Literacy Grows People

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Prologue

Children must earn adulthood by becoming both literate and well-mannered.

(p 88) The Disappearance of Childhood by Neil Postman 

…C. H. Waddington has hypothesized that “one component of human evolution and the capacity for choice is the ability of the human child to accept on authority from elders the criteria for right and wrong.” Without such assurances children find it difficult to be hopeful or courageous or disciplined. If it is hypocrisy to hide from the child the “facts” of adult violence and moral ineptitude, it is nonetheless wise to do so. Surely, hypocrisy in the cause of strengthening child growth is no vice.

 (p 93)

 Literacy Grows People

I’m eager to tell you: It’s been a life-changer to read Neil Postman’s The Disappearance of Childhood. I feel (he said in a stunned voice): “Wow.”

I’ve been fond of Postman ever since I did a book report for college, back when my world was young and idealistic, on Teaching As a Subversive Activity (written with Charles Weingartner). Postman will always be best known for his books about TV, such as Amusing Ourselves to Death and (with Steve Powers) How To Watch TV News. Of course these books deserve their fame. Yet just as an art-house movie can be better and more memorable for you than a famous mainstream movie, can even become almost your favorite film, (Tree of Life) even though you just can’t recommend that film to strangers, so too is The Disappearance of Childhood my favorite of Postman’s work, although it’s one of his less known books. It’s Postman’s favorite too, as he notes in the forward to the new Vintage edition.

Obscure, and perhaps too bookish: I don’t even know who Postman’s readers will be. From what I can see, even smart computer nerds seem to prefer their computer forums, such as reddit, to be just like TV: Valuing variety over complexity, quick emotions over depth, and with a pronounced distaste for anything lengthy. One Internet lady wrote with heated annoyance that if you couldn’t make your point in 200 words then you shouldn’t bother writing at all. (I guess she’s not one of my fans)

Postman needn’t apologize to nerds, although his thesis, step-by-step, chapter-by-chapter, requires more than a page each to cover things like: the long history of non-childhood; the super-swift spread of the “printing press with movable type;” the character-building effect on the reader of literacy; how childhood is a relatively recent social construct, we made it up; how childhood as we know it arose alongside printing; and, finally, the US cultural decline of the concept of childhood and innocence alongside the ascent of TV. That’s a lot of pages. Just now, trying to keep this essay closer to 200 words, I am focusing not on childhood but on literacy… Although I’ve posted two quotes as prologue to get you started on thinking about children.

Although lately, as shown in my essays, I’ve been grasping how TV is “bad,” especially TV “news,” suddenly a new light bulb has turned on: Thanks to Postman, now I grasp how literacy is “good.” More: From Postman, my new theory is that literacy is an achievement, and that adulthood is an achievement, and that literacy is a key to mature adulthood, as we have known it. (Although my favorite brother-in-law is both adult and less-literate)

It seems to me that in those dynamic Greek forums the citizens supported democracy as they gathered to talk, but the true sinews of power for their forums came from a populace who would go home alone to read and to reason. How seriously the Greeks took citizenship could be seen by their term “idiot” meaning one who could neither swim nor read.

I remember when “new, exciting” video computers first appeared, being used for teaching and gaming and TV, and a few people speculated that the skill of reading might one day become as rare as playing music. However—and this is serious—none of them speculated that literacy had an effect on the body politic: on people’s character. Considering how even the nerds among us don’t get it, I’m feeling glum. Considering the consequences, I’m aghast.

Oh well, I may be walking around in a dark cloud but there’s a silver lining: At least I have a clue for the solution of a mystery. In one of the recent nonfiction best sellers, —It was either by the Freakonamics guys or Malcolm Gladwell— he had tracked how TV came to America in bits, with certain regions getting TV broadcasting earlier than others. He tracked the crime rates in these same regions. He was baffled, considering that children only watch kiddies shows, not ones on crime or violence, baffled at how those earlier regions suffered an earlier rise in the crime rate. Today I am wondering if those kids had a less innocent, more cynical childhood, followed by a less literate adulthood. Our ancestors, in their traditional oral society would of course communicate, but literacy means something upstairs, beyond plain communication.

Reading Postman (p. 76-77) I thought of strange far away young males in our war on terror: “When one learns to read, one learns a peculiar way of behaving in which physical immobility is only one feature. Self-restraint is a challenge not only to the body but to the mind as well…. In reading, one must wait to get the answer, wait to reach the conclusion. And while waiting, one is obliged to evaluate the validity of the sentences, or at least know when and under what conditions to suspend critical judgment… The literate person must learn to be reflective and analytical, patient and assertive, always poised, after due consideration, to say no to a text. This mode of behavior is difficult for the young to learn… the young reader is expected at first only to paraphrase, not criticize.”

