Print, Image and Public Educaton

Progressives place a high priority on public education, but is that priority extended to the content of public education? Notoriously the Far Right has paid close and demanding attention to the content of public education because it sees it as an ideal venue for foisting its agenda upon the young. I suggest progressives, perhaps out of a desire to distance themselves from the tactics of the Far Right, express little concern for the content of public education. I think this is a fundamental and grievous mistake.

These thoughts occurred to me as I was recently reading a textbook on English literature my mother used when, I believe, she was about 12 years old. It was written in 1897 and is worn and frayed and has penciled comments by her. It is, of course, all in black and white. The illustrations are small black and white etchings or photos. The authors treated range from Cotton Mather to Tom Paine, Emerson, Thoreau, William Dean Howells and Samuel Clemens. I noticed a list of words, apparently to be understood, such as hyperbole, which my mother had written on a blank page.
It seemed to me that the use of language was of a more disciplined, indeed appreciative, vein than one would now find being offered to children of a similar age.

I was reminded of a study done in 1990 by a writing professor at the University of Delaware, Marcia Peoples Halio, comparing the quality of student writing produced on a Macintosh to that written using a PC. As you may recall the Macintosh was the first popular computer to use the graphical user interface (GUI). The professor found that the papers written on a PC were uniformly superior to those written on the Macintosh. Aside from the observing that the language was less precise, often verging on slang and the sentences were shorter and lass descriptive, she also noticed that the Macintosh users placed a good deal of emphasis on the appearance of their papers, using a variety of fonts and illustrations. She surmised that the Macintosh users became so involved in the formatting and appearance of their papers that they did less thinking about the subject of the paper than they did about its appearance.

The above instances, I believe, are indicative of a passage from a print-oriented to an image-oriented society. So far as I have been able to observe, progressives have not asked what happens to their values as this shift takes place. In particular, is the public education they so avidly support producing the kinds of citizens that can or will continue to vigorously support the values of free speech, social equality and intellectual honesty? What does free speech mean in a world of images? The last time Western civilization, or a part thereof, was so concerned with the appearance of its writing was in the illustrated manuscripts produced by monks concerned with praising their deity or impressing the aristocracy, but certainly not to express the values of a democratic society. What can intellectual honesty mean in such an environment? If, as Marshall McLuhan proclaimed, the medium is the message, we appear to be tending to the trivial and the irrelevant.

Robert Newhard