Special Guest Lecture at the American Education Research Association General Assembly
San Francisco, August 1986
By lay literacy I mean a symbolic fallout from the use of the alphabet in Western cultures — something quite different from clerical literacy, which consists in the ability to read and write. By lay literacy I mean a distinct mode of perception in which the book becomes the decisive metaphor through which we conceive of the Self and its place. By lay literacy I do not mean the spread of written contents beyond the pale of the clerics to others who, previously, could only listen to what is being read to them. I use the term lay literacy to speak of a mind-frame which is defined by a set of certainties which spread within the realm of the alphabet since late medieval times. The lay-literate is certain that speech can be frozen, that memories can be stored and retrieved, that secrets can be engraved in conscience and therefore examined, that experience can be described. By lay literacy I mean therefore a weaving together of categories that — since the twelfth century — has shaped the mental space of the ‘illiterate’ laity just as much as that of the ‘literate’ clergy. It constitutes a new type of space inside which social reality is reconstructed: a new kind of network of fundamental assumptions about all that can be seen or known. I have tried to follow the evolution of this mind-set since the Middle Ages, along with the transformation of a number of certainties that can exist only within it. I will illustrate how such a transformation happens by telling the story of ‘the text.’
The literate mind of the non-reader#
Two reasons commend the history of lay literacy to the attention of people who pursue research on, and not only in, education. The first is the new level of concern within the educational enterprise with universal clerical literacy as a goal to be reached before the year 2000. The other is the powerful temptation to replace the book as the fundamental metaphor of self-perception by the metaphor of the computer.
As to the first, we are all aware that new psychological, managerial and electronic techniques are being used to spread, in one more attempt, the clerical skills of reading and writing. Whether, and if so how, these literacy campaigns interact with lay literacy ought to be better understood. Fifty years ago Luria studied the major shifts that occur in mental activity as people acquire clerical literacy. Their cognitive processes cease to be mainly concrete and situational. They begin to draw inferences, not only on the basis of their own practical experience, but on assumptions formulated in language. Since 1931, when Luria did these studies in Stalinist Russia, much has been learned about the change which clerical literacy induces in perception, representation, reasoning, imagination and self-awareness. But in most of the studies, a causal link is assumed to exist between the individual’s writing skill and the new mind-frame he acquires. As I will show, in the light of the history of lay literacy, this assumption is largely false. Since the Middle Ages, the certainties that characterize the literate mind have spread, overwhelmingly, by means other than instruction in the skills of reading and writing. This is a point which must be kept in mind in the current discussions on illiteracy, semi-literacy and post-literacy. The approach currently used in spreading the skill of ‘written communication’ might actually be subversive to the literate mind.
While I want to call your attention to this independence of the literate mind from personal writing skills, my main argument centers on the current transmogrification of the literate mind itself. During the last decade, the computer has rapidly been replacing the book as the prime metaphor to visualize the Self, its activities and its relatedness to the environment. Words have been reduced to ‘message units,’ speech to the ‘use of language,’ conversation to something called ‘oral communication,’ and the text has been reduced from a string of sound symbols to one of ‘bytes.’ I want to argue that the mental space into which literacy certainties fit, and that other mental space engendered by certainties about the Turing Machine, are heteronomous spaces. The study of the mental space that is generated by lay literacy seems to me a necessary step if we are to grasp the nature of that entirely different mental space which is becoming dominant in our time. And just as lay literacy is largely independent of the individual’s clerical skills, so the cybernetic mind is largely independent of the individual’s technical proficiency with a computer.
