So why do Americans look back to a time when people "knew how to
read and write," a time when "each town had five newspapers?"
Big businesses, consolidated well before the invention of newer
means of communication and mediation, have large investments in
literacy: newspapers, publishing houses, and especially
universities. But the promise of a better material life through
literacy today rings tragically hollow in the ears of graduates
who cannot find jobs in their fields of study. The advertisement
most telling of this state of affairs is for a cooking school:
"College gave me a degree in English. Peter Kump's Cooking
School gave me a career."
Granted that literacy has never made anyone rich in the monetary
sense, we can ask what the pragmatic framework set up in this
part of the New World did accomplish that literacy could not. In
the first place, escape from one dominant mode embodied in
literate practical experiences facilitated the assertion of other
modes of expression and communication. Peter Cooper, founder of
the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New
York City, made his fortune in railroads, glue, and gelatin
desserts. He was truly illiterate: he could not read. Obviously
he was not unintelligent. Many pioneers had a better command of
their tools than of their pen. They read nature with more
understanding than some university students read books. There are
other cases of people who succeed, sometimes spectacularly,
although they cannot read. The illiterate California businessman
who taught high school social sciences and mathematics for
eighteen years became known because television, for some reason,
saw in him a good case for the literacy cause. People like him
rely on a powerful memory or use an intelligence not based on
literate conventions. Howard Gardner's theory of multiple
intelligences (formerly known as aptitudes) seems to be ignored
by educators who still insist that everyone learn to read and
write-better said, conform to the conventions of literacy-as
though these were the only ways to comprehend others and to
function in life. There are few commentaries that contradict this
attitude. William Burroughs thought that "Language is a virus
from outer space." Probably it feels better to perceive language
like this in view of the many abuses to which language is
subjected, but also in view of the way people use it to deceive.
A more direct criticism states: "The current high profile of
literacy is symptomatic of a speedy, ruthless transition from an
industrial to an information-based economy. [...] Literacy, to
be sure, is a powerful, unique technology. Yet literacy remains
a human invention contained by social contract, and the
maintenance of that contract in education betrays our ideas of
humanity as surely as our use of literacy enforces them" (cf.
Elsbeth Stuckey)
American experience shows that the imposition of a sole model of
higher education, based on literacy, has economic, social, and
cultural consequences. It is very costly. It levels instead of
addressing and encouraging diversity. It introduces expectations
of cultural homogeneity in a context that thrives on
heterogeneity. The literate model of education with which the
country flirted, and which still seems so attractive, negates
one of America's sources of vitality-openness to alternatives,
itself made possible by the stubborn refusal of centralism and
hierarchy. Held in high esteem in the early part of American
history, literacy came to students through schoolhouses in which
Webster's Speller and McGuffey's Reader disbursed more patriotism
(essential to a nation in search of an identity) and more
awareness of what "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"
should mean than quality writing or the possibility to select
good books for reading. Literacy with a practical purpose, and
the variety of literacies corresponding to the variety of human
practical experiences, is a discovery made in America.
Understanding pragmatic requirements as opposed to pursuing
literacy for the sake of literacy, at the price of rejecting its
rewards, is where the road forks. But here America follows Yogi
Berra's advice: "When you come to a fork in the road, take it."
In their search for new values, or when faced with competing
answers to tough questions, people tend to look back to a time
when everything seemed all right. And they tend to pick and
choose the characteristics that led to this perceived state of
affairs. Things were all right, some want to believe, when kids,
plodding along country roads, winter or summer, went to school
and learned to read. Therefore, most people assume that the
environment propitious to literacy will bring back the golden
age. No one wants to see that America was never reducible to
this romantic picture. In the South, education never seemed to
be a mission. Slaves and poor whites remained outside the
idealized stream. Females were not encouraged to study. A
Protestant viewpoint dominated subject matter (recall the
Puritan alphabet primer).
Americans seem intent on ignoring accomplishments outside the
domain of literacy and the dynamics of the non-literate United
States. In admiration of real cultures, Americans do not want to
hear or see that many of them, of proud and ancient ancestry,
started questioning their own values and the education
transmitting them. The practical sense and pragmatism
ascertained in the formation of America were adopted as causes
worth fighting for. In Europe, students protested an education
that did not prepare them for work. Thanks to universal
education-European governments by and large offer publicly
supported higher education, at no cost to the student, through
college and graduate school-more young people received an
education (in the classical sense of the word) and their ranks
flooded the market. They discovered that they were not prepared
for the practical experiences characteristic of the new
pragmatics, especially the new forms of mediations that
characterize work and that are making headway around the world.
