Fall Paper

Acacia Graddy-Gamel

MSTU4016

Fall 2009 Final Paper

In modern pedagogical practice, the concept of memorization has become somewhat maligned. Technological advances permit students to have almost instantaneous access to facts and thus devalue the virtue of committing them to memory. Advances in technology have made it possible for people to divert their mental resources to critical analysis and making connections instead of pure retention. Pedagogical theories have not quite caught up to these advances in technology and educators must still strike an effective balance between ensuring a core base of knowledge and avoiding coverage of easily accessible data. At the beginning of the semester, I had not given much thought to how pedagogical practices had evolved over time, or the sheer energy and focus on memorization in past educational practice. More than that, I had never considered how a focus on memorization could mitigate a capacity for critical analysis. As the semester went on and we moved through different media, the connection became clear.

As early as mid September, we were reading Havelock and Plato and learning how Plato viewed the role of memorization in education. With memorization being the sole way to pass on a cultural legacy, an oral tradition precluded proper analysis. As Havelock stated about Plato in our reading, “He asks of men that instead they should examine this experience and rearrange it, that they should think about what they say, instead of just saying it. And they should separate themselves from it instead of identifying with it; they themselves should become the 'subject' who stands apart from the 'object' and reconsiders it and analyses it and evaluates it, instead of just 'imitating' it.”

This was a revolutionary concept that we now (typically) take for granted. In our later readings, Havelock presents Plato’s view that the real purpose of education is to equip someone to lead an examined life. To my mind, there has really never been any other relevant purpose to education than to teach problem solving skills and critical reasoning. As progressive educational institutions have steadily moved away from memorization in the classroom, Plato would likely be pleased with the result.

Certain technological advances, particularly print, made it possible to start uncoupling the acts of accessing information and memorization. People began to use their capacities to memorize to instead visualize scenes from the books they were reading and divert more mental capacity onto separating themselves from their texts. A byproduct of this was that they also started to separate from each other. Reading is a deeply solitary act, as many of the readings in this class have discussed, and a million people reading the same text will have a million interpretations of it.

The act of mass-producing media removed control of the content from the individual and on to the institution, whether a private publisher or a church. So while people might have the mental freedom to analyze a text, they still only received the perspective intended by a given institution. A classic example of this can be found in the formations of the biblical canon. There is still disparity between the Protestant Old Testament (39 books) and the Catholic Old Testament (46 books). That is not just a great deal of discrepancy between the two perspectives, but representative of the level of control that media producers and distributors have over material before it gets to the consumer. The Bible is also an excellent example of this movement from memorization to critical analysis because of the gate-keeping function the Catholic Church provided. People were discouraged from reading it on their own; it was material that was intended to be accessed through a priest. The idea of critical interpretation by laypeople was also anathema to the Church and part of what spurred the Reformation. So in this case, access and capacity to analyze were inextricably interlinked and ability to memorize was very much a secondary concern, further reinforcing the notion that physical possession of a text precluded the need to commit it to memory.

In order to access specific pieces of information, though, readers needed to have a deep fluency in a particular text. This is a huge difference from the position that consumers of media find themselves in now, when the command of a few key words online will instantly summon a passage. Unfortunately, they also summon a hundred other unrelated things, which leads to the development of a new skill set that these medieval readers would not have to use nearly as heavily: discriminating amongst a surfeit of seemingly related information to locate precisely the information one is looking for. As Birkerts says in the Gutenberg Elegies, “In our culture, access is not a problem, but proliferation is. And the reading act is necessarily different than it was in its earliest days. Awed and intimidated by the availability of texts, faced with the all but impossible task of discriminating among them, the reader tends to move across surfaces, skimming, hastening from one site to the next without allowing the words to resonate inwardly. The inscription is light but it covers vast territories: quantity is elevated over quality. The possibility of maximum focus is undercut by the awareness of the unread texts that await. The result is that we know countless more “bits” of information, both important and trivial, than our ancestors. We know them without a stable sense of context, for where the field is that vast all schemes must be seen as provisional. We depend far less on memory; that faculty has all but atrophied from lack of use.” (p. 72)

So the question becomes: what place do these new skills have in an educational environment? Is it the responsibility of educators, as Plato would like, to teach these critical thinking skills over memorization? Is it their responsibility to balance the crucial older skills of literacy and mathematical reasoning with newer skills of analysis, multiplatform research and media literacy? I would say so. Beginning this course, I was already inclined to believe that it was the province of education to teach critical thinking, and after completing this course, I am even more convinced that it is absolutely necessary to cultivate these skills from the earliest possible age, not just to enable people to navigate the rapidly changing technological landscape, but also to help them regain a sense of meaning and footing in a world that is suffering what Birkerts called “a loss of depth” (p. 73).

