The Civilization of Illiteracy Part 48

John Dewey (1859-1952). Dewey bases his pragmatic conception on the proven useful. This explains why this conception was labeled instrumentalism or pragmatics of verification. Among the works where this is expressed are How We Think (1910), Logic, the Theory of Inquiry (1938), Knowing and Known (1940).

William James (1842-1910). James expressed his pragmatic conception from a psychological perspective. His main works dedicated to pragmatism are Principles of Psychology (1890), Pragmatism (1907), and The Meaning of Truth (1909).

Josiah Royce (1855-1916). He is the originator of a conception he called absolute pragmatics.

John Sculley, ex-CEO of Apple Computer, Inc took the bully pulpit for literacy (at President-elect Clinton's economic summit in December, 1992), stating that the American economy is built on ideas. He and other business leaders confuse ideas with invention, which is their main interest, and for which literacy is not really necessary.

Sidney Lanier. The Symphony, 1875, in The Poems of Sidney Lanier.

(Mary Day Lanier, editor). Athens: University of Georgia Press, 198.

Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929). American economist and social scientist who sought to apply evolutionary dynamic approach to the study of economic constructions. Best known for his work The Theory of the Leisure Cla.s.s (1899), in which he coined the term conspicuous consumption.

Theodore Dreiser. American Diaries, 1902-1926. (Thomas P. Riggio, editor). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982.

-. Sister Carrie (the Pennsylvania Edition). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981.

-. Essays. Selected magazine articles of Theodore Dreiser: Life and art in the American 1890's. (Yoshin.o.bu Hakutani, editor). 2 volumes. Rutherford: Fairleigh d.i.c.kinson University Press, 1985-1987.

Henry James. The American Scene. London: Chapman and Hall, 1907.

-. The Bostonians. London: John Lehmann Ltd. 1952.

"I wished to write a very American tale," James wrote in his Notebook (two years prior to the publication of the novel in 1886). He also stated, "I asked myself what was the most salient and peculiar point of our social life. The answer was: the situation of women, the decline of the sentiment of s.e.x...."

Henry Steele Commager. The American Mind. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950.

In the section aptly ent.i.tled "The Literature of Revolt,"

Commager noticed that the tradition of protest and revolt (dominant in American literature since Emerson and Th.o.r.eau) turned, at the beginning of the 20th century (that is, with the New Economics), into an almost unanimous repudiation of the economic order. "...most authors portrayed an economic system disorderly and ruthless, wasteful and inhumane, unjust alike to working men, investors, and consumers, politically corrupt and morally corrupting," (p. 247). He goes on to name William Dean Howell (with his novels), Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Dreiser, F.

Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Pa.s.sos, and others. In the same vein, Denis Brogan (The American Character), J.T. Adams (Our Business Civilization), Harold Stearns (America: A Reappraisal), Mary A.

Hamilton (In America Today), Andr Siegfried (America Comes of Age) are also mentioned.

Howard Gardner. Frames of Mind: Theory of Multiple Intelligences. New York: Basic Books, 1983.

Diane Ravitch. The Schools We Deserve. New York: Doubleday,1985.

Peter Cooper (1791-1883). Self-taught entrepreneur and inventor.

As head of North American Telegraph Works, he made a fortune manufacturing glue and establishing iron works. In 1830, his experimental locomotive made its first 13-mile run.

The Corcoran case. The incredible secret of John Corcoran, 20/20, ABC News, April 1, 1988. (Text by byTranscripts: Journal Graphics, Inc. pp. 11-14.)

Noah Webster. The American Spelling Book: containing an easy standard of p.r.o.nunciation. Being the first part of a Grammatical Inst.i.tute of the English Language. Boston: Isaiah Thomas and Ebenezer T. Andrews, 1793.

William Holmes McGuffey. McGuffey's Newly Revised Eclectic First Reader: containing progressive lessons in reading and spelling (revised and improved by Wm. H. McGuffey). Cincinnati: Winthrop B. Smith, 1853. It is doubtful that all the clever remarks attributed to Yogi Berra came from him. What matters is the dry sense of humor and logical irreverence that make these remarks another form of Americana.

