The Civilization of Illiteracy Part 18

Growing up in an environment of change and challenge is probably rewarding in the long run. But things are not very simple. The pressure to perform, peer pressure, and one's youthful instincts to explore and ascertain can transform a student's life in an instant. The distance between paradise (support and choice without worry) and h.e.l.l (the specter of disease, addiction, abandonment, disappointment, lack of direction) is also shorter than prior generations experienced it. Hundreds of TV channels, the Internet, thousands of music t.i.tles (on CD, video, and radio stations), the lure of sports, drugs, s.e.x, and the hundreds of fashion labels-choosing can be overwhelming. Literacy used to organize everything neatly. If you were in love, Romeo and Juliet was proper reading material. If you wished to explore Greece, you started with Homer's epics and worked your way up to the most recent novel by a contemporary Greek writer.

The problem is that drugs, AIDS, millions of attractions, the need to find one's way in a world less settled and less patient, do not fit in the neat scheme of literacy. The language of genetics and the language of personality const.i.tution are better articulated through means other than books. Heroes, teachers, parents, priests, and activists are no longer icons, even if they are portrayed to be better than they were in reality. Bart Simpson, the underachiever, "mediocre and proud of it," is a model for everyone who is told that what really counts is to feel good, period.

Still, some young people go to school or college full of enthusiasm, hoping to get an education that will guarantee self-fulfillment. All that is studied, over a long period of time and at great financial sacrifice, comes not even close to what they will face. Tehy might learn how to spell and how to add. But they soon discover that in real life skills other than spelling and arithmetic are expected. What bigger disappointment is there than discovering that years of pursing a promise bring no result? If, after all this, we still want both literacy and competence for experiences which literacy does not support, and often inhibits, we would have to invest beyond what society is willing and able to spend. And even if society were to do so, as it seems that it feels it must, the investment would be in imposing useless skills and a primitive perspective on the new generation, until the time comes when it can escape society's pressure. Education in our day remains a compromise between the interests of the inst.i.tution of education (with tens of thousands of teachers who would become unemployed) and a new pragmatic framework that few in academia understand.

One of the elements of this equation is the practical need to extend education to all, and if possible on a continuous basis.

But unless this education reflects the variety of literacies that the pragmatic framework requires, admitting everyone to everything results in the lowest general level of education. The variety of practical experiences of self-const.i.tution requires that we find ways to coordinate access to education by properly and responsibly identifying types of creativity, and investing responsibility in their development. Continuous education needs to be integrated in the work structure. It has to become part of the reciprocal commitments through which the new pragmatic framework is acknowledged.

To all those dedicated to the human aspects of politics, business, law, and medicine, who deplore that the technicians of policy-making can no longer find their way to our souls, all this will sound terrifying. Nevertheless, as much as we would like to be considered as individuals, each with our own dignity, personality, opinions, emotions, and pains, we ourselves undermine our expectations in our striving for more and more, at a price lower than what it costs society to distinguish us. Scale dictates anonymity, and probably mediocrity. Ignorance of literacy's role in centuries of productive human life dictates that it is time to unload the literacy-reflected experiences for which there is no reference in the new pragmatic context.

Who are we kidding?

Scared that in giving up literacy training we commit treason to our own condition, we maintain literacy and try to adapt it to new circ.u.mstances of working, thinking, feeling, and exploring.

In view of the inefficiency built into our system of education, we try to compromise by adding the dimension characteristic of the current status of human experience of multiple partial literacies. The result is the transformation of education into a packaging industry of human beings: you choose the line along which you want to be processed; we make sure that you get the literacy alibi, and that we train you to be able to cope with so-called entry-level jobs. Obviously, this evolves in a more subtle way. The kind of college or university one attends, or the tuition one pays, determines the amount of subtlety.

Students accept the function of education insofar as it mediates between their goals and the rather scary reality of the marketplace. This mediation differs according to the level of education, and is influenced by political and social decision making.

