Public Schooling Does Not Serve A Public;

We Had Learned How To Invent Things, And The Question Of Why We Invent Things Receded In Importance. The Idea That If Something Could Be Done It Should Be Done Was Born In The Nineteenth Century. And Along With It, There Developed A Profound Belief In All The Principles Through Which Invention Succeeds: Objectivity, Efficiency, Expertise, Standardization, Measurement, And Progress. It Also Came To Be Believed That The Engine Of Technological Progress Worked Most Efficiently When People Are Conceived Of Not As Children Of God Or Even As Citizens But As Consumers-that Is To Say, As Markets.

Voting, We Might Even Say, Is The Next To Last Refuge Of The Politically Impotent. The Last Refuge Is, Of Course, Giving Your Opinion To A Pollster, Who Will Get A Version Of It Through A Desiccated Question, And Then Will Submerge It In A Niagara Of Similar Opinions, And Convert Them Into--what Else?--another Piece Of News. Thus We Have Here A Great Loop Of Impotence: The News Elicits From You A Variety Of Opinions About Which You Can Do Nothing Except To Offer Them As More News, About Which You Can Do Nothing.

For In The End, He Was Trying To Tell Us What Afflicted The People In 'brave New World' Was Not That They Were Laughing Instead Of Thinking, But That They Did Not Know What They Were Laughing About And Why They Had Stopped Thinking.

A Definition Is The Start Of An Argument, Not The End Of One.

It Is Inescapable That Every Culture Must Negotiate With Technology, Whether It Does So Intelligently Or Not. A Bargain Is Struck In Which Technology Giveth And Technology Taketh Away.