In Europe, there is a clear distinction between university
studies and vocational studies. This has prevented universities
from becoming the high-class vocational schools that they are in
America, and has maintained the meaning of the diploma as a
proof of intellectual endeavor. On the other hand, they remain
ivory towers, not preparing students for the practical
experiences of the new pragmatics. Brotlose Kunst (breadless
art) is what the Germans now call such fields of study as
literature, philosophy, musicology, religion, and any other
purely intellectual endeavor.
Looking at a totally different culture, Americans tend to respond
to Japan's economic success and criticism of our system by
saying that our educational system must become more like that of
America's leading competitor. They ignore the fact that Japan's
high rate of productivity has less to do with the nation's high
rate of literacy than does the indoctrination and character
formation that Japanese schooling entails. Fundamental attitudes
of conformity, team mentality, and a very strong sense of
hierarchy, together with an almost sacred sense of tradition, are
instilled through literate means. One does not have to be
literate in any language in order to solder one circuit to
another on an assembly line or to snap together modular
components fabricated by advanced machines. What is necessary,
indeed expected, is an ethic that calls for a sense of duty and
pride in a job well done, a sense met by the social promise of
permanency. All in all, the Japanese system allows for little
variation from the consensus, and even less for the creation of
new models. The only way Japan stepped out of the literate mode
in the manufacturing world is in quality control. Ironically,
this idea was developed by the American Edward Denning, but
rejected by his compatriots, who literally stagnated in a
hierarchic model originating from circumstances of literacy.
This hierarchical model, now in obvious decline, gave to American
businessmen the sense of power they could not achieve through
education or culture.
The Japanese, living in a system that preserved its identity
while actively pursuing plans for economic expansion, formed
strategies of self-containment (severely tested in times of
economic downturn), as well as methods of relating to the rest of
the world. This condition is manifest in their talent for
spotting the most profitable from other countries, making it
theirs, and pursuing avenues of competition in which what is
specifically Japanese (skills, endurance, collusion) and the
appropriated foreign component are successfully joined. Almost
the entire foundation of today's television, in its analog
embodiment, is Japanese. But if for some reason the programming
component would cease to exist, all the marvelous equipment that
makes TV possible would abruptly become useless. In some ways,
Japan has almost no interest in a change of paradigm in
television, such as the revolutionary digital TV, because an
enormous industry, present in almost every home where television
is used, would have to reinvent itself. The expectation of
permanency that permeates literate Japan thus extends from
literacy to a medium of illiteracy. In the American context, of
almost no stable commitments, digital television, along with
many other innovations in computation and other fields, is a
challenge, not a threat to an entire infrastructure. This
example was not chosen randomly. It illustrates the dynamics of
the change from a literacy-dominated civilization to one of many
competing literacies. These emerge in the context of change from
self-sufficient, relatively small-scale, homogeneous
communities to the global world of today, so powerfully
interconnected through television and through digital media of
all kinds. As illiterates, Americans lead other nations in
breakthroughs in medicine, genetics, networking, interactive
multimedia, virtual reality, and inventiveness in general.
Obviously, it is easier to design a course of education assuming
some permanency or maintaining it, regardless of pragmatic
requirements. Diane Ravitch stated that it is hard to define
what education will be needed for the future when we don't know
what skills the jobs of the future will require. An optimal
education, reflecting pragmatic needs of highly mediated
practical experiences of distributed effort and networking, will
have to facilitate the acquisition of new cognitive skills.
Decentralized, non-sequential, non-deterministic experiences
require cognitive skills different from those characteristic of
literacy. Schools used to be able to prepare students to find
their place in the workforce even before graduation. More
schools than ever insist on churning out a strange version of
the literate student who should go on to a college that is more
(though still not enough) vocational school than university. The
university, under the alibi of equal opportunity and more in
consideration of its own agenda, has done more damage to
education and literacy by forcing itself upon Americans as the
only means to attain a better life. The result is crowded
classes in which passive students are processed according to the
industrial model of the assembly line, while the creative
energy of faculty and students is redirected to a variety of
ventures promising what a university cannot deliver. The very
word university acknowledges one encompassing paradigm,
prevalent in the Middle Ages, that the USA practically disposed
of over a century ago. In an age of global reality and many
paradigms, the university is in reality less universal and
increasingly specialized.
