Allow me explain why I believe the American education system, at least in its present form, is doomed to extinction (for members of the religious fringe who believe dinosaur bones were placed in the earth to confuse scientists, you may substitute the objectionable Darwinian term “extinction” with something a little more innocuous like “hellfire”).

In his latest tome The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories, a book that is impressive for its almost Tolstoyan length as well as its seemingly inexhaustible catalogue of plot summaries, British author and journalist Christopher Booker analyzes hundreds of novels and films and comes to the sad if obvious conclusion that American stories are lacking in themes of individual self-development and growth; the heroes of such stories fail to become fully mature adults capable of functioning in society in humane and meaningful ways and who seem to seek, as the highest prize, “the approbation of the crowd.”

In Booker’s view, and who would argue with him on this point, the prototypical American novel is Moby Dick, an epic nightmare in which the main character, Captain Ahab, develops an unhealthy obsession with a whale and enlists the help of a crew and three seasoned harpooners to hunt down the accursed beast and destroy it. If Ahab is successful, he will be lauded throughout the Seven Seas as a great hero. If not…well, for Ahab failure is not an option. Is it ever in America? Extremism comes so naturally to us.

The twist Melville gives to this otherwise typical “quest” story is this: Ahab is a dark, brooding character who has clearly come unhinged while the whale, let us not forget, is white and thus a symbol of all that is good and natural and at one with the cosmos. In a particularly vivid episode roughly midway through the book, we see Ahab pouring over his charts, trying to surmise the likely whereabouts of his nemesis based on currents and feeding grounds and so forth, and it is here that Melville describes the maelstrom of the captain’s mind:

… a chasm seemed opening in him, from which forked flames and lightnings shot up, and accursed fiends beckoned him to leap down among them; when this hell in himself yawned beneath him, a wild cry would be heard through the ship; and with glaring eyes Ahab would burst from his state room, as though escaping from a bed that was on fire.

Today the word we might use to describe Ahab is “neurotic.” It’s certainly a fitting word, and one we might use to describe Americans in general. We are a society of obsessives who yearn for the adulation of the crowd. In your mind right now go through a list of films and then think how often they end with the hero surrounded by a throng of beaming admirers. In Moby Dick, of course, there is no standing ovation for Ahab. Both the hero (if he can be called such) and his ill-fated crew are ultimately destroyed. Now, while failure of this sort is rarely treated in mainstream Hollywood movies or in mass market paperbacks and is something that Americans seem incapable of coming to terms with and shun as being needlessly pessimistic (I think the term being touted about these days is “defeatism”), the truly pivotal factor contributing to our collective neurosis is the utter futility of the mission itself. It’s infantile, is it not, for a grown man to seek revenge against a whale.

Perhaps the reason so many Americans cling to unrealistic stories in which the hero is always successful in his mission (Melville dared to do things a bit differently), is because we do not have a valid mythological perspective in this country. According to Joseph Campbell, the noted mythologist best known for his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, in most myths and folktales we encounter men and women who undergo trials, often horrifying in nature, that change them in significant ways and help them to become productive members of society. The traditional hero is scarred in some way and this scar unlocks the creative potential within. Not so with popular American characters. They rarely change and usually contribute nothing to the betterment of society.

When we first meet Ahab he is already maimed, he paces the deck late at night with an ivory stump, and throughout the rest of story he learns little. The key word here is “learn.” Rather than learn any lessons from life’s traumatic twists and turns American heroes choose to make their injuries the focal point of their existence, turn them into self-destructive obsessions, and then demand to be worshiped as heroes for having vanquished them. Except, you see, most of us never do destroy our demons; the demons destroy us or least drive us to gobble jars of mood altering pills. The pharmaceutical industry couldn’t be happier about the current state of affairs.

Campbell insists that one of the key functions of myth is to initiate us into the sphere of adult concerns. Without a valid mythological model to help us make the difficult transition from adolescence to adulthood we’re doomed to live out the rest of our lives as dysfunctional Peter Pans. As defined by Campbell, a hero is someone who leaves home, journeys into the underworld where he faces many challenges, eventually overcoming hardships, and then returns home to share his experiences with members of his group. In this way the adolescent is initiated into the world of adult concerns, and his triumphs are largely psychological rather than physical in nature.

