Textbooks, It Seems To Me, Are Enemies

The Making Of Adaptable, Curious, Open, Questioning People Has Nothing To Do With Vocational Training And Everything To Do With Humanistic And Scientific Studies.

People Like Ourselves May See Nothing Wondrous In Writing, But Our Anthropologists Know How Strange And Magical It Appears To A Purely Oral People - A Conversation With No One And Yet With Everyone. What Could Be Stranger Than The Silence One Encounters When Addressing A Question To A Text? What Could Be More Metaphysically Puzzling Than Addressing An Unseen Audience, As Every Writer Of Books Must Do? And Correcting Oneself Because One Knows That An Unknown Reader Will Disapprove Or Misunderstand?

America Was Founded By Intellectuals, A Rare Occurrence In The History Of Modern Nations We Might Even Say That America Was Founded By Intellectuals, From Which It Has Taken Us Two Centuries And A Communications Revolution To Recover.

But It Is Much Later In The Game Now, And Ignorance Of The Score Is Inexcusable. To Be Unaware That A Technology Comes Equipped With A Program For Social Change, To Maintain That Technology Is Neutral, To Make The Assumption That Technology Is Always A Friend To Culture Is, At This Late Hour, Stupidity Plain And Simple.

The Shock Of Twentieth-century Technology Numbed Our Brains And We Are Just Beginning To Notice The Spiritual And Social Debris That Our Technology Has Strewn About Us.