Once You Have Learned To Ask Questions

The Line-by-line, Sequential, Continuous Form Of The Printed Page Slowly Began To Lose Its Resonance As A Metaphor Of How Knowledge Was To Be Acquired And How The World Was To Be Understood. "knowing" The Facts Took On A New Meaning, For It Did Not Imply That One Understood Implications, Background, Or Connections. Telegraphic Discourse Permitted No Time For Historical Perspectives And Gave No Priority To The Qualitative. To The Telegraph, Intelligence Meant Knowing Of Lots Of Things, Not Knowing About Them.

Children Enter School As Question Marks And Leave As Periods.

A Book Is An Attempt To Make Through Permanent And To Contribute To The Great Conversation Conducted By Authors Of The Past. […] The Telegraph Is Suited Only To The Flashing Of Messages, Each To Be Quickly Replaced By A More Up-to-date Message. Facts Push Other Facts Into And Then Out Of Consciousness At Speeds That Neither Permit Nor Require Evaluation. (70)

[it] Is Not That Television Is Entertaining But That It Has Made Entertainment Itself The Natural Format For The Representation Of All Experience. […] The Problem Is Not That Television Presents Us With Entertaining Subject Matter But That All Subject Matter Is Presented As Entertaining. (87)

Childhood Is Analogous To Language Learning. It Has A Biological Basis But Cannot Be Realized Unless A Social Environment Triggers And Nurtures It, That Is, Has Need Of It. If A Culture Is Dominated By A Medium That Requires The Segregation Of The Young In Order That They Learn Unnatural, Specialized, And Complex Skills And Attitudes, Then Childhood, In One Form Or Another, Will Emerge, Articulate And Indispensable.