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Date Posted:
Thursday January 10, 2002 10:20:15 AM
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Arun Tripathi's review of
"On the Internet: Thinking in Action", Hubert Dreyfus (Routledge, 2001)
calls our attention to serious concerns about the impact of
the Internet on education, and on our whole form of life -- what, long
before
the "ditigal revolution, Edmund Husserl characterized in
his "Vienna Lecture" (May, 1935) as: "the crisis of
European humanity".
The concerns to which Tripathi calls our attention
suggest an admonitory analogy between the advent of
global internetworking today, and
the advent of printed books in the late 15th century.
In his study of this earlier communication media revolution,
"Ramus, Method, and the Decay of the Dialogue: From
the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason", Walter Ong
argued, following his teacher, Marshall McLuhan, that
while there were significant gains from the shift from manuscript to
print culture, there were also
important -- and preventable -- losses.
With the advent of printed books, education, according to Ong,
quickly came to emphasize individual learning by the student reading
textbooks (the art of reason...). This was, like distance learning
today, far more efficient than the pedagogical praxes it replaced.
Learning on the computer, today, replaces learning from
reading textbooks, analogous to how reading textbooks replaced
copying manuscripts and oral disputation (the art of dialog...)
in the late 15th century.
Just as printed books freed learning from
the drudgery of manuscript copying in the 16th century,
the Internet can free learners from the drudgery of taking
notes from books in the residually medieval "reserve reading room".
In each case, however, immediate interpersonal engagement is
supplanted by reified mediations
(books then, the computer screen now).
Ong does not wish to return to copying manuscripts. (As Elizabeth
Eisenstein showed in "The Printing Press as an Agent of Change",
the advent of uniform printed editions transformed the pursuit
of knowledge from
an intrinsically entropic to an almost inevitably progressive
endeavor....) What Ong urges is that the scholastic
practice of oral disputation was a valuable pedagogical "technology"
which need not have been discarded along with rote manuscript copying.
The benefits of oral disputation were not achieveable through
the new pedagogy of textbooks and tests.
The pedagogical innovators of the
16th century need not have "thrown the baby out with the bathwater".
Oral disputation was discarded because of its association with
scholasticism (i.e., its taint from
being part of "the old way of doing things").
Similarly today, we risk losing the benefits of what to us
is "the old way of doing things", for example: (1) the learner's engagement
with a printed book in his or her hands -- thumbing through the
pages, rereading, writing marginal notes ---, and (2)
the learner's face-to-face engagement with teachers and
fellow students.
Tripathi's review calls our attention to the good things which the
Internet revolution places in jeopardy if we, like the educational
reformers of the 16th century, indiscriminately throw out everything
that represents "the old way of doing things", instead of
thoughtfully retaining what in the old ways still has value
even though it is not for us new.
We can with some confidence predict that today's new
technologies will become tomorrow's old ways of
doing things. The ability to discern
and cultivate what has value in both the new and the old, however,
is a skill not likely to become outdated. "Cleverness
carries the day, but wisdom endureth" (--Peter Drucker)
(signed Brad McCormick
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