social critics, late professor Postman, who defined the U.S. as a society in which technology is deified to a near-totalitarian degree, is a multi cultural motivated and innovative educator. His ambiguous prophecy, he writes in his epilogue refers both to the idea that schools as we know them are on the way out. Postman acknowledged that his conclusion were assumed over the years from many others, including Jacques Ellul, and Marshall McLuhan, while Postman is equally indebted to his broad intellectual engagement with Noam Chomsky, John Dewey, Freud, Northrop Frye, Aldous Huxley, between many others.
A passionate call for meaningful narratives in our schools... November 23, 2005 9 out of 10 found this review helpful
My name is Mark and I was an 'A' student. I did well on tests, impressed my teachers, and was generally viewed as a star student. The one blight on my record was a mediocre grade in my A.P. English class in high school. Something about the class disturbed my complacent performance and ignited a spark of resistence and non-cooperation. I couldn't bring myself to answer the questions posed by the teacher, on plot, or character, or theme, or setting, with any real attention or engagement. What was lacking there - and most conspicuously in the realm of literature - was any kind of focus on meaningful narratives, or meaningful readings. It wasn't until the summer after my first year in college that I was motivated to pursue those meaningful narrratives on my own. Neil Postman's The End of Education argues for the reinstatement of meaningful narratives into elementary and secondary education. He has written a manifesto for resurrecting the question of purpose and the enactment of value in our schools. The seeming pessimism of the title is aimed at articulating the nature of a problem of decadence that has been undermining the essential values and qualities of education. Yet Postman does not stop at articulating the problem. The book is about suggesting solutions, and even more so, Postman suggests a way of thinking that will generate solutions as situations demand them. Here is book that has the capacity to motivate and inspire. It should be read by everyone who has any involvement at all with education, as a reminder why an education system exists in this country at all and why it should continue to exist in the future.
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