Have you ever thought about how many words you speak in a minute? Speech scientist Grace Yeni-Komshian found it to be 125-180 continuous words per minute. Unlike reading, there are no cues to show we're beginning or ending a word when we're speaking. It makes sense when you think about the first time you heard a foreign language, an incomprehensible stream of sound that happened too quickly for you to even begin to make sense of it!
Maryanne Wolf (2007), maintains that the flow of language promotes literacy. Chapter Three of her book, Proust and the Squid, speaks of the efficiency of an alphabet. She suggests that the alphabet, with its limited number of signs (20-30), orderly presentation, and comprehensive sound representation, allows letter-recognition to happen at almost automatic speeds, giving the brain more time to think.
Ancient Greek civilization is a powerful example of how the alphabet promotes literacy. The most prolific period in Greek history, a time when there were huge gains in mankind's powers of thought, accompanied the establishment of the Greek alphabet in 750 BC. Because the alphabet did away with memorization and other constraints posed by the previous oral tradition, it became more possible for more people.
Which brings me to the Sneetches. Remember Dr. Suess's book where some Sneetches have stars on their bellies and some don't? Even in the literacy debate, we find Sneetches claiming superiority. Socrates himself believed the oral culture was superior to the written one.
Socrates' Objections:
1. Inflexibility of the Written Word
He saw the generative relationship between words and thoughts to be at the heart of education and maintained that this could only happen within a dialogue. Calling written language a "dead discourse", he related it to looking at a painting, a mute object that can't respond. Centuries later, we can agree with Vygotsky that the very process of writing requires an inner dialogue as the writer carefully chooses words that best capture his or her ideas.
2. Memory's Destruction
Socrates was right about the written word minimizing our need for memorization. Wolf (2007), asks her undergraduate students each year how many poems they can recite from memory. Ten years ago, it was between five and ten poems; but now it's one to three. Let's think about those multiplication tables . . . . Listen to this quote by Nicholas Ostler, "[In] modern Guatemala . . . Mayans remark that outsiders note things down not in order to remember them, but rather so as not to remember them."
3. The Loss of Control over Language
Socrates worried about a superficial understanding of the written word. Like Pandora's box, he felt that the process of unsupervised reading would lead to a loss of control over knowledge. Dave Marvit's speech on YouTube, promotes distributed knowledge as a positive outcome of our civilization's expanded knowledge system.
As you were reading this blog, how many of you thought of how Socrates would feel about the dawning of the digital age of literacy? Do we have our own Sneetches who still feel that "book learning" is superior to a computer screen? Will "continuous partial attention" to an endless flood of information encourage a superficial understanding or will it promote literacy? I believe only time will tell.
I love how you always make connections, it helps to give me a visual. In response to you questions at the end, I wonder how long it will be until books will be a rare thing? With all the digital books now it makes me think that there will be atime when children will look at books like they do 8 tracks or cassettes. Technology is amazing and there is so much information we can get grom it.
ReplyDeleteI have heard that we remember three times more of what we hear and write down as opposed to just listening and walking away. I always write down things that I want to remember. I would say that is not the cause of the memory's destruction, but in response to a poor memory.
ReplyDeleteNice blog. I love that whole part of Socrates not liking how writing and reading disseminates knowledge. It strikes me as so ironic.
ReplyDeleteI think there is just so much more to remember these days. It is no longer the case where a young person apprentices for a specific position. We are now expected to know a good amount about every subject, whether it is our intent to study it in depth or not.
ReplyDeleteGreat post MaryAnn. I need to read this book--I think actually physically having it in my hands and reading it and then re-reading it to fully grasp all of the information would be helpful. Your blogs are helpful in connecting ideas.
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