 According to Postman, (p 101) “When the United States Constitution was written, James Madison and his colleagues assumed that mature citizenship necessarily implied a fairly high level of literacy and its concomitant analytic skills. For this reason the young, commonly defined as those under twenty-one, were excluded from the electoral process because it was further assumed that the achievement of sophisticated literacy required training over a long period of time… As Tocqueville tells us, the politics of America was the politics of the printed page.”

You may think that in a month or so, with second thoughts, I will have reached a calmer, more critical balance… I hope so, but just now, under Postman’s spell, and wondering if literacy builds character, I am feeling dark and thunderous. I see TV as images without language, without abstractions, and without a sense of time. I see “moving pictures” which don’t allow any pause to reflect. I sense the futility of any “TV-now-time” liberal trying to direct our foreign policy and our savage peace making without having first woven together a personal philosophy of history. I envision the horror of Nineteen Eighty-Four replaced by the horror of Brave New World, censorship replaced by the “soma” of electronics. Later I will be calmer, of course, but just now I am trying on this new clothing, look at every mirror, trying to imagine if an entire society can suffer from a reliance on image over abstract language.

As regards society, I suppose people intent on politics are especially sensitive. Earlier this month, a backroom party worker and syndicated columnist, Warren Kinsella, wrote that image, emotion, has become more important than words. The hook for his column, which he must have been thinking about for some time, was about Bev Oda, the Member of Parliament we all loved to hate. Finally she’s been turfed. It seems her fate wasn’t just from the public contemplating her incredibly stupid and selfish actions, but was mostly from a single image of her dressed in black, looking sinister, sneaking a cigarette. Kinsella wrote, “Print folks —the ones who like to pour their souls into writing newspapers and magazines, the ones who craft profound essays for blogs, the ones who toil in government offices and conjure up grand speeches— like to believe that words matter still. But, mostly, they don’t.” To this, all I can say is “Ouch!” and “Too true.” What’s happened to us?

I guess James Madison’s time has passed. Judging by the prevalence of electronic screens, Americans now prefer not to think. Last summer, when a nearby library was having a one-dollar sale, I overheard two young ladies in high heels. As a blonde reached for a fantasy her brunette friend asked, “Are you going to look at these science fiction books?” “No! I don’t want to think!” …As God is my witness, I never would have thought to see, in my lifetime, the fantasy books at the big box bookstore, formerly a minority to be mixed in with, and outnumbered by, the science fiction books… now having their own separate gargantuan fantasy section, ignoring the withered little row of sf books. While hoping it is somehow coincidence, I am finding those two book sections awfully symbolic.

Often I despair. As documented in A Time to Start Thinking (A book I announced in my America Descending essay of June 2012) when it comes to US federal politics the experts have concluded, and I suppose Kinsella would agree, “to explain is to lose.” And so “they” spout labels and slogans. I ask you: How much more unthinking could the American people be? When Postman discusses screens versus literacy he never comes out and says “post-literate age,” but I think this term describes our timid new world. Longing for lush language, I am traveling across the desert, “a stranger and afraid, in a world I never made.” Las Vegas initially looks attractive, with bright images of moving neon, but in the end, it is surrounded by desert.

Epilogue

… “And what is the use of a book,” Alice thinks “without pictures or conversations?” Lewis Carrol is making the obvious point that the pictorial and narrative mode is of a lower order of complexity and maturity than the expository. Pictures and stories are the natural form in which children understand the world. Exposition is for grownups.

(p 117)

The often missed irony of the remark that television programs are designed for a twelve-year-old mentality is that there can be no other mentality for which they may be designed. Television is a medium consisting of very little but “pictures and stories,” and Alice would have found it quite suitable for her needs.

(p 118)

Sean Crawford

Calgary

Finishing this essay, complete with quotes, at exactly 1776 words.