Akiro Morita, et al. Made in j.a.pan. New York: Dutton, 1989.

United We Stand, the political interest group founded by H. Ross Perot, is probably another example of how difficult it is, even for those who take an active stand (no matter how controversial), to break the dualistic pattern of political life in the USA. This group became the Reform Party.

Gottfried Benn. Smtliche Werke. (Gerhard Schuster, editor).

Vols. 3-5 (Prosa). Stuttgart: Klett Cotta, 1986.

Benn maintains that the language crisis is actually the expression of the crisis of the white man.

Andrei Toom. A Russian Teacher in America, in Focus, 16:4, August 1996, pp. 9-11 (reprint of the same article appearing in the June 1993 issue of the Journal of Mathematical Behavior and then in the Fall 1993 issue of American Educator).

Among the many articles dealing with American students' att.i.tudes towards required subject matter, this is one of the most poignant. It involves not literature, philosophy, or history, but mathematics. The author points out not only the expectations of students and educational administrators, but also the methods in which the subject matter is treated in textbooks. Interestingly enough, he recounts his experience with students in a state university, where generalized, democratic access to mediocrity is equated with education.

From Orality to Writing

Peter S. Bellwood. Prehistory in the Indo-Malaysian Archipelago.

Orlando, FL: Academic Press, 1985.

Andrew Sherrat, Editor. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Archaeology. New York: Crown Publishers, 1980.

Eric A. Havelock. Schriftlichkeit. Das griechische Alphabet als Kulturelle Revolution. Weinheim: Verlag VCH, 1990.

Ishwar Chandra Rahi. World Alphabets, Their Origin and Development. Allahabad: Bhargava Printing Press, 1977.

Current alphabets vary in number of letters from 12 letters of the Hawaiian alphabet (transliterated to the Roman alphabet by an American missionary) to 45 letters in modern Indian (Devnagari). Most modern alphabets vary from 24 to 33 letters: modern Greek, 24; Italian, 26; Spanish, 27; modern Cambodian, 32; modern Russian Cyrillic, 33. Modern Ethiopian has 26 letters representing consonants, each letter modified for the six vowels in the language, making a total of 182 letters.

Walter J. Ong. Orality and Literacy. The Technologizing of the World. London and New York: Methuen, 1982.

The comparison between orality and writing has had a very long history. It is clear that Plato's remarks are made in a different pragmatic framework than that of the present. Ong noticed that: "...language is so overwhelmingly oral that of all the many thousands of languages-possibly tens of thousands-spoken in the course of human history, only around 106 have even been committed to writing to a degree sufficient to have produced literature, and most have never been written at all" (p.7). Ong also refers to pictographic systems, noticing that "Chinese is the largest, most complex, and richest: the K'anglisi dictionary of Chinese in 1716 AD lists 40,545 characters" (p. 8).

Recently, the a.s.sumption that Chinese writing is pictographic came under scrutiny. John DeFrancis (Visible Speech. The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1989, p. 115) categorizes the Chinese system as morphosyllabic.

Harald Haarman. Universalgeschichte der Schrift. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 1990.

David Diringer. The Alphabet: A Key to the History of Mankind.

2nd ed. New York: Philosophical Library, 1953.

-. The Story of Aleph Beth. New York/London: Yoseloff, 1960.

-. Writing. Ancient Peoples and Places. London: Thames of Hudson, 1962.

Ignace J. Gelb. A Study of Writing. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1963.

Gelb, as well as Ong, a.s.sumes that writing developed only around 3500 BCE among the Sumerians in Mesopotamia. Many scripts are on record: Mesopotamian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Minoan or Mycenean Linear B, Indus Valley script, Chinese, Mayan, Aztec, and others.

Ritual: a set form or system of rites, religious or otherwise.

Ralph Merrifield. The Archaeology of Ritual and Magic. London: B.

T. Ratsford, 1987.

Catherine Bell. Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Rite: a ceremonial or formal, solemn act, observance, or procedure in accordance with prescribed rule or custom, as in religious use (cf. Webster's Unabridged Dictionary).