Palmer Trinity School

In 1995 Neil Postman published The End of Education. In it he made the audacious assumption that "schools are not now and never have been chiefly about getting information to children." Postman invoked the wisdom of Thomas Jefferson, who believed the purpose of school was "to ensure that citizens would know when and how to protect their liberty." As the title suggests, he was trying to save education from slipping into extinction by reclaiming its original purposes. As Plato taught us in his allegory of the cave, we are all of us to one degree or another chained and enslaved by our ignorance, and only through the mighty work of turning our entire souls around, can we hope to see truth with greater clarity. But even in Plato's old city, Athens, it was commonplace for people to miss the point of school. Most of the children of citizens were tutored by rhetoricians who focused on training their students to win arguments by any means necessary, an ancient version of vocational training. Socrates, our first teacher, had a different idea. He wanted students to seek greater understanding of themselves and the world around them. In Athens, the idea of school as we practice it was born. The marketplace of Athens became a marketplace of ideas, where all things were tested, all ideas rose or fell according to how much merit they contained rather than how loudly or skillfully they were trumpeted. Many things have changed since then. Thanks to science we know a lot more about the universe. We no longer live in isolated city states. The Enlightenment—not to mention the Internet—has opened up every aspect of life on earth, and we are continually confronted with every conceivable idea and impulse. Neil Postman was right to worry that education might become impossible in such a world. It does seem at times that education has retreated to a position of training a few in the skills that will serve their individual self interests best, without regard to the good of the whole or the greater understanding of truth. As Postman put it, "The making of adaptable curious, open, questioning people has nothing to do with vocational training and everything to do with humanistic and scientific studies." If we at Palmer Trinity are to avoid the age-old pitfall of using our educational opportunity merely as a means to an end and not as the end itself, if we are to raise our consciousness out of the darkness of ignorance and into the light of truth, then, in Postman's words, "free human dialogue, wandering wherever the agility of the mind allows" must lie at the heart of all we do. Schools must provide a narrative of "moral guidance, a sense of continuity, explanations of the past, clarity to the present, hope for the future." And we must do so within a context of faith, faith in the inherent potential of every human being to become a mature, productive, resilient, and versatile adult. The strong currents of materialism and consumerism are siren songs tempting us to see ourselves merely as brokers of commerce rather than as citizens in the marketplace of ideas. Sean Murphy Head of School HIGHLIGHTS | Highlights | 3

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