“In all ages the educational system has existed to enable the individual to become an integral part of his cultural life — whatever form that culture might have.”
“That doesn’t sound extremely ominous,” said Montgomery.
“I haven’t said that it is. Judgment on that point will be left up to you. But let us consider the system in engineering terms:
“A culture demands a certain minimum degree of stability for its existence. Uniformity of customs, thoughts, and habits contributes to this stability. Likewise, there is demanded a heavy checkrein on excursions too far away from the cultural norm. Both of these items, the uniformity and the restraint, can be very adequately provided by indoctrination in the Traditions of the Elders, by dispensing All That is Known of the Universe and Man in the sixteenth century, or by wrapping up the results of much data collection in a Handbook of Wing Design for aeronautical engineers.
“This represents a homeostatic process. The school is the instrument designed to carry it out. It’s the thermostat on the stove to keep the pot from boiling over.”
“If that were true, the school would be responsible for keeping things as they are — not for venturing into the new and unknown!”
“Exactly,” said Nagle. “An educational system forms a homeostatic control over the natural adventuresomeness of the individual human mind to keep it in line with established patterns. It preserves the cultural ideal at all costs through widespread indoctrination with the particular mass of data currently accepted as ‘truth.’ This is its only function”
“I should think that would be extremely difficult to prove.”
“On the contrary, it is so obvious it requires nothing more than calling attention to it. It is more than amply demonstrated by the fact that no educational system has ever been able to concern itself with the basic object of its ministrations: the individual human brain. The enormous range of variation in human minds has been taken into account only as something to be flattened out so that whatever curriculum is in vogue can be injected with minimum effort. No effective program to investigate these variations and harness their usefulness has ever been established. Earnest people have thought upon the problem from time to time, but they seemed unaware that the educational system is basically unable to do anything but what it is doing.”
“This sounds rather rough on the educators.”
“Not at all! They’re fulfilling the function assigned by society long ago when the first half dozen families gathered outside the communal cave and decided little Joe Neanderthal was getting too big for his britches and somebody was going to have to teach him a thing or two. They’ve been teaching him ever since this first school was set up. There are many social homeostats outside the family now, but the school was the first — and the function of a homeostat is to flatten variations.”
Montgomery laughed. “I suppose everyone has that kind of feeling about his education at times — although I’m not yet convinced your description is wholly accurate. I do remember seeing at one time, however, a picture of an ingenious machine to stamp walnuts with a brand name. Regardless of the shape or size of the nut it came through the machine with the same brand as all the rest. I thought then that schools had also been stamping the nuts with identical brands for a long time.”
Nagle smiled broadly and nodded. “They deal in terms of classes, not individuals, of materials to be taught, of obtaining agreement from the pupils, not of inviting them to original thought. We laugh now at little Joe Genius being held down by the backwardness of the Little Red School-house on the prairie, and exult in his eventual triumph over it. We fail to recognize that the Little Red School-house is still with us — even though it now has air-conditioning, glass bricks, and cantilevered roofs. We fail to recognize that discovery and invention are culture-smashing activities, and education is a culture-preserving mechanism. By its very nature, then, education cannot sponsor any vital, new departures in any facet of our culture. It can only appear to do so, to preserve the sustaining illusion of progress while at the same time maintaining the homeostasis of the culture.”
“And all this leads to what?” said Montgomery.
“To the question of what happens to a working system when the setting of its homeostatic control is pushed down too low!”
Montgomery shifted uncomfortably. He refused to believe the arguments Nagle was proposing, yet he wasn’t quite sure how he would have refuted them if he had been in a position to do so.
“I suppose in that case,” he said, “the fire goes out. You believe this has happened?”
“It is happening,” said Nagle, “at an alarming rate. Education is being substituted for learning. Data-collecting is taking the place of research.
“Perhaps no period of our culture has seen a more optimum balance between the two than the last thirty years of the nineteenth century and the first decade of this one. Education was widespread enough to enable a country the size of the United States to function as a unit — and limited enough to keep from smothering the culture-shaking activities of the Edison-Ford-Wright type. We have to work toward a restoration of that balance.”
Montgomery shook his head — not too vigorously, in view of the necessity to not antagonize Nagle. “Cultures can’t be static structures trying to avoid all change,” he said. “They don’t last very long if they are. To exist, a culture must be a vigorous, growing entity. Ours is — and in my opinion our educational system is largely responsible for it. For every invention of the Edison, Ford, or Wright type you’ve got a thousand others produced quietly in industrial and university research centers, and each is just as important in its own way as the work of the barefoot boys who sold newspapers. After all, the atom bomb didn’t come out of somebody’s basement lab!”
“No — it came only after virtually all homeostatic forces involved were thoroughly shackled. We could argue the variations in thousands of instances, but that would hardly be practical.
“What is practical is to note that the situation we’re in produces XB-91's — and will continue to produce them unless a change occurs. We have to tackle the basic problems of the minds that do the thinking. We supply them with bigger wind tunnels, more complex computers. That merely evades the problem. It doesn’t solve it.
“We must find out the nature and purposes of the human being — of you and me. We have to turn our vision from the external world to the internal. This is something that science, society — our whole culture from the very beginning — has been afraid to do. We make believe we’re going after it by taking electroencephalograms, analyzing blood constituents and glandular products. But this, too, is an evasion. It tells us nothing of what a man is and what he’s doing - and why he’s doing it.
“And you’ve missed my point about the function of homeostatic controls. They don’t necessarily prevent cultural growth. They keep it within certain bounds. But the control must not be confused with the agency responsible for growth. That would be somewhat like confusing the thermostat with the fire!”
Montgomery felt a sense of anger growing within him for a reason he couldn’t quite name. Nagle seemed so sure he had all the answers. “What agency is responsible, then?” he demanded.
“That, my friend,” said Nagle, “is what you are here to discover for yourself.”
“And in spite of all your objections to schools it appears that you have set up still another one.”
“Our Institute has been called a school, but it shouldn’t be. Our function is primarily to reverse the activities of the ordinary school. You might — and quite correctly — say that we are engaged in de-educating —”