As Thomas Jefferson, Horace Mann, John Dewey and other great educators understood, public schools do not serve a public so much as create a public. But in order to do that they depend on the existence of shared narratives and the capacity of such narratives to provide an inspired reason for schooling. What keeps our schools from being effective, he says, is the lack of commonly accepted stories, or the inadequacy of those we have in giving meaning and direction to schooling. At the moment, he says, education is geared toward economic utility, consumerism, technology, multiculturalism and other bogus objectives. Narratives such as these are incapable of providing a rich and sustaining rationale for public education.
Postman also offers a number of admittedly radical innovations toward making schools more effective.
He argues that textbooks should be altogether eliminated because they have a deadening effect on students and promote a view of education as the acquisition of immutable facts. He proposes that teachers offer incentives to students who find errors in their teachers' lessons. And he feels that the subjects of archeology, geology and astronomy be given the highest priority since they imbue students with a sense of awe and global interdependence. Overall, this is a very convincing argument, and, as usual, Postman makes it most eloquently. At one point in the book, he acknowledges a debt of gratitude to George Orwell, one of his intellectual heroes.