As an industry for processing the new generation, education acts according to parameters resulting from its opportunistic search for a place between academia and reality. Education acknowledges the narrow domains of expertise which labor division brought about, and reproduces the structure of current human experience in its own structure. Through vast financial support, from states, private sources, and tradition- based organizations, education is artificially removed from the reality of expected efficiency. It is rarely a universe of commitments. Accordingly, the gap between the literate language of the university and the languages of current human practice widens. The tenure system only adds another structural burden. When the highest goal of a professor is to be freed of teaching, something is awfully wrong with our legitimate decision to guarantee educators the freedom necessary for exercising their profession.

Behind the testing model that drives much of current education is the expectation of effective ranking of students. This model takes a literate approach insofar as it establishes a dichotomy (apt.i.tude vs. achievement) that makes students react to questions, but does not really engage them or encourage creative contributions. The result is ill.u.s.trative of the relation between what we do and how we evaluate what we do. An expectation was set, and the process of education was skewed to generate good test results. This effectively eliminates teaching and learning for the sake of a subject. Students are afraid they will not measure up and demand to be taught by the book.

Teachers who know better than the book are intimidated, by students and administration, from trying better approaches. Good students are frustrated in their attempts to define their own pa.s.sion and to pursue it to their definition of success.

Entrepreneurs at the age of 14, they do not need the feedback of stupid tests, carried out more for the sake of bureaucracy than for their well-being. Standardized tests dominated by multiple-choice answers facilitate low cost evaluations, but also affect patterns of teaching and learning. Exactly what the new pragmatics embodies-the ability to adapt and to be proactive-is counteracted through the experience of testing, and the teaching geared to multiple-choice instruments.

The uncoupling of education from the experiential frame of the human being is reflected in education's language and organization, and in the limiting a.s.sumptions about its function and methods. Education has become a self-serving organization with a bureaucratic "network of directives," as Winograd and Flores call them, and motivational elements not very different from the state, the military, and the legal system. Like the organizations mentioned, it also develops networks of interaction with sources of funding and sources of power, some driven by the same self-preserving energies as education itself. Instead of reflecting shorter cycles of activity in its own structure, it tends to maintain control over the destiny of students for longer periods of time. Even in fields of early acknowledged creativity-e.g., computer programming, networking, genetics, and nanotechnology-education continues to apply a policy that takes away the edge of youth, inventiveness, and risk.

The lowest quality of education is at the undergraduate level in universities, where either graduate a.s.sistants or even machines subst.i.tute for professors too busy funding their research, or actually no longer attuned to teaching. This situation exists exactly because we are not yet able to develop strategies of education adapted to new circ.u.mstances of human work and to the efficiency requirements which we ourselves made necessary. The "network of recurrent conversations," to use Winograd's terminology again, or the "language game" that Wittgenstein attributed to each profession, hides behind the front of literacy and thus burdens education. Once accreditation introduces the language game of politics, education distances itself even more from its fundamental mission. Accreditation agencies translate concerns about the quality of education into requirements, such as the evaluation of colleges and universities based on scores on exit tests taken by students.

These are supposed to reflect academic achievement. In other cases, such scores are used for a.s.sessing financial support. The paradox is that what negatively affects the quality of education becomes the measure of reward. Test results are often used in politicians' arguments about improved education, as well as a marketing tool. In fact, to prepare students for performance makes performance a goal in itself. Thus it should come as no surprise that the most popular book on college campuses-today's education factories-is a guide to cheating.

Many times comparisons are made between students in the USA and in j.a.pan or in Western European countries. In many ways these comparisons are against the pervasive dynamics of integration that we experience. Still, there are things to consider-for instance, that j.a.panese students spend almost the same amount of time watching TV as American students do, and that they are not involved in household tasks. Noticeable differences are in reading. The j.a.panese spend double the number of hours that American students do in reading. j.a.panese students spend more time on schoolwork (the same 2-to-1 ratio), but much less on entertainment. Should j.a.pan be considered a model? If we see that j.a.panese students rank among the best in science subjects, the answer seems to be positive. But if we project the same against the entire development of students, their exceptional creative achievements, the answer becomes a little more guarded.

