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Richard Lanham and James O'Donnell

the breakfast table
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from: Richard Lanham

"Can a complex culture work without a sophisticated literacy?"

Posted Monday, April 16, 2001, at 6:01 PM ET

Jim,

I'm prepared to put down some of my fears to curmudgeonly vexation. When I read in the paper that "The focus are gleaners ..." and start reaching for my red pen, twitching to write "subj/verb agreement" in the margin," clearly that's just the brain cells remembering even after six years of retirement. And when I read a sign in a school yard saying "Canine Detection--The Oxnard Union High School District utilizes trained detection canines that can detect the presence of drugs ..." and I mutter, dogs, dogs, you are talking about dogs, dogs that can smell drugs, I know that is just the author of Revising Prose yearning to be unleashed.

But my fears go deeper than schoolmasterly annoyance. We can indeed teach "improbable people improbable things on short deadlines," but we don't do this with reading, writing, and speaking. We don't convince students--we don't convince anybody--that words really matter, that they are anything but an annoyance that gets in the way of things. We do a lot of preaching--"Read more books, you rascals!"--but all this does is make reading seem like time in the penalty box. The only people in the university world worrying much about the digital expressive space are the people doing CHI (Computer-Human Interface) or Web design, and they are not interested in words at all, it sometimes seems. As for trying to relate the printed page to the electronic screen, and thus creating the kind of "composition" program that we need, I don't see it appearing or indeed the awareness that is needed. As for your question, "Could we even imagine schools and colleges that worked as well as we think they should?" I'd have to answer, "Yes, I can imagine them working a lot better than they do now with no trouble at all."

Can a complex culture work without a sophisticated literacy? Are we about to find out? That is the "story behind the story" (to revert to the metaphor you began today's conversation with) for the New York Times article about the government's difficulty in "finding people who know foreign languages well enough to understand what terrorists are saying when we wiretap them." It is the same story behind the news stories about fourth graders who can't read, and juries who can't add well enough to reckon up the millions in damages they want to award, or, for that matter, behind the students in my classes who stopped arguing about grades because they didn't know how to compute a mathematical average but were too ashamed to say so. The story in back of all these stories is a very scary one. And no one really wants to tell it or even comes close to getting it right if they try. No, I don't think the message is that the "educational system is about as good as we need it to be." Just the opposite. It is far worse than we can afford to let it be. It is just the kind of situation that would have gotten your friend Cassiodorus' dander good and up.

Well, your turn to start things off tomorrow. I'd really like to hear more of what you have to say about this--obviously your university experience is much fresher than mine--but if you want to start another thread, it is your play. This conversation certainly lends a fresh zest to reading the morning papers!

Dick

the breakfast table
entries
1234567891011121314
from: Richard Lanham

"Can a complex culture work without a sophisticated literacy?"

Posted Monday, April 16, 2001, at 6:01 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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