Cultural Literacy through technology

This article submitted by Guy Welch on 3/10/97.

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Thoughts:

I agree with the high school teacher’s comments. I checked out E.D. Hirsh’s book that Postman criticizes, and I though that there definitely are some common signposts that students should be required to be familiar with in our culture. I believe in a some sort of a fluid, ever changing encyclopedia of culture. There are some people, events, and concepts that all educated people should be familiar with, Rosa Parks, Abe Lincoln, Shays Rebellion, Watergate, Marshall McLuhan, the list goes on.
I was having a discussion with a history professor from Long Beach at this conference that I went to. He made the comment that it was difficult to make analogies to events in history without first considering what his students did or did not know. For example, he used the phrase, "Jesus and the money-changers" alluding to New Testament parable. Only a handful of students in his class knew what this meant.
Whether the United States is a church going culture anymore is not the point here. The point is that we as a culture are losing more of our common literary experiences. Our ability to make common reference to culturally significant ideas is eroding the strength of our culture and our minds.
In the March 1997 issue of Wired, Umberto Eco gives praise for the internet as a means that might improve our decrepit state of cultural awareness. Unlike the passive mediums of television and radio, the net demands that you engage it, steer it, respond to it. He has worked to install a high speed, high-tech internet library in Italy where everyone can share in the knowledge and experience of the net. Over the next few decades as more people embrace this new technology and opportunity, maybe society will be able to start filling in the landscape that televisions "vast wasteland" created.
It is unfortunate that Postman’s "Technopoly" did not cover the aspects of the on-line movement, but with the rate he publishes, I expect a book out on that at any time.

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