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Richard Lanham and James O'Donnell

the breakfast table
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from: Richard Lanham

Learning Both Sides of the Argument

Posted Monday, April 16, 2001, at 1:09 PM ET

Jim,

I've only been to one conference even roughly parallel to your Algeria visit, and that one at the opposite end of the compass--giving a talk in Jerusalem. Still, bombs were going off, and my multimedia lecturing equipment was given a going-over in the Frankfurt airport that I've never forgotten, so it was a little different from visiting a small campus in Ohio. Carol and I were treated, during a long 3 a.m. taxi ride from Jerusalem to the Tel Aviv airport, to a diatribe about Orthodox Jews who would not serve in the military and about the new Russian arrivals, and much besides. I got on the plane secure in the knowledge that this place was both far too old and far too new for me to understand. A quarrel to stay out of. Such an opinion, of course, is acceptable to no one, especially to you who are trying to understand such things from the other side of the fence. In most cases--What's going on in the runoff election in Peru? What about official corruption in Brazil? And the killer cops in Jamaica? to take the first three world-survey articles in this week's Economist--I don't think we really can. By the time you did, you'd be unable to understand our side. The best we can hope to do, perhaps, is to train ourselves in two-sided argument, and that kind of rhetorical training is as out of fashion as a thing can well be.

On to "What's news?" and how do we get to it. Let me propose a thread to pursue--two stories in today's Los Angeles Times. One, "Defensive Learning," a piece on a prep program for the SATs. Two, "2 Gloomy Education Reports Should Serve as Guideposts for Reform Effort." We've both spent our careers--well, staked our lives, not to put too fine an edge on it--on the centrality of the word, especially the written word. We've both argued, one way or another, that we must understand what's happening when words migrate from page to screen. So what do we do in a world where only one-third of fourth-graders can read a fourth-grade reader? What think you?

Dick

the breakfast table
entries
1234567891011121314
from: Richard Lanham

Learning Both Sides of the Argument

Posted Monday, April 16, 2001, at 1:09 PM ET
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Richard Lanham spent his active academic career teaching and writing about medieval and Renaissance literature at UCLA, but now spends his retirement fiddling around with electronic text. He is the author of The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts. James O'Donnell is a classics professor at the University of Pennsylvania and vice provost of computing. He is the author of Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace.
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