July 2012

Understanding Essays

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Prologue: The opening paragraph of a piece by J. Hillis Miller, Dylan Thomas's "Delayed Meaning" ends with these two lines:
Of his early poetry Thomas said: "I thought it enough to leave an impression of sound and feeling and let the meaning seep in later." This does not mean that there is no meaning, but that the poet refuses to give the reader easy access to it… (ellipses Miller's)

Understanding Essays:
Using your Tardis, suppose you found a Chinese master chef and asked him precisely whether his Peking soup was sweet or sour? He'd scowl, for his soup is a wordless blend, crafted as best he knows how. Ask an English literature-type author which picture to put on the cover of his classic novel and he'd reply, "Make it black." Then, I suppose, you'd use a dark meaningless old oil painting.

Ask a classical composer what prose description-title to put on his piece. He'd shrug. "Can't you just give it a number?" In our own day, of course, pop artists have said they only make music videos because their labels insist they do. It disturbs the musicians because it takes away your personal imagination. The artist Seal won't even put song lyrics in his CD liner notes, because, as his notes explain, you might be able to mishear and mistakenly come up with better words on your own. Art is like that—it's personal.

Similarly, for an essay, the prose title may not be very descriptive, the message may not be reducible to a sound bite, and some reader assembly may be required.

So if an essay goes on at great length about serving in ill-fitting uniforms for years in London (London - 1944 by Mary Lee Settle, from The Virginia Quarterly Review) while on reduced rations under the blitz, and then, at the end, suddenly switches to a brief incident, around VE Day, of hearing a French officer at a fine New York dinner expressing satisfaction at the reduction in the Jewish population... then don't expect from the author a prose description, a pretty paint-by-numbers conclusion, telling you what the essay was all about. If I met Ms Settle, I would not ask.

I am saying that essays can be artistic, a blending of art and craft, of right-brain and left-brain.

Unlike essays by schoolchildren, an adult essay need not proceed to a predetermined end of Q.E.D. (Thus it is demonstrated) Topic sentences are fine for kids, but...

...Topic sentence technique can result in nothing but wooden and mechanical writing....and the fact is that topic sentences can be found in the work of no great author... Further, since the topic sentence inevitably gravitates towards the beginning, it cultivates textbookish writing: first the definition in blackface, then the explanation. If we understand the definition, we need not read the explanation. Texbook writing makes no attempt at suspense; and since textbooks are synonymous with dullness, it is perhaps as well that such writers as Dickens, Thackeray, Conrad and Galsvorthy wrote before the topic sentence technique was born... 

 The Way of the Makers, by F. M. Salter, University of Alberta, 1967  

Essays are not as artistic as novels, of course, but the two forms are related. In prose, the reason you can have symbols and themes being interpreted three different ways by three different English teachers is: Art is like that—the interpretation is personal.

And no, the writer won't give away the answers: It just isn't done, and besides—he or she doesn't know. Some of the things, the insights, came as she wrote, not before. Her readers will have insights too, but each reader will be unique, each having different insights at different places in a novel... or in an essay.

I may never write a novel—essays are more fun—but I have written short fiction. I was humbled, once, to meet a fan. I was in a booth at the Lido cafe when a stranger, a young man, knelt (knelt!) at my booth. He asked if I was that friend of Lucas who had once read a short story aloud at a picnic table at Citizen Paine coffee house. I said I was. He said, "That story changed my life."

I thanked him, asked no questions. He left... For him to ask me what exactly I had thought as I wrote, or, for me to ask him what parts had changed his life, would have been just too personal: Art is like that. And besides, we may not have quite known the answers ourselves.

Please don't feel that an essay has to be crystal clear, as in some impersonal computer manual, and please don't feel foolish if you don't "get it." If an author is good enough to merit an editor and be published then you surely "got" his blended soup at some level, you got what what you personally needed to get.

The End


Interlude:

What I am saying, before we get to a long thoughtful epilogue, is that you should not be intimidated when reading a non-structured essay, nor be intimidated into the thinking you must write a structured essay.
Unless you are a pre-adult in school, I  guess, for just as you will re-trace the reasoning of Pythagorus,  for your own good, it will do you good to learn to think straight. But once you're learned? Here is a blow against structure, as part of advice to young movie critics:

9. Just write, damn it. I believe that ninety percent of writer's block is not the fault of the writer. It's the fault of the writer's wrongheaded educational conditioning. We're taught to write via a 20th century industrial model that's boringly linear and predictable: What's your topic sentence? What are your sections? What's your conclusion? Nobody wants to read a piece that's structured that way. Even if they did, the form would be more a hindrance than a help to the writing process, because it makes the writer settle on a thesis before he or she has had a chance to wade around in the ideas and inspect them. So to Hell with the outline. Just puke on the page, knowing that you can clean it up and make it structurally sound later. ..

