The Word Weavers/The World Makers
Excerpt from the book “The End of Education” by Neil Postman
I once had the good fortune to attend a lecture by Elizabeth Eisenstein, author of a
monumental two-volume study of the printing press as an agent of cultural change. During the
question period, she was asked how she had come by her interest in the subject. She appeared to
welcome the question. She told the audience that when she was a sixth-grade student, her teacher
remarked that the invention of the printing press with movable type represented one of the great
advances of human civilization, almost the equal of the invention of speech itself. Young Elizabeth
took this remark to heart. But then a strange thing happened-in a word, nothing. The subject was
never mentioned again. It did not come up in junior high school, senior high school, or college.
Fortunately, it remained in her mind during all that time, and the result was that she eventually
devoted herself to a detailed explication of what her sixth-grade teacher must have meant.
That such a thing could happen is at once startling and yet unsurprising. School is notorious
for neglecting to mention, let alone study, some of the more important events in human history. In
fact, something quite similar to what happened to Elizabeth Eisenstein happened to me when I was
in Mrs. Soybel's fifth-grade class. In that class, considerable attention was paid to public speaking,
especially pronunciation, since the school was in Brooklyn, New York, and it was generally believed
(and still is) that people from Brooklyn do not pronounce their words correctly. One of my
classmates, Gerald Melnikoff, was whispering and mumbling his weekly oral presentation and
thereby aroused Mrs. Soybel's pedagogical wrath. She told Gerald that he was speaking as if he had
marbles in his mouth; then, addressing the rest of the class, she told us that language was God's
greatest gift to humanity. Our ability to speak, she said, was what made us human, and this we must
never forget. I took the remark seriously. (I recall that for some reason I was even frightened by it.)
But as with Elizabeth Eisenstein and the printing press, the matter was never mentioned again,
certainly not by Mrs. Soybel. She gave us excellent lessons in spelling, grammar, and writing and
taught us to remove the marbles from our mouths when we spoke. But the role of language in
making us human disappeared. I didn't hold this against her-after all, she did mention the idea-but I
waited for the subject to come up again in junior high, senior high, and college. I waited in vain.
Whenever language was discussed, it was done so within the context of its being a useful tooldefinitely not as a gift from God, and not even as a tool that makes us human.
Of course, one does not need to call on God, either literally or metaphorically, to tell the
story of language and humanness, of human beings as the word weavers of the planet. This does not
mean the story is without mystery. No one knows, for example, when we began to speak. Was it
50,000 years ago, or 100,000 years, or longer? No one even knows why we began to speak. The
usual answer is that speech arose exclusively as a functional mechanism; that is, without speech, the
species could not have survived. Someone absolutely had to learn to say, "The tiger is hiding behind
the tree!" But Susanne Langer thought otherwise. Something happened to our brains, she believed,
that created in us a need to transform the world through symbols. Perhaps to give us something
interesting to do in our spare time, or for the sheer aesthetic joy of it. We became symbol makers,
not to spare us from the teeth of the tiger but for some other reason, which remains mysterious. Of
course, we eventually discovered how speech could assist us in survival, but that was not the reason
we began to speak to ourselves and to others. I place speaking to ourselves first because we surely
spend more time, use more words, are affected more deeply in talking to ourselves than to others.
Each of us is, to borrow a phrase from Wendell Johnson, "our own most enchanted listener." Perhaps
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Langer was right. Why do we talk to ourselves? Does it enhance our survival? What is so important
that we are impelled to talk to ourselves so incessantly-indeed, not only when awake but when
sleeping as well?
One answer that can provide schooling with a profound organizing principle is that we use
language to create the world---which is to say, language is not only a vehicle of thought; it is, as
Wittgenstein said, also the driver. We go where it leads. We see the world as it permits us to see it.
There is, to be sure, a world of "notwords." But, unlike all the other creatures on the planet, we have
access to it only through the world of words, which we ourselves have created and continue to
create. Language allows us to name things, but, more than that, it also suggests what feelings we are
obliged to associate with the things we name. Even more, language controls what things shall be
named, what things we ought to pay attention to. Language even tells us what things are things. In
English, "lightning" is a thing, and so is a "wave," and an "explosion." Even ideas are made to
appear as things. English makes us believe, for example, that "time" is moving in a straight line from
"yesterday" to "today" to "tomorrow." If we ask ourselves, Where did yesterday go? Where is
tomorrow waiting?, we may get a sense of how much these words are ideas more than things and of
how much the world as we imagine it is a product of how we describe it. There is no escaping the
fact that when we form a sentence, we are creating a world. We are organizing it, making it pliable,
understandable, useful. In the beginning, there was the word, and in the end, as well. Is anyone in
our schools taking this seriously?
