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Richard Lanham and James O'Donnell

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from: James O'Donnell

The Literacy Divide

Posted Tuesday, April 17, 2001, at 7:25 PM ET

Dick,

I've given my life to high literacy as well, but when I see it unevenly distributed among us and erratically propagated, my skeptical historian side wonders whether that isn't telling us that the value of high literacy isn't all our ideology cracks it up to be. There's certainly a rational argument to be made for saying that you can make $65,000 a year without reading a book and probably twice that without reading a serious book once you leave college, so why bother? Oh, I can think of lots of reasons to bother, but my private suspicion is that the "digital divide" isn't what will map the society of the future, but the "literacy divide"--and it's already with us, just morphing forward.

Did classics ruin Britain? I've not read either of those books you cite, but they're on my list for tomorrow--because I'm one of the few who can see almost any book someone names within 24 hours if I care to, thanks to my university position. I saw Stoppard's Invention of Love in Philadelphia, and I, too, expected it to be unplayable--not just about a Latin professor, but a Latin professor who spent his life reconstructing the way an astronomical poet could find to say "360 divided by 12 is 30, then divided by 12 again is two and a half" in perfect Latin hexameters! But it is a zinging success, partly because of the wider issues that classical scholarship is made to touch, and partly, of course, because Stoppard is cleverer than you, me, and the next dozen people we run into put together.

But the classmate the young Housman had a crush on, who went off to India to embody the empire in some minor way. Housman remembers him in one place as "despiser of Latin". Even then, you could make your way without the particular form of high literacy that involved Latin verse composition; and the prestige of that literacy didn't have much to do with its applicability to "modern" life of the 19th century. Almost any rigorous form of mental training will probably suffice to make smart people successful, when you come down to it.

jo'd (off to the library)

the breakfast table
entries
1234567891011121314
from: James O'Donnell

The Literacy Divide

Posted Tuesday, April 17, 2001, at 7:25 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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