Growing up in an environment of change and challenge is probably rewarding in the long run. But things are not very simple. The pressure to perform, peer pressure, and one's youthful instincts to explore and ascertain can transform a student's life in an instant. The distance between paradise (support and choice without worry) and hell (the specter of disease, addiction, abandonment, disappointment, lack of direction) is also shorter than prior generations experienced it. Hundreds of TV channels, the Internet, thousands of music titles (on CD, video, and radio stations), the lure of sports, drugs, sex, and the hundreds of fashion labels-choosing can be overwhelming. Literacy used to organize everything neatly. If you were in love, Romeo and Juliet was proper reading material. If you wished to explore Greece, you started with Homer's epics and worked your way up to the most recent novel by a contemporary Greek writer.
The problem is that drugs, AIDS, millions of attractions, the need to find one's way in a world less settled and less patient, do not fit in the neat scheme of literacy. The language of genetics and the language of personality constitution are better articulated through means other than books. Heroes, teachers, parents, priests, and activists are no longer icons, even if they are portrayed to be better than they were in reality. Bart Simpson, the underachiever, "mediocre and proud of it," is a model for everyone who is told that what really counts is to feel good, period.
Still, some young people go to school or college full of enthusiasm, hoping to get an education that will guarantee self-fulfillment. All that is studied, over a long period of time and at great financial sacrifice, comes not even close to what they will face. They might learn how to spell and how to add. But they soon discover that in real life skills other than spelling and arithmetic are expected. What bigger disappointment is there than discovering that years of pursing a promise bring no result? If, after all this, we still want both literacy and competence for experiences which literacy does not support, and often inhibits, we would have to invest beyond what society is willing and able to spend. And even if society were to do so, as it seems that it feels it must, the investment would be in imposing useless skills and a primitive perspective on the new generation, until the time comes when it can escape society's pressure. Education in our day remains a compromise between the interests of the institution of education (with tens of thousands of teachers who would become unemployed) and a new pragmatic framework that few in academia understand.
One of the elements of this equation is the practical need to extend education to all, and if possible on a continuous basis. But unless this education reflects the variety of literacies that the pragmatic framework requires, admitting everyone to everything results in the lowest general level of education. The variety of practical experiences of self-constitution requires that we find ways to coordinate access to education by properly and responsibly identifying types of creativity, and investing responsibility in their development. Continuous education needs to be integrated in the work structure. It has to become part of the reciprocal commitments through which the new pragmatic framework is acknowledged.
To all those dedicated to the human aspects of politics, business, law, and medicine, who deplore that the technicians of policy-making can no longer find their way to our souls, all this will sound terrifying. Nevertheless, as much as we would like to be considered as individuals, each with our own dignity, personality, opinions, emotions, and pains, we ourselves undermine our expectations in our striving for more and more, at a price lower than what it costs society to distinguish us. Scale dictates anonymity, and probably mediocrity. Ignorance of literacy's role in centuries of productive human life dictates that it is time to unload the literacy-reflected experiences for which there is no reference in the new pragmatic context.
Who are we kidding?
Scared that in giving up literacy training we commit treason to our own condition, we maintain literacy and try to adapt it to new circumstances of working, thinking, feeling, and exploring. In view of the inefficiency built into our system of education, we try to compromise by adding the dimension characteristic of the current status of human experience of multiple partial literacies. The result is the transformation of education into a packaging industry of human beings: you choose the line along which you want to be processed; we make sure that you get the literacy alibi, and that we train you to be able to cope with so-called entry-level jobs. Obviously, this evolves in a more subtle way. The kind of college or university one attends, or the tuition one pays, determines the amount of subtlety. Students accept the function of education insofar as it mediates between their goals and the rather scary reality of the marketplace. This mediation differs according to the level of education, and is influenced by political and social decision making.
As an industry for processing the new generation, education acts according to parameters resulting from its opportunistic search for a place between academia and reality. Education acknowledges the narrow domains of expertise which labor division brought about, and reproduces the structure of current human experience in its own structure. Through vast financial support, from states, private sources, and tradition- based organizations, education is artificially removed from the reality of expected efficiency. It is rarely a universe of commitments. Accordingly, the gap between the literate language of the university and the languages of current human practice widens. The tenure system only adds another structural burden. When the highest goal of a professor is to be freed of teaching, something is awfully wrong with our legitimate decision to guarantee educators the freedom necessary for exercising their profession.
Behind the testing model that drives much of current education is the expectation of effective ranking of students. This model takes a literate approach insofar as it establishes a dichotomy (aptitude vs. achievement) that makes students react to questions, but does not really engage them or encourage creative contributions. The result is illustrative of the relation between what we do and how we evaluate what we do. An expectation was set, and the process of education was skewed to generate good test results. This effectively eliminates teaching and learning for the sake of a subject. Students are afraid they will not measure up and demand to be taught by the book. Teachers who know better than the book are intimidated, by students and administration, from trying better approaches. Good students are frustrated in their attempts to define their own passion and to pursue it to their definition of success. Entrepreneurs at the age of 14, they do not need the feedback of stupid tests, carried out more for the sake of bureaucracy than for their well-being. Standardized tests dominated by multiple-choice answers facilitate low cost evaluations, but also affect patterns of teaching and learning. Exactly what the new pragmatics embodies-the ability to adapt and to be proactive-is counteracted through the experience of testing, and the teaching geared to multiple-choice instruments.
The uncoupling of education from the experiential frame of the human being is reflected in education's language and organization, and in the limiting assumptions about its function and methods. Education has become a self-serving organization with a bureaucratic "network of directives," as Winograd and Flores call them, and motivational elements not very different from the state, the military, and the legal system. Like the organizations mentioned, it also develops networks of interaction with sources of funding and sources of power, some driven by the same self-preserving energies as education itself. Instead of reflecting shorter cycles of activity in its own structure, it tends to maintain control over the destiny of students for longer periods of time. Even in fields of early acknowledged creativity-e.g., computer programming, networking, genetics, and nanotechnology-education continues to apply a policy that takes away the edge of youth, inventiveness, and risk.