The Error of Our Ways

By Neil Postman

I am not sure who said it (possibly Northrop Frye), but it has been remarked that there are three characters from literature who are known all over the world: Hamlet, Alice, and Sherlock Holmes. I don't know how Shakespeare and Lewis Carroll felt about their creations, but it is known that Arthur Conan Doyle believed Holmes to be something of a nuisance and thought that his stories about Holmes did not represent his best work. The irony, of course, is that no one reads what Doyle regarded as his best work, but everybody reads about Holmes.

Something like this will happen, on occasion, to lesser--much lesser--authors. For example, me. Among the many pages I have written about education over the years, I have included a few ideas that seemed to me to rise above the others and could be expected to be given special consideration by readers. But the ideas have been largely ignored, mostly on the grounds that readers believed they were included as an attempt at humor. This is depressing for two reasons: first, that readers believed my sense of humor was so uninspired; second, that their sense of possibilities was so limited. You may judge for yourself. Here is one of the ideas. We could improve the quality of teaching overnight, as it were, if math teachers were assigned to teach art, art teachers science, science teachers English. My reasoning is as follows: Most teachers, especially high school and college teachers, teach subjects they were good at in school. They found the subject both easy and pleasurable. As a result, they are not likely to understand how the subject appears to those who are not good at it, or don't care about it, or both. If, let us say, for a semester, each teacher were assigned a subject that he or she hated or always had trouble with, the teacher would be forced to see the situation as most students do, would see things more as a new learner than as an old teacher. Perhaps he or she would discover how boring the textbooks are, would learn how nerve-racking the fear of making mistakes is, might discover that a question that has unsuspectingly aroused his or her interest must be ignored because it is not covered by the syllabus, might even discover that there are students who know the subject better than he or she could ever hope to. Then what?

All in all, I believe the experience would be chastening and even eye-opening. When teachers returned to their specialties, it is possible they would bring with them refreshing ideas about how to communicate about their subject, and with an increased...