For all ten points of Advice to Young Critics by MZS,  see link

Epilogue: Selected paragraphs to further indicate that schoolchild essays are not like the real world, taken from my unpublished Me and Your Essay:

My two year college ran a "third year level' course in "rhetoric" (written). As a prerequisite I needed six English courses to get in. I had one. Or, permission from the department head. This I hoped I could wrangle. So we met. I confessed, "You know how in high school they tell you to begin with a clear topic sentence and then outline your clear reasoning A,B,C each with subheadings 1,2,3? Well, I never do it that way. I am self-taught, from reading George Orwell. Would that be OK?" The man chuckled and said, "If you know George's name then you're doing better than most of the students here." And I was in. It turned out to be my favorite class; the teacher said I was one of his wild horses. So you can understand that I take the reading and writing of essays quite seriously.

I also obtained permission to take a "history of stage plays" class with the theatre majors. There I learned of theater movements such as "theater of the absurd." They say education is never wasted—especially when I can compare and contrast my two classes.

You may have found that for certain "English 101" essays, of the ABC type, you can read the first half, or the middle half, or the last half, and thereby know almost half the essay. The same might apply to reading certain plays—but never for the absurd ones. For plays like the one act The Zoo Story (two guys on a park bench) or Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf? (two couples at home) you have to read the entire organic whole—the gestalt. Similarly, while some essays are purely left brain, others include the right brain. For the latter, you may need to relax enough to let the whole essay wash over you.

When Orwell, a lover of literature, put in a "'conclusion' sentence" to his essays he seldom meant it narrowly and literally: he usually meant it as a subtle tip of the ice berg, expecting you to have first read the whole piece. Me too.

Three conclusion-ending lines of Orwell:

The corner of the human heart that they speak for might easily manifest itself in worse forms, and I for one should be sorry to see them vanish. (The Art of Donald McGill)

"Them" refers literally to risque post cards; but figuratively to society's outlet for impropriety.

And really it was like watching a flock of cattle to see the long column, a mile or two miles of armed men, flowing peacefully up the road, while the great white birds drifted over them in the opposite direction, glittering like scraps of paper. (Marrakech)

Literally: a scene of white officers and black enlisted men; figuratively: while on paper the colonizers could excuse their oppression, one day these colonies, strong enough to survive on their own, would be free.

One cannot change all this in a moment, but one can a least change one's own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase—some jackboot, Achilles' heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse—into the dustbin where it belongs. (Politics and the English Language)

This seems closer to a literal summary-ending—but the subject is in fact political thought. I include it to show how richly one can write. Not like all that barren prose, immortal, floating in cyberspace, of less beauty than a drifting dandelion seed.

~Paul Graham speculated that "conclusions" came from concluding remarks to the jury. I suppose he wondered why the heck schoolchildren are taught to write a conclusion as a reworded beginning, even though readers could presumably scroll with their eyes back to the top of the essay. The above quoted F. M. Salter would agree. Here is his paragraph against schoolchild conclusion paragraphs:

Similarly, the way to stop writing is to stop; and the very best place to stop is at the end. Teachers who insist on "conclusions" are really asking students to go beyond the end. Nowhere in life is it pleasant to see people going on after they have finished; people who explain their jokes, people who linger forever at the door at the end of a visit and refuse to go home; people who have said or done all they need to do or say, and still  go on puttering. In endings it may be the theatre has the edge on all other mediums of writing if the author does not know when to end his play, the producer will  find out very soon, and ring down the curtain when the audience tells him, by applause or otherwise, "That's enough."

Sean Crawford

July 20012

Calgary

Footnotes: 

~Paul Graham, my favourite web essayist, has done two more meta (about) essays, The List of N Things and Persuade Xor Discover. (Both pieces were eye openers, but I won't try to summarize them here—one of the links compares schoolboy essays to the articles in Cosmopolitan)

~My Essays and Blogs piece archived June 2010 gives a "present at the creation" perspective on the internet; the 'net came to the general public in 1992, and here is a song I really like about it, based on the hit "Video killed the Radio Star"—which I also really like—which was the very first music video ever broadcast on MTV. (the music television channel)

~For fun, I am slowly adding "links" to this piece to see if, and at what point, I get any extra hits. So far, links make no difference. My few hits are solely from the week I posted.
Update: Now I'm getting hits, but not until my piece was linked to the max.

~While the word is not on my "spell check," which doesn't have VE day either, I'm so pleased my ROM (computer) dictionary includes the word Tardis