While it would seem easy to paint a rosy picture of technological access sacrificing our capacity for memorization and granting us this hitherto uncultivated capacity to analyze and draw connections, it is an unfortunate byproduct of our technological that our critical abilities are devolving along with our memories. People are overwhelmed by content and do not take the time to evaluate their sources. When we read Lanier at the beginning of the semester, he expressed a concern about the vast repository of unverified information available on the Internet and the common mistake people make of not checking sources or doing any form of due diligence when gathering information online. It is a very real concern and educators have an additionally difficult task of teaching a new form of research and vetting to a generation used to having information at their fingertips but shockingly unused to questioning its validity.

In writing these blogs and doing this reading, I have come back to this same idea of shunting the task of information retention onto external sources and freeing up one’s mental resources to make connections between those sources. That somehow, if we can train ourselves to effectively access and utilize these external repositories, we will enable ourselves to reach levels of insight that we could not reach before. The more that I’ve come to think about it though, the more I worry that that will not happen until we also renew a set of skills that we have been neglecting in this process of aggregating this information: the skills of discernment, depth of study and singular focus. I don’t see that one necessarily has to preclude another. With some training and prioritizing, I believe it will be possible for people to apply the mental discipline necessary to committing an epic poem to memory to formulating thoughtful connections between pieces of information with focus and engagement, even if they have not committed those pieces of information to memory themselves. I have not been turned into a pessimist by this realization, but rather acknowledged that the problem is far more complex than I initially thought.

One of the things I found most remarkable about this reading was the high esteem with which McLuhan views television. In modern critical study of film and television, film is considered the far more involved medium than television—requiring an active participation on the part of the thoughtful viewer—who considers plot, structure, character behavior, lighting, artistic design, editorial work, camera work, auditory decisions and exploration of themes. While the content is important, the medium is equally important, and does serve (hot medium?) all of the information necessary to the viewer, but leaves a great deal for the viewer to resolve on their own in terms of connecting the information presented to other films and mediums that they are familiar with and being certain that they are accessing all of the data being delivered. Many casual viewers of film are not conscious of all of the data they are receiving (particularly auditory data) and how it affects their interaction with the media.

That being said, free television has quickly become the unwanted stepchild of modern art forms (and in some ways technology). Many shows appeal to the lowest common denominator, require a minimum of involvement or audience participation and demonstrate an acute lack of thoughtfulness and information perceived. The idea that this form involves more participation than film is… bewildering to me. Perhaps it was a response to the relative newness of the form when he wrote this.

Overall though, some comments to touch to another point of McLuhan’s, albeit from a slightly tangential perspective. McLuhan says “The young people who have experienced a decade of TV have naturally imbibed an urge toward involvement in depth that makes all the remote visualized goals of usual culture seem not only unreal but irrelevant, and not only irrelevant but anemic. lt is the total involvement in all-inclusive nowness that occurs in young lives via TV's mosaic image. This change of attitude has nothing to do with programming in any way, and would be the same if the programs consisted entirely of the highest cultural content. The change in attitude by means of relating themselves to the mosaic TV image would occur in any event. It is, of course, our job not only to understand this change but to exploit it for its pedagogical richness. The TV child expects involvement and doesn't want a specialist job in the future. He does want a role and a deep commitment to his society.”(p. 443).

The problem with this demonstrated in modern society comes in the popularity of hero tales, particularly in television and film. As a personal note, I’m a huge fan of hero tales, and my girlfriend despises them (for the reasons I’m about to outline). I studied film and literature in college; she studied social movements. People watch films and television about epic protagonists who engage in sweeping dramatic actions and get caught up in the power of the story. They feel, through their identification, that they are participating in the story, and that they are actually effecting societal change by participating in a viewing activity. However, they are not actually changing anything. A sense of personal epic narrative has actually stunted people’s capacity to engage in real change that involves group movements and slow progress. Are people really participating in television? Does it give viewers something to do? Do they fill in information or do they just substitute their own experience of the real world with the experience of characters and thus become more inoculated to a passive relationship with the real world because they cannot have the sweeping narrative of fiction?