This motif, common to all cultures, has informed people seeking guideposts along the difficult and often treacherous road of life, but we Americans, never ones willing to accept the wisdom of the ages or the lessons of history at face value, place great importance on materialism, thus altering our concept of the hero. For us the hero is someone, preferably a man, preferably white, and preferably Ivy League educated, who escapes from humble circumstances and, once he has found what he is looking for, never returns to the place from which he came except perhaps to flaunt his newly acquired riches.

Christopher Booker, having analyzed American literature and movies at some length, takes note of this trend and argues that this is precisely where our mythology has gone totally wrong. It’s a mythology that encourages us to abandon friends and family in favor of selfish concerns, fame and fortune and the like, and doesn’t stress the psychological and societal benefits of egalitarianism, altruism, self-sacrifice and so on.

This, at long last, leads me to my first point about education and its inevitable demise. I teach English to freshman at a small private college near Cleveland, Ohio, and I find, having read hundreds of term papers (maybe it’s thousands now, God help me) that students have no concept, or perhaps no interest in, individual self-development and achievement. This is so because, at present, there is a virulent strain of anti-intellectualism running through American society. Because few people read challenging texts for pleasure and write not at all (except perhaps for the occasional angst ridden poem scribbled in a notebook) no one has the capability to think critically or analytically. This makes self-analysis a difficult if not impossible task. Instead of exploring their own individuality, students tend to adhere to and act out the stereotypes created for them by the American mass media, a mindless machine that, in the hands of the ownership class, has no intention of providing acceptable models of behavior for adolescents who are on the verge of assuming adult roles and responsibilities. Where’s the profit in that?

In a recent PBS/Frontline documentary The Merchants of Cool, the producers identified two basic stereotypes marketed to today’s teens, one for boys, the other for girls. For boys it is “the mook,” the eternal adolescent and prankster, the clown, the buffoon, the man-child lacking in adult sensibilities. He is Johnny Knoxville of Jackass fame, Peter Griffin of The Family Guy, Tom Green, Howard Stern, Jimmy Kimmel--crude, obnoxious, vulgar, loud, moronic. For females there is “the midriff,” girls who use their sexual objectification as a form of empowerment. You’ve seen them--Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, and the like. Many such “cultural icons” have come and gone in America, true enough, but there have never been so many at one time and never without acceptable alternatives. One might argue that the current generation of teens has passed through a cultural bottleneck in which their “heroes” have been rigorously defined as the mook and the midriff.

Real heroes do exist of course, there is a war on, but teens are unlikely to see any mention of them in the mainstream mass media. What’s more, the teens I teach express little interest in the war and prefer to show their patriotism by shopping. Well, who can argue with this logic? After all, Bush practically made it his strategy for winning the peace. Support the troops? No, support your local economy! So if kids don’t see real heroes--selfless individuals who are willing to sacrifice even their lives for a greater cause--what do they see? Noam Chomsky, the left wing firebrand, says the mass media is teeming with unsavory characters that can be labeled “anti-heroes,” people who have picked up on a trend and try to exploit it for their own benefit:

[T]hose are the kinds of “heroes” that the culture is going to set up for you--the kind who show up when there are points to be gotten and power to be gotten, and who try to exploit popular movements for their own personal power-trips, and therefore marginalize the popular movements.

Chomsky gets right to the heart and soul of the American marketing industry. Find out what kinds of things teens like, set up caricatures to pose as their heroes, and then market the final product to them for obscene profits.

You’d think kids would be savvy enough to pick up on the fact that they’re being horribly exploited, but I don’t think this is happening. From what I’ve seen, the vast majority of college kids try to live up to the stereotypes. Most dress alike and speak in maddening clichés, all of it learned behavior, yes, but these stereotypes have become so internalized that the kids now actually believe that they are true, real, cool, and as we all know if you live a lie long enough it becomes true. It’s very difficult to say one thing and think another. This is what Chomsky calls “cognitive dissonance,” and with the exception of career politicians, few people are capable of putting up a façade for very long. It’s quite unlikely, for instance, that a college freshman has the ability to strut around campus like a buffoon, acting the part of the mook, while suppressing his deep desire to study Shakespeare. This is what George Orwell’s 1984 is all about, Chomsky claims.

