The self-evident degradation of educational quality in our society today has several causes. But of all of them there are three that most immediately come to mind. 

The first is the apparent inability of teachers and curricular designers to rigorously analyze the impact of new technologies on culture in general, and on the cognitive patterns of students in particular. 

The second is the tendency among teachers and administrators to rapidly and often unreflectively consign exemplarity and love, long considered central to the learning process, to marginal roles within their daily teaching practices. 

The third is the custom among many teachers who are alienated and frightened by the promotion of hedonistic individualism under our culture’s dominant ethos of consumerism to try to remedy this evil by drastically minimizing the concepts of merit and personal responsibility in their interactions with students.

In his Amusing Ourselves to Death (1984), the great educational philosopher Neil Postman, following in the footsteps of his mentor Marshall McLuhan, reminds us again and again that while we, as adherents of the modern creed of inexorable linear progress, like to focus almost exclusively on the supposed benefits provided by new communication technologies, we tend to ignore the fact that each such innovation carries with it a new epistemology; that is, a new way of mentally organizing the physical, spatial, and temporal elements of our lives. 

Postman does not believe that it is either advisable or possible to try to hinder or cancel the development of new communication tools. But he warns that it is the responsibility of all people interested in the continuity and enrichment of culture to talk openly and honestly about which cognitive and human qualities are lost, and which are gained, with the adoption of each important new communicative technology. 

He suggests that it is only when we know whether and/or how the new technologies facilitate the apprehension of the skills and the canons of knowledge that we, as adults, have decided as essential to the achievement of the good life, that we should allow them a prominent place in our classrooms. 

But in order to do this, we would, of course, have had to do something that we have not done as citizens, educators, and administrators until now: have a serious debate about what exactly is this Good Life thing that the Greek philosophers (and every........

© Eurasia Review