In these times of change, America, founded on innovation and
self-reliance, seems to forget its own philosophy of
decentralization and non-hierarchy. By no surprise, the newer
computer technology-based companies took the lead in
decentralizing and networking the workplace, in re-engineering
each and every business. Most business-people, especially in
established companies, are reluctant to address matrix
management methods or to use distributed forms of organization
and decentralized structures. Consequently, after waves of
corporate restructuring and resizing, presidents and chairmen
(not unlike university presidents and school principals) are
kings, and the laborer, when not replaced by a machine, is often
a virtual serf. Surprisingly, the decentralized spirit of
homesteading and the distribution of tasks and responsibilities,
through which much of efficiency is reached, makes slow headway.
But things are changing! If there is an engine at work pulling
the world from its literacy- based pragmatics to the future of
higher efficiency required by the new scale of human activity,
it has the initials USA written on it. And it is-make no mistake
about it-digital.
When not faithful to its own experience of pluralism and
self-motivation, the USA faces the inherent limitations of
literacy-based practical experience in a number of domains, the
political included. America once had a number of political
parties. Now it seems that it cannot effectively get beyond the
literate dualistic model of two antagonistic parties, emulating
the Tories and the Whigs of the empire to which it once
belonged. European countries and several African and Asian states
have multi-party systems that reflect sensitivity to differences
and take advantage of the variety they allow for. Such systems
enfranchise more of a country's citizenry than does the two-
party system in the USA. Every four years, Americans demand
greater choice in elections, but only one state, Alaska,
considers it normal to have more than two parties, and,
incidentally, a governor who is neither Republican nor Democrat.
The USA has a complex about literacy to the extent that every
subject is now qualified as literacy-cultural literacy, computer
literacy, visual literacy, etc.-whether literacy is involved or
not. Literacy has become its own specialty. In addition, new
literacies, effectively disconnected from the ideals and
expectations of classical literacy, have emerged from practical
experiences of human self-constitution in realms where writing
and reading are no longer required. This would not be so bad if
it were not blinding people to the truth about a major
characteristic of humankind. Diversity of expression and
multiplicity of communication modes define new areas of human
accomplishment and open avenues for further unfolding of people's
creative and economic potential. The new condition of language,
in particular the failure of literacy, is at the same time a
symptom of a new stage in human progress. It in no way reflects a
failure of national policy or will. As a matter of fact, the new
stage we are entering is a reflection of the human spirit
unfolding, refusing to be held captive to a dominant mode that
has outlived its usefulness. It may well be that the coming of
age of America is part of this new stage. After all, many
believe that the crisis of language is the crisis of the white
man (cf. Gottfried Benn), or at least of Western civilization.
So, is the USA the epitome of the civilization of illiteracy?
Yes, America is illiterate to the extent that it constituted
itself as an alternative to the world based on the underlying
structures of literacy. The new pragmatic framework that the USA
embodies does not automatically free it from the seductive
embrace of the civilization it negates, and the current angst
over the state of literacy is a manifestation of this. As an
embodiment of the civilization of illiteracy, America
demonstrates how several literacies can work together by
complementing each other. Such a pragmatics succeeds or fails
on its own terms. Whenever the implicit founding principles of
adaptation, openness, exploration and validation of new models,
and pragmatically based institutions are pursued, the result is
the expected efficiency. Sometimes, the price people seem to pay
for it is very high-unemployment, dislocation, retrenchment, a
loss of a sense of permanency that humans long for. The price
includes the ability or willingness to consider all aspects
involved in a situation-political, environmental, social, legal,
religious. These aspects transcend the tangible and necessitate
taking the broad view, which literate civilization allowed for,
over the specialized, narrowly focused, short- sighted, parochial
view. Other times, it looks as though there are no alternatives.
But in the long run, no one would really want to go back to the
way things were 200 years ago.