With all its limitations, the USA is still more attuned to pragmatic requirements. This is probably due more to the country's inherent dynamics than to its educational inst.i.tutions. Largely unregulated, capable of adaptive moves, subject to innovation, the USA is potentially a better network for educational possibilities.

What caused the criticism in these pages of evaluation is the indecisiveness that the USA shows-the program for school reform for the year 2000 is an example of this att.i.tude-and the difficulty it has in realizing the price of the compromise it keeps supporting. Once j.a.panese businesses started buying American campuses, the price of the compromise became clear.

Universities in the USA were saved from bankruptcy. j.a.panese schools, whose structured programs and lack of understanding of the new pragmatics made for headlines, were able to evade their own rigid system of education, reputed for being late in acknowledging the dynamics of change. Abruptly, the Americanization of world education-study driven by multiple-choice tests with a dualistic structure-was short-changed by a j.a.panization movement. But in the closer look suggested above, it is evident that the j.a.panese are extricating themselves from drastic literacy requirements that end up hampering necessary accommodations in the traditional j.a.panese system of values. Although caution is called for, especially in approaching a subject foreign to our direct experience and understanding, the trend expressed is telling in its many consequences.

What about alternatives?

A legitimate question to be expected from any sensible reader refers to alternatives. Let us first notice that, due to the new pragmatic framework, we are more and more in the situation to disseminate every and any type of information to any imaginable destination. The interconnectivity of business and of markets creates the global economy. In contrast, our school and college systems, as separate from real life, and conceived physically outside our universe of existence, are probably as anachronistic as the castles and palaces we a.s.sociate with the power and function of n.o.bility; or as anachronistic as the high stacks of steel mills we a.s.sociate with industry, and the cities we a.s.sociate with social life. Some alumni might be nostalgic for the Gothic structures of their university days. The physical reference to a time "when education meant something" is clear-as is the memory of the campus, yet another good reason to look at the homecoming party in antic.i.p.ation of the football game, or in celebration of a good time (win or lose).

To make explicit the shift from a symbolism of education, coordinated with the function of intellectual accomplishment, to a stage when debunking this symbolism, still alive in and outside Ivy League universities, is an urgent political and practical goal is only the beginning. There is no justification for maintaining outmoded structures and att.i.tudes, and investing in walls and campuses and feudal university domains. As one of the successful entrepreneurs of this time put it, "anything that has to do with brick and mortar and its DISPLAY is-to use some poetic license-dead." The focus has to be on the dynamics of individual self-const.i.tution, and on the pragmatic horizons of everyone's future.

Fixing and maintaining schools in the USA, as well as in almost any country in the world, would cost more than building them from scratch. The advantage of giving up structures inappropriate to the new requirements of education is that, finally, at least we would create environments for interaction, taking full advantage of the progress made in technologies of communication and interactive learning. There is no need to idealize the Internet and the World Wide Web at their current stage. But if the future will continue to be defined more by commerce expectations than by educational needs, no one should be surprised that their educational potential will come to fruition late.

Humans do not develop at the same pace, and in the same direction. Each of us is so different that the main function of education should be not to minimize differences through literacy and literacy-based strategies that support a false sense of democracy, but to identify and maximize differences. This will provide the foundation for an education that allows each student to develop according to possibilities evinced through the relations, language-based or not, that people enter into. The content of education, understood as process, should be the experience, and the a.s.sociated means of creating and understanding it. Instead of a dominant language, with built-in experiences more and more alien to the vast majority of students, the ability to cope with many sign systems, with many languages, to articulate them, adapt them to the circ.u.mstance, and share them as much as the circ.u.mstance requires, should become the goal. Some would counter, "This was attempted with courses labeled modern math and resulted in no one's understanding it, or even simple math." There is some truth in this. The mathematically gifted had no problem in learning the new math. Students who were under the influence of literate reasoning had problems. What we need to do is to keep the mind open, allow for as much acc.u.mulation as necessary, and for discarding, if new experiences demand an open mind and freedom from previous a.s.sumptions. Some students will settle (in math or in other subjects) for predominantly visual signs, others for sounds, some for words, for rhythm, for any of the forms through which human intelligence comes to expression. Interactive multimedia are only some of the many media available. Other possibilities are yet to emerge. The Internet is in the same situation. A framework for individual selection, for tapping into learning resources and using them to the degree desired and acknowledged as necessary by praxis, would be the way to go. Not only literacy, in the accepted sense, but mathematical literacy, biological, chemical, or engineering literacy, and visual thinking and expression should be given equal consideration.