Winston Smith, the main character in Orwell’s novel, is suppressing his true nature and playing a part to appease the people in positions of authority, but Smith is an exceptionally rare breed of man and realizes how difficult it is to keep up the act, to control the way he walks and talks, gestures and dresses. Orwell writes:

It struck [Smith] that in moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy but always against one’s own body…And it is the same in all seemingly heroic situations. On the battlefield, in the torture chamber, on a sinking ship...

A schizophrenic crackup can’t be long down the road for such a man, and anyone who has read 1984 has surely come away with an acute sense of paranoia.

Each semester I do not read papers by individual human beings but by mooks and midriffs or people who, like Winston Smith, have managed to suppress their true selves in order to “fit in.” Most essays are completely vacuous. They are lacking in sincerity, intellectual curiosity, maturity, and meaning. The papers are often trivial, stringing together a series of facts lifted from inadequate sources like Wikipedia. The papers fail to inform the reader and never say anything new about the subject matter under discussion. The diction is often informal, consisting of colloquialisms and slang. Students show no understanding of the concepts of thesis, argumentation or persuasion. And because students are incapable of thinking critically about the subjects they encounter in the college classroom odds are they are unlikely to become critical of the consumer culture that is continually manipulating them. This mentality creates a vicious feedback loop: Teens are told that being stupid is a virtue; they then build up a resistance to learning; as a consequence of their resistance, they become stupid.

This is not to say that college freshmen are entirely to blame. Some critics, like former New York City school teacher John Taylor Gatto, have likened the traditional classroom to a vast assembly line that mass produces a work force for the industrial sector. The goal is not to teach kids to think critically and independently but to make them submissive to authority. Teachers judge them not on how well they can analyze the world around them but on how well they are able to take orders and follow directions. There is a lot of truth to this. When I first started teaching six years ago I was aghast by what I saw when read the essays piling up on the corner of my desk. In a panic I turned to a colleague and said, “You know, I feel like I’m just teaching these kids how to follow simple instructions, not how to analyze complex texts.” My colleague had a sullen look in his eye as if to say, “Now he gets it.”

Maybe I do. Mooks and midriffs. A society of vulgarians. And this vulgarity stems largely from indoctrination rather than education. Literacy can help. In December 2005 NBC Nightly News reported that 69% of college seniors are unable to read complex texts. In essence they are functionally illiterate. Apparently reading is of no use to them. In the preface to his book In Praise of Darkness, Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges says that a book is merely an object like any other and until someone actually reads the book it will remain an object rather than something of aesthetic value. Unfortunately, for most college students books are objects, things to be abhorred and reviled rather than read, studied, and admired. Any so-called college level reading is purely trivial. The formula goes like this: Students read a book, memorize a portion of its contents, and then regurgitate the material during exam time. Students never actively involve themselves in what they’re reading. Noam Chomsky says:

The point is, it doesn’t matter what you read, what matters is how you read it….Just reading does you no good: you only learn if the material is integrated into your own creative processes somehow, otherwise it just passes through your mind and disappears. And there’s nothing valuable about that—it has basically the effect of learning the catechism …

For any experience to be truly meaningful, including the experience of learning, it must be internalized. Joseph Campbell writes of this in regards to mythology. In the past people lived with their myths. Stories of heroic deeds gave them a model of behavior, a sense of place within the larger society. For them a ritual was a re-enactment of and participation in a myth. But today, since we have no myths to live by, nothing really resonates in a meaningful way. What we do have is a mass media controlled by mega corporations that teach kids to behave in crass ways. When it comes right down to it, Americans have ritualized stupidity on a mass scale.

Of course kids always have the option of picking up a good book and reading about characters concerned with our common humanity, but mooks and midriffs, conditioned since their natal day to dismiss such pursuits, lack the motivation to venture into those uncharted waters, and so books remain objects, or worse, they become the white whale that must be destroyed at all costs. Regretfully, this will only hasten the destruction of the intellectually maimed heroes of the so-called Information Age, but when the drama is done we may find that a few lucky survivors have escaped to tell their tale. And perhaps the true purpose of college is to roam the incalculably vast wasteland of American culture in search of missing children in need of rescuing.

Keven P. Keating teaches English at Baldwin-Wallace College near Cleveland, Ohio