Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [73]
When Channel One brings television advertising into the classroom, teachers can be sure it is not in order to provide an audiovisual tool for teaching critical thinking.35 Without a concerted pedagogical effort, television is unlikely to enhance learning: it is better at annihilating than at nurturing the critical faculties. Private consumption cannot help youngsters develop an empowering sense of the need for public goods—something that might throw the very premises of McWorld into doubt. Television enmeshed in commerce cannot but view schoolchildren as prospective consumers rather than prospective critics and citizens.36
Education is unlikely ever to win an “open market” competition with entertainment because “easy” and “hard” can never compete on equal ground, and for those not yet disciplined in the rites of learning, “freedom” will always mean easy. Perhaps that is why Tocqueville thought that liberty was the most “arduous of all apprenticeships.” To grow into our mature better selves, we need the help of our nascent better selves, which is what common standards, authoritative education, and a sense of the public good can offer. Consumption takes us as it finds us, the more impulsive and greedy, the better. Education challenges our impulses and informs our greediness with lessons drawn from our mutuality and the higher goods we share in our communities of hope. Government, federal and local, with responsibility for public education once took it upon itself (back when “itself” was “us”) to even up the market and lend a hand to our better selves. Now via vouchers the market threatens to get even with public education. This sorry state of affairs is not the work of villains or boors. It arises all too naturally out of the culture of McWorld in a transnational era where governments no longer act to conceive or defend the common good.
8
Teleliterature and the Theme
Parking of McWorld
AS SURVIVORS OF aging print technologies, books are relics of a slowly vanishing culture of the word—democracy’s indispensable currency and a faltering bulwark against the new world of images and pictures flashed across screens at a speed that thwarts all deliberation. Democracy, like a good book, takes time. Patience is its least noticed yet perhaps most indispensable virtue. Television and computers are fast, fast, faster, and thus by definition hostile to the ponderous pace of careful deliberation upon which all public conversation and decision making on behalf of the common good is premised. One reason it is hard to use the speed-of-light medium of television for civic education is that while television wants to fly, education lumbers along with all the ponderous tedium of a deliberate and prudent pedagogy. It is unwatchable—unless the aim is to learn and to grow. Finally, educational television is a contradiction in terms.1 Where then do books belong in our videoland helter-skelter? They belong not at all—unless they acquiesce to assimilation and takeover and become one more genre in the infotainment service telesector’s commercial culture, what we can call teleliterature.
Assimilation of the new for publishers entails modification (read: adulteration) by the very technologies by which they are being supplanted, and the book format is particularly vulnerable to computer technology. TECHNOLOGY THREATENS TO SHATTER THE WORLD OF COLLEGE TEXTBOOKS, screams a Wall Street Journal article, which features the somber warning, “If textbook publishers don’t wake up and learn how to make, market and distribute something other than a book, the rug will be pulled right out from under us.”2 The Authors Guild is sufficiently impressed to have alerted its members. In