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Richard Lanham and James O'Donnell

the breakfast table
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from: Richard Lanham

"What lies behind all these articles about the 'literacy crisis'?"

Posted Monday, April 16, 2001, at 1:48 PM ET

Jim,

An addendum to my last transmission (sorry about "transmission"--you can get the boy out of the Signal Corps but not the Signal Corps out of the boy), which I had the wit to think of only on the staircase after the party, as the French say. Serves me right for not rehearsing these spontaneous comments enough. I meant to suggest the article about fourth-grade reading skills as developing from your argument about what lies "behind the news." What lies behind all these articles about the "literacy crisis"? Way behind it lies our failure to understand the relationship between the electronic expressive space where children now dwell and the print space. Now here's a real problem in deep understanding of another world. How do print types like us, hard as we try, understand it? With brains literally formed on print. White male academics trying to understand how people in Somaliland view air traffic control problems (back to the Economist) is easy, compared to this gulf.

Dick

the breakfast table
entries
1234567891011121314
from: Richard Lanham

"What lies behind all these articles about the 'literacy crisis'?"

Posted Monday, April 16, 2001, at 1:48 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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