Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus of Education, The University of British Columbia[permission granted to reproduce if authorship acknowledged]
I read that
the line “things fall apart; the centre cannot
hold” from Yeats’
poem describing Europe after the First World War has been quoted more often in
the past year or two than in the preceding 90 years. No doubt events in Europe
– Brexit, increasing xenophobia, mass migrations – and the behaviour of Donald
Trump may have encouraged others to recall the verse, as I have. But even in
the absence of those events, the pace of change and its centrifugal forces
should prompt us to ask about what prevents things from falling apart and the
centre from holding.
Observant
riders of public transport will have noticed that there is little conversation among
the many passengers whose attention has been absorbed by their smartphones and
tablets. Indeed, it is not infrequent that a couple dining out are attending to
their phones rather than to one another.
Because of
our access to the internet, we probably have more information at our fingertips
and exercise less critical capacity about that information than at any previous
time in human civilization. Neil Postman used the phrase “we are amusing ourselves to death” to refer to the narcotizing impact of television on
rational thought. Postman’s view was that the medium
of communication and its features take precedence over, and in most cases overwhelm,
the content. It is difficult to apply serious mental effort to a tweet or to
public affairs broadcasts in which antagonists appeal to people’s emotions and
prejudices rather than reason and evidence. Hence the numbing effect of
television and, by extension, internet-based technologies.
I do not
oppose these technologies. I am as frequent an (ab)user of them as many of my
fellow passengers. But the use of fugitive material from internet sources
increases the need for a set of critical faculties that enables people to
distinguish among different types of claims and the kinds of evidence one needs
to adjudicate those claims.
The internet
environment does not reduce the need for schooling (everything I learned, I
learned from the internet) as is sometimes claimed. Electronic media magnify
the importance of the contribution that schools make to the acquisition of
critical faculties, standards that evidence must meet, and standards for
determining the trustworthiness of sources.
At one time religious
institutions and closely knit families and communities worked together to counteract
the centrifugal forces driving people apart. The increasingly complex demands
on families, the diminution of the importance of religion in people’s lives,
and the fragmentation of communities have left public school as the primary
agency of socialization. The public school is one of the few institutions
capable of communicating our shared values, integrating us all into the fabric
of the society we share.
One of the
many implications of the centrality of schools to social cohesion is that we
must be conscious of the values that we share and aware of the forces capable
of eroding them. The substitution of appeals to emotion and prejudices for deep
and critical thought is very divisive. However, it is more difficult for those
with totalitarian impulses or designs to steal our rights when we know them
well and understand the importance of the institutions that ensure those
rights.
Teaching
about rights and institutions was once a central part of public schooling.
Though it is still one of the things that schools do, its place is less central
than it once was - and needs to be - to counteract the narcotizing and
centrifugal influences with which the young must contend.
It is to
public schooling that we should look to preventing things from falling apart.
They are the centres that can hold us together when it appears that the centre
cannot hold.