Cross-pollination among disciplines traditionally kept in isolation will definitely enhance creativity by doing away with the obsessive channeling practiced nowadays.

Education needs to shift from the atomistic view that isolates subjects from the whole of reality to a holistic perspective.

This will acknowledge types of mediation as effective means of increasing the efficiency of work, the requirements of integration, and the distributed nature of practical experiences in the world today. Collaborative effort needs to be brought to the forefront of the educational experience. We can define communities of interest, focused on some body of experience (which can be incorporated in an artifact, a book, a work of art, or someone's expertise). Education should provide means for sharing experiences. A variety of different interests can be brought into focus through sharing and collaborative learning.

There are many dimensions to such an approach: the knowledge sought, the experience of the variety of perspectives and uses, the awareness of interaction, the skills for intercommunication, and more. Implicit is the high expectation of sharing, while at the same time maintaining motivations for individual achievement and individual reward. This becomes critical at a time when it becomes more and more evident that resources are finite, while expectations still grow exponentially. The change from a standardized model, focused on the quick fix that leads to results (no matter how high a cost), to the collaborative model of individuality and distinction re-establishes an ethical framework, which is urgently needed. Compet.i.tion is not excluded, but instead of conflict-which in the given system results in students who cut pages from books so that their colleagues will fail-we ought to create an environment of reciprocally advantageous cooperation. How far are we from such an objective?

In the words of Jacques Barzun, a devoted educator committed to literacy, education failed to "develop native intelligence." In an interesting negative of what people think education accomplishes, he points to the appearance of success: "We professed to make ideal citizens, super-tolerant neighbors, agents of world peace, and happy family folk, at once s.e.xually adept and flawless drivers of cars." All this is nothing to be ashamed of, but as educational goals, they are quite off the target. Citizenship in the society of the new pragmatic context is different from citizenship in previous societies. Tolerance requires a new way to manifest it, such as the integration of what is different and complementary. Peace, yes, even peace, means a different state of affairs at a time when many local conflicts affect the world. As far as family, s.e.x, and the culture of the car are concerned, nothing can point more to the failure of education. Indeed, education failed to understand all the factors involved in contemporary family life. It failed to understand s.e.xual relations. Faced with the painful reality of the degradation of s.e.xual relations, education resorted to the desperate measure of dispensing condoms, an extension of what was gloriously celebrated as s.e.x education. The flawless drivers never heard the criticism voiced by citizens concerned with energy waste. We made students rely on cheap gasoline and affordable cars to bring them to school and college, instead of understanding that education needs to be decentralized, distributed, and-why not-adapted to the communication and interaction possibilities of our times. The Green Teens who are active against energy waste might be well ahead of their educational system, but still forced to go through it. Moreover, education should be seen in the broader context of the other changes coming with the end of the civilization of literacy: the status of family, religion, law, and government.

While education is related to the civic status of the individual, the new conditions for the activity of our minds are also very important. Ideally, education addresses all the facets of the human being. New conditions of generalized interconnection almost turn the paradigm of continuing education into continuous education that corresponds to changes in human experience unfolding under even more complex circ.u.mstances. It might well happen that for some experiences, we shall have to recuperate values characteristic of literacy. But better to rediscover them than to maintain literacy as an ideal when the perspectives for new forms of ascertaining ourselves as human beings require more, much more, than literacy.

