Years ago, when I was first a teacher – which is to say, back before I had time to read books about teaching – a coworker recommended Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner’s Teaching as a Subversive Activity. I remember having a fairly negative evaluation of the book then – just another piece of Sixties excess, I thought – and so it was with interest and an open mind that some years later I caught sight of the title of another Postman book on the shelf: Teaching as a Conserving Activity. Although I didn’t have the same disparaging reaction as I did to the earlier book, most of the book made little impression on me.
There were two exceptions though — two big exceptions. The first was the introduction of Teaching as a Conserving Activity, which was probably the best “post-mortem” on the excesses of 1960s-era educational reform (from one who’d participated so centrally in it, no less). It’s a compelling account – a classic “after the dust settled, what the hell just happened?” reflection that, with the changing of a few proper nouns, might apply just as well to any other reform era.
The second part that stuck with me was the book’s first chapter, the central thesis, and it stayed in my head so persistently, so long after the rest of the book had completely faded from my mind, that recently I decided to reread the book to see what I found so compelling. Here is what it was: It was a metaphor.
In the first chapter, Postman outlines his belief that education is best conceived as a “thermostatic activity.” As a room gets colder, the thermostat turns on and warms the room. Similarly, education at its best must sense the “temperature” of society — the prevailing cultural, political, and social trends — and must “turn on” in order to counteract these trends. If society is stagnant, education must push students to be innovative. When society is rapidly evolving, education must preserve. It is a kind of balance, an ecological view, a dialectical relationship: Postman cites all of these. “The function of education is always to offer the counterargument, the other side of the picture” (19-20). It is not a philosophy, but, as Postman notes, the deploying of philosophies. It “aims at all times to make visible the prevailing biases of a culture and then, by employing whatever philosophies of education are available, to oppose them” (20). It is not a teleological approach, he says, but an ecological one. It aims to keep society healthy, not to send it in any special direction:
“The ecologist is not a utopian, not an idealogue, not a dogmatist, not a theologian. He is, rather, a physician, a navigator, a steersman. His politics is the politics of remediation. The only item of his agenda is to correct our imbalances” (20).
This is important, says Postman, because there are two ways for a system to die: from stasis, and from too much change. Education must safeguard against both. As opposed to the period in the 1960s when Postman published Teaching as a Subversive Activity, by 1979, the year Postman was writing this second book, society was “overdosing on change . . . A long time ago it seemed to me that only by looking ahead could we equip our children to face the present. It now seems to me that we might do it better by looking back. For a while” (25). He writes, “The last thing that teaching needs to be in our present situation is revolutionary, groundbreaking, and highly charged with new values. That is the voice in which our culture speaks. Who shall speak in a different voice?” (22).
The rest of the book – composed of Postman’s specific prescriptions – I found had vanished from my head again almost immediately after the rereading, just as it had done the first time. Yet this vision of education as a thermostatic activity is fascinating in the way the best metaphors are: Outwardly simple yet deeply resonant; this metaphor is far from new, as Postman himself notes – but certainly salient. It reminds me, at first, of John Dewey’s naturalistic description, in the beginning of Democracy and Education, of the way that societies use education to preserve and to transmit their cultural traditions. And it reminds me of Michael Oakeshott’s notion of the “trimmer” – the political leader who aims not for ideological victory but to keep the vessel of the state balanced.
There’s a lot you can do with this simple image of education-as-thermostat. It is provocative and radical, on the one hand, because by definition it defies cultural or social trends. It seeks to point out biases, excesses, trends and tides, and to respond accordingly by turning away in the opposite direction. Then it is fundamentally conservative as well because it seeks to preserve “that which is both necessary to a humane survival and threatened by a furious and exhausting culture” (25).
As to what it is exactly that is “necessary to a human survival” – what exactly Postman thinks we must “conserve” — he spends the rest of the book attempting to explain, and, as I mentioned, I thought the results were a little mixed. But it is the central metaphor of education as thermostatic that I find compelling.
I think that it’s especially interesting to contrast the underlying assumption of education as an ecological model that Postman invokes with the assumption of education as a structure of reproduction that underlies much of the influential latter-day Marxist / Critical Theory view of schools.
The main focus in Critical Pedagogy is not on how society is multifaceted, organic, and ever evolving, but instead on the aspects of it that are fundamentally static; domination and oppression based on identity-group characteristics are omnipresent, fundamentally unchanging, and supported by a status quo that features built-in, structural discrimination. In this worldview, any educational program that is not explicitly attempting to use schools as means of deliberate, conscious social reconstruction are “reproducing” the “unjust status quo.” The Critical stance is a view of a structural system that reproduces itself because it was designed to continue operating in the same way, over and over, reproducing the same outcomes. In this sense, even if the outward forms or the means of transmission are ever evolving, even if things look very different or are run by different groups, it is still the same message being transmitted because the superstructure of schools themselves as well as that of the broader society outside of them are fundamentally static, programmed entities.
As a result, good education is not about balancing or situationally counteracting, not about modifying or reforming, tending to a complex ecology filled with disparate and interrelated actors and influences, but about “deconstructing” the structures of power and the “reconstructing” them in newer, more just forms. There is always a sense in Critical approaches that one is not tending or trying to sensitively respond, but to mount, finally, a sustained response to something that has been a problem since time immemorial. If there is an ecological view, it is of society long overrun by an extensive growth of malignant, non-native species; familiar Critical metaphors of educational change often involve “uprooting,” or “rooting out” various social or political maladies.
On the other hand, the thermostatic view, at least as articulated by Postman, sees the ways that ever-shifting cultural movements, social and political movements, and the advent of new technologies (Postman is especially attentive to this) dramatically shape the environment in which children grow up and attend school, and influence them deeply. Because these influences are always changing, society is seen less as a structure and more as a teeming forest, full of different and evolving forms of life. He writes, “too many things are moving – are always moving – to be accommodated by a fixed point of view” (16). Not just one lens or goal should be used, as in the Critical view, but a host of different lenses and goals, depending on the nature of the prevailing culture. Nothing is “dismantled,” but education must seek to reform, to reposition, to call into question, to balance and adjust in response to changing conditions. “The thermostatic view of education is, then, not ideology-centered. It is balance-centered” (19-20).
All of this is not to say that the two views are irreconcilable. Certainly, the Critical view of education as reconstruction can be taken to embody a kind of permanent-thermostatic ideal: Because schools and society are so strongly programmed to reproduce certain beliefs or outcomes, education must enact a permanent counterbalance. And the notion of thermostatic education as a truly agnostic, value-free deployer of disparate philosophies is somewhat misleading. Postman’s book certainly possesses a certain underlying philosophy and sense of what is good and right (particularly when it comes to students’ information environments). After all, the notion of balance implies some right positioning one should aim for to begin with, some sense of which way is properly up and which way is down, some north star to sail toward while keeping one’s vessel trim.
Still, it does seem to me to matter that education is responsive to and asking students to have to talk back to the broader society. This requires a certain attentiveness by educators to the environment of their students, and a certain sense of malleability as to their methods and perhaps to their goals as well. And taking Postman at his word that what’s more important is for educators to be less ideologically committed than ideologically responsive seems to me a provocative — and important — message for education today.