The Civilization of Illiteracy Part 47

John Brockman. The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995.

A recent criticism of the book, by Phillip E. Johnson, on the World Wide Web, states that the scientists contributing to the book "tend to replace the literary intellectuals rather than cooperate with them."

Alan Bloom. The Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987.

Antoine de St. Exupry. The Little Prince. Trans. Katherine Woods. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1943.

Helmut Schmidt, ex-Chancellor of West Germany, Marion Grfin Dnhoff, editor-in-chief of Die Zeit, Edzard Reuter, ex-CEO of Daimler-Benz, along with several prominent German intellectuals and politicians, met during the summer of 1992 to discuss issues facing their country after reunification. In their Manifesto, they insisted that any concept for a sensible future needs to integrate the notion of renouncing (Verzicht) and sharing as opposed to growing expectations and their export through economic aid to Third World countries. See Ein Manifest: Weil das Land sich ndern mu (A Manifesto. Because the country needs to change), Reinbeck: Rowohlt Verlag, 1992

Jean-Marie Guhenno. La Fin de la Dmocratie. Paris: Flammarion, 1993.

Edmund Carpenter. They Became What They Beheld. New York: Outerbridge and Dienstfrey/Ballantine, 1970.

Nathaniel Hawthorne. Earth's Holocaust, in The Complete Short Stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Garden City NY: Doubleday & Co., 1959.

George Steiner. The end of bookishness? in Times Literary Supplement, July 8-14, 1988.

"To read cla.s.sically means to own the means of that reading. We are dealing no longer with the medieval chained library or with books held as treasures in certain monastic and princely inst.i.tutions. The book became a domestic object owned by its user, accessible at his will for re-reading. This access in turn comprised private s.p.a.ce, of which the personal libraries of Erasmus and of Montaigne are emblematic. Even more crucial, though difficult to define, was the acquisition of periods of private silence" (p. 754).

Thomas Robert Malthus. An Essay On the Principle of Population, 1798, in The Works of Thomas Robert Malthus. E.A. Wrigley and David Souden, editors. London: W. Pickering, 1986.

Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorn Clemens). The Annotated Huckleberry Finn: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. With introduction, notes, and bibliography by Michael P. Hearn. New York: C.N.

Potter and Crown Publishers, 1981.

"Twain drives home just how strongly we are chained to our own literacy through Huck's illiterate silence" (p. 101). "Thus Twain brings into focus the trap of literacy. There is a whole world in Huck Finn that is closed to those without literacy.

They can't, for ironic example, read this marvelous work, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. And yet we must recognize a world rich with superst.i.tion and folklore, with adventure and beauty, that remains closed to those who are too tightly chained to letters" (p. 105).

George Gilder. Life After Television: The Coming Transformation of Media and American Life. New York: Norton, 1992.

Neil Postman. Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. New York: Knopf, 1992.

America-The Epitome of the Civilization of Illiteracy

John Adams. Letters from a Distinguished American: Twelve Essays by John Adams on American Foreign Policy, 1780. Compiled and edited by James H. Hutson. Was.h.i.+ngton, DC: Library of Congress, 1978.

-. The Adams-Jefferson: the Complete Correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams (Lester J. Cappon, editor). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959.

Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber. The American Challenge. Trans.

Robert Steel. With a foreword by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. New York: Atheneum, 1968.

Neil Postman. Rising Tide of Illiteracy in the USA, in The Was.h.i.+ngton Post, 1985.

"Whatever else may be said of the immigrants who settled in New England in the 17th century, it is a paramount fact that they were dedicated and skillful readers.... It is to be understood that the Bible was the central reading matter in all households, for these people were Protestants who shared Luther's belief that printing was 'G.o.d's highest and extremest act of Grace, whereby the business of the Gospel is driven forward.' But reading for G.o.d's sake was not their sole motivation in bringing books into their homes."

Lauran Paine. Captain John Smith and the Jamestown Story. London: R. Hale, 1973.

Henry Steele Commager. The American Mind. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950.

Charles d.i.c.kens. American Notes. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985.

The book is a journal of d.i.c.kens's travels from Boston to St.

Louis, from January through June, 1842.

Alexis de Toqueville. Democracy in America, Vol. 1 (Henry Reeve text as revised by Francis Bowen). New York: Vintage Books, 1945.

Several other writers have attempted to characterize the USA, or at least some of its aspects:

Jean Baudrillard. Amrique. Paris: Gra.s.set, 1986.

-. America. Chris Turner, London/New York: Verso, 1988.

Gerald Messadie. Requiem pour superman. La crise du mythe amricain. Paris: R. Laffont, 1988.

Rod, Jos Enrique. Ariel. Liberalismo y Jacobinismo. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Depalma, 1967.

In practically all her novels, Jane Austen extols the improvement of the mind (especially the female mind) through reading; see especially Pride and Prejudice, Vol. 1, chapter 8. (New York: The New American Library, 1961, p. 35).

Thomas Jefferson. Autobiography, in Writings. New York: The Library of America/Literary Cla.s.sics of the United States, 1984.

Jefferson's father placed him in the English school when Thomas was five years old, and at age nine in the Latin school, where he learned Latin, Greek, and French until 1757. In 1758, Jefferson continued two years of the same program of study with a Reverend Maury. In 1760, he attended the College of William and Mary (for two years), where he was taught by a Dr. William Small of Scotland (a mathematician). His education consisted of Ethics, Rhetoric, and Belles Lettres. In 1762, he began to study law.

Joel Spring. The American School 1642-1990. 2nd ed. New York/London: Longman, 1990.

Benjamin Franklin's model academy embodied his own education. "

'...it would be well if [students] could be taught every thing that is useful, and every thing that is ornamental. But Art is long, and their Time is short. It is therefore propos'd that they learn those things that are likely to be most useful and most ornamental.' [...] Franklin's early life was a model for getting ahead in the New World [...] The 'useful' elements in Franklin's education were the skills learned in apprentices.h.i.+p and through his reading. The 'ornamentaln elements,... were the knowledge and social skills learned through reading, writing, and debating" (p. 23).

Theodore Sizer, editor. The Age of the Academics, New York: Teachers College Press, 1964.

"The academy movement in North America was primarily a result of the desire to provide a more utilitarian education as compared with the education provided in cla.s.sical grammar schools" (p.

22). Lester Frank Ward. The Psychic Factors of Civilization.

2nd ed. New York: Johnson Reprint Corp, 1970. "The highest duty of society is to see that every member receives a sound education" (p. 308).

Transcendentalism: "A 19th century New England movement of writers and philosophers who were loosely bound together by adherence to an idealistic system of thought based on a belief in the essential unity of all creation, the innate goodness of man, and the supremacy of insight over logic and experience for the revelation of deepest truths." The main figures were Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Th.o.r.eau, and Margaret Fuller (cf.

Encyclopedia Britannica, Micropedia. 1990 ed.

Paul F. Boller. American Transcendentalism, 1830-1860. An Intellectual Inquiry. New York: Putnam, 1974. Major philosophers of pragmatics:

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914). Although no finished work deals explicitly with his pragmatic conception, this conception permeates his entire activity. His semiotics is the result of the fundamental pragmatic philosophy he developed.