Why are classical schools obsessed with books? Isn’t a picture worth a thousand words? And aren’t there advantages to the use of screens, like keeping children engaged?
Books are at the foundation of a classical education, not because technology lacks any utility or value at all, but because screens in particular—electronic image carriers—are largely at odds with the proper purposes of formal, K-12 education, i.e., the training of the rational faculties of young people. It turns out that the medium matters.
Nearly forty years ago, Neil Postman observed that the advent of television had marked a dramatic shift in the prevailing epistemology of America—that is, the accepted origins and nature of knowledge in our culture. “[T]he result [was] that the content of much of our public discourse has become dangerous nonsense.” If only he could see us now…
Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death presciently recognized what electronic imagery was doing to the civilization that originally had been founded by people “as committed to the printed word as any group of people who have ever lived.” It wasn’t that the content of electronic media was so terrible—it was that electronic imagery as “a way of knowing” was replacing what Walter Ong called the “analytic management of knowledge,” which is the discipline of mind required of any reader of the written word.
Television—and now the infinitude of electronic imagery in pictures and videos constantly and immediately at our fingertips—embrace “a way of knowing” that is, in Postman’s account, “uncompromisingly hostile to typography’s way of knowing,” which entails a “sophisticated ability to think conceptually, deductively and sequentially; a high valuation of reason and order; and abhorrence of contradiction; a large capacity for detachment and objectivity; and a tolerance for delayed response.”
For entertainment, the electronic medium is well suited. But a proper education is serious business; it is not show business. And so, at Columbus Classical Academy, we read books.