Book Four

Language and the Visual

Photography, film, and television have changed the world more than Gutenberg's printing press. Much of the blame for the decline in literacy is attributed to them, especially to movies and television. More recently, computer games and the Internet have been added to the list of culprits. Studies have been conducted all over the world with the aim of discovering how film and television have changed established reading habits, writing ability, and the use and interpretation of language.

Patterns of publishing and distribution of information, including electronic publication and the World Wide Web (still in its infancy), have also been a.n.a.lyzed on a comparative basis.

Inferences have been drawn concerning the influence of various types of images on what is printed and why, as well as on how writing (fiction, science, trade books, manuals, poetry, drama, even correspondence) has changed.

In some countries, almost every home has a television set; in others even more than one. In 1995, the number of computers sold surpa.s.sed that of television sets. In many countries, most children watch television and films before they learn to read. In a few countries, children play computer games before ever opening a book. After they start to read, the amount of time spent in front of a TV set is far greater than the time dedicated to books. Adults, already the fourth and fifth generations of television viewers, are even more inclined to images. Some images are of their choice-TV programs at home, movies in the theater, videotapes they buy, rent, or borrow from the library, CD-ROMs. Other images are imposed on the adult generations by demands connected to their professions, their health, their hobbies, and by advertis.e.m.e.nt. After image-recording and playing equipment became widely available, the focus on TV and video expanded. In addition to the ability to bring home films of one's choice, to buy and rent videotapes, laser discs, and CD-ROMs on a variety of subjects, we are also able to produce a video archive for family, school, community, or professional purposes. We can even avail ourselves of cable TV to generate programs of local interest. The generalized system of networking (cable, satellites, airwaves), through which images can be pumped from practically any location into schools, homes, offices, and libraries, affects even further the relation of children and adults among themselves and the relation of both groups to language and to literacy in contemporary life. Anyone with access to the printing presses of the digital world can print a CD-ROM. Access to the Internet is no more expensive than a magazine subscription. But the Internet is much more exciting because we are not only at the receiving end.

The subject, as almost all have perceived and a.n.a.lyzed it, is not the impact of visual technology and computers on reading patterns, or the influence of new media on how people write. At the core of the development described so far is the fundamental shift from one dominant sign system, called language, and its reified form, called literacy, to several sign systems, among which the visual plays a dominant role. We would certainly fail to understand what is happening, what the long-lasting consequences of the changes we face are, and what the best course of action is, if we were to look only at the influence of technology. Understanding the degree of necessity of the technology in the first place is where the focus should be. The obsession with symptoms, characteristic of industrial pragmatics, is not limited to mechanics' shops and doctors'

offices.

New practical experiences within the scale of humankind that result in the need for alternatives to language confirm that the focus cannot be on television and computer screens, nor on advertis.e.m.e.nt, electronic photography, and laser discs. The issue is not CD-ROM, digital video, Internet and the World Wide Web, but the need to cope with complexity. And the goal is to achieve higher levels of efficiency corresponding to the needs and expectations of the global scale that humankind has reached.

So far, very few of those who study the matter have resisted the temptation to fasten blame on television watching or on the intimidating intrusion of electronic and digital contraptions for the decline of literacy. It is easier to count the hours children spend watching TV-an average of 16,000 hours in comparison to 13,000 hours for study before graduation from high school-than to see why such patterns occur. And it is as easy to conclude that by the time these children can be served alcohol in a restaurant or buy it in stores, they will have seen well over a million commercials. Yet no one ever acknowledges new structures of work and communication, even less the unprecedented wealth of forms of human interaction, regardless of how shallow they are. That particular ways of working and living have for all practical purposes disappeared, is easily understood. Understanding why requires the will to take a fresh look at necessary developments.