Perhaps Mrs. Soybel did, but thought we were too young to grasp the idea. If so, she was
mistaken. There are many ways to teach the young the connections between language and worldmaking. But she made still another mistake, one common enough, by giving her students the
impression that the important thing about language is to know the difference between "he don't" and
"he doesn't," to spell "recommendation" correctly, and never to pronounce the name of our city,
"Noo Yawk." Some might say that if she taught those lessons well, she did enough. But what, then,
of the junior high teachers, the high school teachers, the college teachers? By failing to reveal the
story of human beings as world-makers through language, they miss several profound opportunities.
They fail, for example, to convey the idea that there is an inescapable moral dimension to how we
use language. We are instructed in the Bible never to take the name of the Lord in vain. What other
names must we never take in vain? And why? A fair answer is that language distinguishes between
the sacred and the profane, and thereby provides organization to our moral sense. The profligate use
of language is not merely a social offense but a threat to the ways in which we have constructed our
notions of good and bad, permissible and impermissible. To use language to defend the indefensible
(as George Orwell claimed some of us habitually do), to use language to transform certain human
beings into nonpersons, to use language to lie and to blur distinctions, to say more than you know or
can know, to take the name of the truth in vain-these are offenses against a moral order, and they
can, incidentally, be committed with excellent pronunciation or with impeccable grammar and
spelling. Our engagement with language almost always has a moral dimension, a point that has been
emphasized by every great philosopher from Confucius and Socrates to Bertrand Russell and John
Dewey. How is it possible that a teacher, at any level, could miss it?
Of course, language also has a social dimension. Mrs. Soybel understood this well enough,
but only part of it. Her idea was that by abandoning homegrown dialects, her gaggle of Brooklyn
ragamuffins could become linguistically indistinguishable from Oxford dons, or at least American
corporate executives. What she may have missed is that in changing our speech, we would be
changing our politics, our taste, our passions, our sense of beauty, even our loyalties. Perhaps she did
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know this, but the matter was never explained or discussed, and no choice was offered. Would such
changes alienate us from our parents, relatives, and friends? Is there something wrong with being
from the "working class"? What new prejudices will become comfortable and what old ones
despicable? In seeing the world through the prism of new ways of speaking, would we be better or
worse? These are questions of large import, and they need to be raised these days in the context of
the effort to have us speak in "politically correct" ways. By changing our names for things, how do
we become different? What new social attitudes do we embrace? How powerful are our habitual
ways of naming?
These are matters that ought to be at the heart of education. They are not merely about how
we sound to others but about how we are sounding out the world. Of course, they are no more
important than how language controls the uses of our intellect-that is to say, how our ideas of ideas
are governed by language. Aristotle believed he had uncovered universal laws of thought, when, in
fact, all he had done was to explain the logical rules of Greek syntax. Perhaps if the Greeks had been
interested in other languages, he would have come to different conclusions. The medieval
churchmen thought that if their language contained a word, there must necessarily be something in
the world to which it corresponded, which sent them on a fruitless intellectual journey to discover
how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. The well-known German philosopher Martin
Heidegger believed that only the German language could express the subtlest and most profound
philosophical notions. Perhaps he meant incomprehensible notions. In any case, his claim is
weakened by the fact that he was an ardent supporter of Adolf Hitler and a member of the Nazi
party. Apparently, he was somewhat unclear about what constitutes subtlety and profundity. But to
the extent to which any of us is clear about anything, it will be through an awareness of how we use
language, how language uses us, and what measures are available to clarify our knowledge of the
world we make.
All of this is part of the great story of how humans use language to transform the world and
then, in turn, are transformed by their own invention. The story, of course, did not end with the
invention of speech. In fact, it begins there, which is what Mrs. Soybel may have meant in saying
speech made us human. The story continued to unfold with fantastic twists as human beings invented
surrogate languages to widen their scope: ideographs, phonetic writing, then printing, then
telegraphy, photography, radio, movies, television, and computers, each of which transformed the
world-sliced it, framed it, enlarged it, diminished it. To say of all this that we are merely toolmakers
is to miss the point of the story. We are the world makers, and the word weavers. That is what makes
us smart, and dumb; moral and immoral; tolerant and bigoted. That is what makes us human. Is it
possible to tell this story to our young in school, to have them investigate how we advance our
humanity by controlling the codes with which we address the world, to have them learn what
happens when we lose control of our own inventions? This may be the greatest story untold. In
school.
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