Do students need facts or stories?

Somehow, Neil Postman saw it coming. His 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, predicted that people would become so consumed by entertainment that they would be rendered unable to have serious discussions about serious issues. Postman was worried about television; he didn’t live to see social media kick those fears into hyperdrive. Now Amusing Ourselves to Death has become a stock reference for commentators trying to explain life amid an onslaught of memes and influencers.

Although today Postman’s name comes up mostly in relation to his critique of television, his writing on education is equally worth revisiting. In The Atlantic’s December 1989 issue, he reviewed two books calling for a change in American pedagogy. Cultural Literacy, by E. D. Hirsch Jr., and The Closing of the American Mind, by Allan Bloom, were both unlikely best sellers, featuring dense passages on why the nation’s youth were failing and what to do about it. Hirsch, then an English professor at the University of Virginia, argued that schools focused too much on teaching how to learn rather than what to learn. By absorbing hard facts, he thought, students would better understand references in texts, which would in turn boost their reading comprehension.

Bloom, a University of Chicago professor, was alarmed by the popularity of “relativism” among college students. If all principles and societal customs were arbitrary products of history, they couldn’t be judged and must be held equal. Bloom felt that students must shed their faith in relativism so they could grasp clear, absolute truths. The critic Camille Paglia described the book as “the first shot in the culture wars.” It sold more than 1.2 million copies.

Postman dissects each of their arguments, picking out flaws and using them to his own ends. “Hirsch believes he is offering a solution to a problem when in fact he is only raising a question,” he writes. “Bloom suggests an answer to Hirsch’s question for reasons that are not entirely clear to him but are, of course, to me.” (Postman deploys sarcasm the way John Grisham deploys suspense.) Hirsch’s “solution” was a roughly 5,000-item list of names, places, and other trivia that he believed literate Americans should know. But to Postman, the issue was not that students lacked information; it was that there was too much of it. Cable television was becoming a prominent force in American life. Twenty-three percent of households subscribed to basic cable in 1980; the number would go up to almost 60 percent by 1990. CNN, the first 24-hour news network, was changing how people consumed journalism. In 1982, an average of 5.8 million households a week watched the channel. Postman writes:

Bloom, Postman thought, had the answer—sort of. “Although he does not seem to know it, Bloom is arguing that students need stories, narratives, tales, theories (call them what you will), that can serve as moral and intellectual frameworks,” Postman writes. “Without such frameworks, we have no way of knowing what things mean.”

Here is where Postman seems prescient once again—or, at least, shows us how history has boomeranged. He writes that people and nations require stories, ways of understanding themselves as they’re bombarded by data points. He sensed that Americans had lost faith in their nation’s story, and that young people no longer believed in the stories previous generations offered them. Today, information, accurate or not, is more accessible than ever. Log on to social media, and you’ll find a feed swarming with news, real and fake. Ask a large language model for clarity, and it might hallucinate. And the national story feels more fractured than it was in the 1980s. Debates rage over how the United States remembers its past and thinks of its place in the world; fights over insufficient civics instruction, book bans, and classical education fill op-ed pages.

“Americans rely on their schools,” Postman wrote in his 1995 book, The End of Education, “to express their vision of who they are, which is why they are usually arguing over what happens in school.” In his 1989 Atlantic article, he avoids outlining his vision: “I am not wise enough to say where the young can find what they need.” Instead, he reminds his readers why, confronted with an unrelenting flow of information, they need a vision—some kind of narrative, a way to reach into the rapids, sift through the dregs, and give meaning to what remains.