Some of today's visual sign systems originate in the civilization of literacy: advertis.e.m.e.nt, theatrical and para-theatrical performance, and television drama. They carry with them efficiency expectations typical of the Machine Age. Other visual sign systems transcend the limits of literacy: concrete poetry, happening, animation, performance games that lead to interactive video, hypermedia or interactive multimedia, virtual reality, and global networks. Within such experiences, a different dynamics and a focus on distinctions, instead of on h.o.m.ogeneity, are embedded. Most of these experiences originate in the practical requirement to extend the human being's experiential horizon, and the need to keep pace with the dynamics of global economy.

How many words in a look?

In a newspaper industry journal (Printers' Ink, 1921), Fred R.

Barnard launched what would become over time a powerful slogan: "One look is worth a thousand words." To make his remark sound more convincing, he later reformulated it as "One picture is worth a thousand words," and called it a proverb from China. Few slogans were repeated and paraphrased more than this one.

Barnard wanted to draw people's attention to the power of images. It took some years until the new underlying structure of our continuous practical self-const.i.tution confirmed an observation made slightly ahead of its time. It should be added that, through the millennia, craftsmen and the forerunners of engineering used images to design artifacts and tools, and to plan and build cities, monuments, and bridges. They realized through their own experience how powerful images could be, although they did not compare them to words.

Images are more concrete than words. The concreteness of the visual makes images inappropriate for describing other images.

However, it does not prevent human beings from a.s.sociating images with the most abstract concepts they develop in the course of their practical or theoretical experience. Words start by being relatively close to what they denote, and end up so far removed from the objects or actions they name that, unless they are generated together with an object or action (like the word calculator, from calculae, stones for counting), they seem arbitrary. Reminiscences of the motivation of words (especially onomatopoeic qualities, i.e., phonetic resemblance to what the word refers to, such as crack or whoosh) do not really affect the abstract rules of generating statements, or even our understanding of such language signs.

Images are more constrained, more directly determined by the pragmatic experience in whose framework they are generated. Red as a word (with its equivalencies in other languages: rot in German, rouge in French, rojo in Spanish,

in j.a.panese, adom in Hebrew, and

in Russian) is arbitrary in comparison to the color it designates. Even the designation is quite approximate. In given experiential situations, many nuances can be distinguished, although there are no names for them. The red in an image is a physical quality that can be measured and standardized, hence made easier to process in photography, printing, and synthesis of pigments. In the same experiential framework, it can be a.s.sociated with many objects or processes: flowers, blood, a stoplight, sunset, a flag. It can be compared to them, it can trigger new a.s.sociations, or become a convention. Once language translates a visual sign, it also loads it with conventions characteristic of language-red as in revolution, cardinal red, redneck, etc.-moving it from the realm of its physical determination (wavelength, or frequency of oscillation) to the reality of cultural conventions. These are preserved and integrated in the symbolism of a community.

Purely pictorial signs, as in Chinese and j.a.panese writing, relate to the structure of language, and are culturally significant. No matter to which extent such pictorial signs are refined-and indeed, characters in Chinese and Kanji are extremely sophisticated- they maintain a relation to what they refer to. They extend the experience of writing, especially in calligraphic exercise, in the experience conveyed. We can impose on images-and I do not refer only to Chinese ideograms-the logic embodied in language. But once we do, we alter the condition of the image and transform it into an ill.u.s.tration.

Language, in its embodiment in literacy, is an a.n.a.lytic tool and supports a.n.a.lytic practice quite well. Images have a dominantly synthetic character and make for good composite tools.

Synthesizing activities, especially designing, an object, a message, or a course of action, imply the partic.i.p.ation of images, in particular powerful diagramming and drawing. Language describes; images const.i.tute. Language requires a context for understanding, in which cla.s.ses of distribution are defined.

Images suggest such a context. Given the individual character of any image, the equivalent of a distributional cla.s.s for a language simply does not exist.

To look at an image, for whatever practical or theoretical purpose, means to relate to the method of the image, not to its components. The method of an image is an experience, not a grammar applied to a repertory, or the instantiation of rules of grammar. The power of language consists of its abstract nature.

Images are strong through their concreteness. The abstraction of language results from sharing vocabulary and grammar; the abstraction of images, from sharing visual experience, or creating a context for new experiences.