Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 16, 1995 TAG: 9504180032
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: D-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ROBERT N. FISHBURN
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Which like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;
And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything ...
- William Shakespeare, in "As You Like It."
I HAVE FOUND sermons in stones and in other unlikely places. I was unprepared, however, to find, if not a whole book, at least a chapter or two, submerged in the running brook of commercials on television.
The insight, such as it is, came while viewing an ad for jet skis, those pesky mega-gnats infesting waterways and coves across the land. It's hardly an exaggeration, I believe, to say that this commercial, however unwittingly, sums up a good portion of what has gone wrong with the way we teach our young and points out, in a dramatic way, why we are unlikely to find a technological path out of our educational quagmire.
The jet-ski spot is a "show and tell" format: A youngster shows the class film footage - spewing wake, a roller-coaster ride, thrills galore - in a sort of ultimate "what-I-did-last-summer" putdown. As he is about to say how the ski can really kick --- (the viewer supplies the missing noun), the teacher interrupts and calls on the next class member: a pudgy, benighted child holding a small model of Mount Rushmore. Poor soul! He looks as though he has worn argyle socks to his first prom.
What's wrong with this picture? For me, everything. History, in the form of Jefferson, Washington, Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, doesn't stand a chance against the allure of a jet-ski ride. It's David facing not Goliath but Delilah, no slingshots allowed. The child knows it, the class knows it, the teacher knows it, the viewer knows it.
Innocent humor? I choose to look at it as the perfect vignette to illustrate the depressing message coming from books like "Amusing Ourselves to Death," by Neil Postman. He describes his book as a "lamentation about the most significant American cultural fact of the second half of the Twentieth Century: the decline of the Age of Topography and the ascendancy of the Age of Television."
For Postman, this ascendancy "proclaims the spirit of a culture in which all public discourse increasingly takes the form of entertainment." And that - our need to reduce everything to entertainment - is the "public haunt" keeping me from finding much good in the television commercial: If education, the most important form of public discourse, must be entertaining, what chance does that little boy have with his model of Mount Rushmore?
Stephen Ozment, a professor of ancient and modern history at Harvard, addresses much the same problem in an article in the current issue of "The Public Interest." In commenting on the familiar theme of graduation addresses these days - which he characterizes as exhortations to "engage in a major moral reconstruction of the world as we know it" - he concludes that we are giving in to the "folly of advising the young to right a world before they [have] mastered themselves."
Ozment gives examples of adult advice to children in what he calls the "premodern" world; those earlier admonitions center on such attributes as discipline, modesty, patience, honesty, industry, moderation, prudence and common sense. The list could go droning on, bringing heavy eyelids to those who think that teaching the young today requires sweeping new techniques and bold new goals.
Nowhere in the premodern advice is the notion of being induced into using one's brain through entertainment. And nowhere are there the lofty ideals and what Ozment calls the "foolhardy moral crusades" so prevalent in our advice to the young today.
"What every new generation needs most from the adult world," he asserts, "is not the latter's guilty conscience and fantasies of redemption, but the basic skills and virtues that enable it to create an independent and worthy life of its own."
That's a noble goal for all times, including ours, however difficult it may be to achieve. Instead, what we seem to be searching for is an easier path, some trailblazing electronic miracle more in keeping with the times. But whatever it turns out to be, it probably won't do the job because of the "public haunt" lurking behind that seemingly innocent television commercial, a specter hinted at by Aldous Huxley: "An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie."
Robert N. Fishburn is a former editor of the Commentary page.
by CNB