Bertonneau, Part Deux
In this Pope Center essay, Professor Tom Bertonneau argues that many young Americans — those who disdain books and any but the lightest reading — are sliding back into the state that precedes literacy, namely “orality.”
America spends great amounts to put computers into students’ hands and make sure that classrooms are fitted up for all sorts of fancy media stuff. Maybe we’d get better results, however, if we relied more on an old learning tool — the book.
Categories: Books
Pope Center
This Pope Center article appears inattentive to the fact that the objects of thought of the cited theoreticians were, indeed, television and wordless media, i.e., pre-hypertext, pre-Internet, pre-Web, etc. The theoreticians cited are cogent and often very convincing, yet themselves a few decades behind the information age as experienced by today’s students.
The strongest example cited in the article is the Lincoln-Douglas debates which actually undercut the article’s thesis: the article proffers that those oral performances were so powerful and so popular because the society then was a printed word-oriented society. Lacking is a discussion of the conditions of lived history at that time: Lincoln’s walking for miles to school, the scarcity of books in the home and one-room schoolhouse, etc.
The spoken word can become “generalized” through the practice of memorization which was the prevalent mode of learning, indeed “reading,” in a society with a dearth of tomes and a tradition of oratory and lecture. Homer, by this theory, might presumably be viewed as an “oral” throw-back to the “pre-literate.” Yet, consider the role of the “trace,” of the many ways that words become inscribed upon the mind.
When committed educators, of whom the article’s author is most assuredly one, accept that we are in an information age where the image and the word are interwoven, and that philosophy, hermeneutics, and communication are richer, not poorer for this marriage, they/we will develop a truly ground-breaking understanding of the desperate need of students for faculty, pre-K through 16+, who are experts in deciphering the “keys and codes” of the image and the auditory as well as of the word. Then, indeed, our students will be able to better develop into free and democratic citizens, unfettered by the often confounding and confusing ways of this brave new world.
In short, as W.B. Yeats so eloquently put it: “How can we tell the dancer from the dance?” As at least one critic has noted, that question would seem to be of life-and-death importance.
How, indeed, do we divorce the word from the image and the body in theater, for example? If a Shakespeare performance is oral and personal — even though nobility and groundlings alike attended the Globe and rarely had recourse to the printed plays (yes, there were quartos but the more definitive folios appeared only after the Bard’s death), then give our students such “Shakespeares,” let them eat such cake — the multimedia analog of the highest literacy potential of our contemporary world!