I was at work today, handwashing all the corsets that were used in the opera, when suddenly everything went dark. The power went out! The costume shop is in the basement where there are no windows and it was so dark it felt oppressive. It reminded me of the dark room in photography class where we would wind our film onto the spools for developing negatives. Absolutely no light. Soon we were rescued by someone with a flashlight, and he said the power was out all over campus. So we all went home.

On my way out of the building -luckily there were some emergency lights still lit in the hallways- I realized how dependent we are on electricity. I tried to exit through the tunnel, but the door was shut. I realized that if the door had been open, they wouldn’t have been able to close it (it’s a big door like a garage for driving trucks full of hardware into the building). When I got outside, I saw that people were trying to drive out of the parking lot, but the arm barriers would not go up at the exit, so they were stuck in the parking lot. Then, since it’s finals week, I wondered about the Testing Center. If someone wanted to take their final at that time, they wouldn’t have been able to, because the computers wouldn’t work.

These thoughts were all fueled by the paper I just wrote, about technology and education. Here I’ve posted some of my main points. It’s a really fascinating topic!  I apologize for the huge wall of text, but if you have a moment, read it and tell me what you think.  It’ll be nice to have someone read this and not give me a grade on it.

- New technological inventions have always changed our lives. They make our lives easier, and production more efficient, for example. We also tend to think that technology makes us smarter. Each discovery in physics or medicine leads to more discoveries. But are we actually smarter than those who didn’t have technology? Are technological discoveries always good for us? Socrates told a story about an inventor, Theuth, who, having invented writing, said it would cure forgetfulness and make men smarter. He presented it to the king, Thamus, who rejected the new invention, saying that it would actually make men more forgetful because they would rely on things outside themselves to remember for them.
Thamus’ warning applies to most of our technologies: they are crutches for our minds or our bodies. Writing keeps us from training our minds to remember what we hear. Cars keep us from walking, huge corporate farms keep us from growing our own food, to the point where we are barely able to do either. Before these inventions people used their bodies and minds more, it would seem. Are we really smarter than they were? Also, we adopt new inventions so readily these days, it’s impossible to tell what the consequences might be until it’s too late. Literacy took hundreds of years to be accepted. People seemed to know that if they adopted it, they would lose something. They knew that the way that they lived before would be gone. But today people adopt new inventions without thinking about what they will lose. Neil Postman said, “We are currently surrounded by throngs of zealous Theuths, one-eyed prophets who see only what new technologies can do and are incapable of imagining what they will undo,” (5). Because of the huge impact that technology has, and the rate at which new technologies are being produced, we need to be aware of the consequences before we accept each new invention.

-M.T. Clanchy gives one example of how a culture dealt with the the new technology of writing in his book From Memory to Written Record. In the book, he details England’s change from an oral to a literate culture. Though writing was used by 1066, when the Normans conquered England, it did not become common for hundreds of years. This is not just because people did not have the opportunity to be educated: Clanchy says that the main reason is that people distrusted written documents. For one reason, they were unaccustomed to fiction, and saw written fictional stories as lies. For another, they knew that official documents could easily be forged by scribes. The act of writing itself assumes that what is written will be forgotten otherwise, and these people were used to remembering those things that were important to remember. To them, written things seemed less important because they did not require memory. For example, one’s word was more official and trusted than one’s signature: “An honest person held to his word and did not demand written proof,” (Clanchy 193). If they used a signature, it showed that they might not intend to remember their promise.

-If technology were allowed to take up more time in the classroom, it would produce a very different student than a traditional education. Since the nature of our technologies today is to produce and make available information, students will tend to gloss over texts in order to read a good amount of what is available. The price of this education is that students, though they may have a broad education, will have sacrificed depth. There are some books that cannot be understood after just one quick reading. Readers need to ponder what they read, and allow the words time to resonate in their minds. A good analogy for this idea is given by John P. Davies in Education in the Electronic Culture. He compares the older, more traditional education involving memorization, deep reading, rhetoric, and so on, to the roots of a tree. Tree roots grow deep into the soil, and anchor the tree firmly. Davies compares a shallow but broad education to crabgrass roots, which only penetrate the first couple inches of soil, but spread outward along the surface indefinitely, (70).

-In Mary Carruthers’ The Book of Memory, she mentions a Medieval scholar, named Ockham. He was imprisoned without his books for several years, and while there he wrote about the books he had studied. He had read them to memorize, as scholars did at that time, and “was able at will to draw extensive resources from his memorial library”. In expounding and commenting on these books in his memory, he filled 551 folio pages, all showing a deep knowledge of the things he had studied. In his writings he also apologizes for “skimming the surface,” and says if he had access to his books he would be able to write more, (Carruthers 158). These hundreds of pages of philosophical commentary written from memory, an incomplete work to him, is much more than is expected in a dissertation today.

The student that emerges from our current education system does not usually learn how to read and study deeply. Because of our love for technology and information, we tend to rush from topic to topic in school, taking in as much as we can as fast as we can, and we don’t spend enough time on texts that require more study and research. With each gain in technology, we lose something of wisdom and memory. But despite all this, we need to keep on top of technology to some degree in order to function in society. So what should we do? Perhaps the only thing we can do is to understand that with each new technological gain, we lose something that had until then been fundamentally important, just as scholars in the Middle Ages must have lost the ability to memorize after books became more plentiful. In all probability, times will continue to change and education will soon become drastically different as a result of our love for technology. But we should at least try to understand what that change will be, and decide whether we really want it.

p.s. if you use this without my permission, you are plagiarizing, which is against the law.