Solid foundations for research on the literate mind have been laid; I only plead that the results of this research be applied in education, to recognize unacknowledged postulates which are implied in the axioms from which educational theories are derived. The first to observe the depth of the epistemological break between oral and literate existence was Millman Parry, some sixty years ago. Through him we come to recognize the Island of Literacy that rises out of the magma of epic orality as a potter-scribe takes down the song of a bard, which we call the Illiad. His pupil, Albert Lord, convinces us that the steps by which one becomes a bard cannot be grasped with the same concepts as those used to get at the steps by which one becomes a literate poet. Eric Havelock argues convincingly that the profound changes in the style of reasoning, in the mode of perceiving the universe, in the appearance of ‘literature’ and science in sixth- and fifth-century B.C., Greece can be understood only in light of a transition from an oral to a literate mind. Others have explored how the unique and once- and-for-all invention of the alphabet spread to Brahmin India and thence to the Orient. The circumstances under which new European people were brought into the realm of literate perception are well known to me and, therefore, I take my main examples from that epoch. Elisabeth Eisenstein, in her monumental study on the impact of the printing press on Renaissance culture, deals with another major transformation within the literate mind in yet another epoch. Jack Goody, the anthropologist, has turned our attention to the ever-ongoing ‘alphabetization of the savage mind.’ And Walter Ong, over the last two decades, has pulled together the research of psychologists, anthropologists and students of epics, to argue that alphabetization is equivalent to the ‘technologization’ of the word. So far, however, no one has attempted a history of the literate mind as distinct from clerical literacy. And it is a daunting task. The literate mind is a phenomenon both brilliantly clear and slippery — like a jellyfish whose features and shapes can be discerned only so long as it is observed within its own milieu.
The irrelevance of schooling to the literate mind#
To make my plea for this novel research plausible, I will explain the steps which led me to my present position. This I can do by criticizing my book, Deschooling Society, for its naive views. My travelogue begins twenty years ago when that book was about to appear. During the nine months the manuscript was at the publishers, I grew more and more dissatisfied with its text which, by the way, did not argue for the elimination of schools. This misapprehension I owe to Cass Canfield Sr, Harper’s president, who named my baby and, in doing so, misrepresented my thoughts. The book advocates the disestablishment of schools, in the sense in which the Church has been disestablished in the United States. I called for the ‘disestablishment of schools’ for the sake of education and here, I noticed, lay my mistake. Much more important than the disestablishment of schools — I now see — was the reversal of those trends which make of education a pressing need rather than a gift of gratuitous leisure. I began to fear that the disestablishment of the educational church would lead to a fanatic revival of many forms of degraded education.
Norman Cousins published my own recantation in the Saturday Review during the very week my book came out. In it I argued that the alternative to schooling was not some other type of educational agency, or the design of educational opportunities in every aspect of life, but a society which fosters a different attitude of people toward tools. Since then, my curiosity and reflections have focused on the historical circumstances under which the very idea of educational needs can arise.
So that you might see the character of my argument, let me tell you how I came to the study of education. I came from theology. As a theologian, I specialized in ecclesiology, which constitutes the only old learned tradition which — in social analysis — distinguishes fundamentally between two entities: the visible community in which the spirit is embodied, and the quite different community which is the city or the state. This dualism is of its essence. Emboldened by 1500 years of ecclesiology, I saw the Church as more than a mere metaphor for the new Alma Mater. I tended increasingly to stress the fundamental continuity between two seemingly opposed agencies, at least insofar as they defined the meaning of education in successive centuries.
Within ecclesiology, the study of Liturgy has always been my favorite topic. This branch of learning deals with the role of cult in bringing about the phenomenon, Church. Liturgy studies how solemn gestures and chants, hierarchies and ritual objects create not only faith, but the reality of the community-as-Church, which is the object of this faith. Comparative liturgy sharpens the eye to distinguish the essential mythopoetic (myth-making) rituals from accidents of style. So sensitized, I began to look on those things that go on within schools as parts of a liturgy. Accustomed to the great beauty of Christian Liturgy, I was of course put off by the abject style so proper to schools.
I then began to study the place that the liturgy of schooling holds in the social construction of modern reality, and the degree to which it creates the need for education. I began to discern the traces which schooling leaves on the mind-set of its participants. I focused my attention on the effects of scholastic liturgy by putting into parenthesis not only learning theory, but also research which measures the achievement of learning goals. In the articles published in Deschooling Society, I presented a phenomenology of schooling. From Brooklyn to Bolivia it consists of age-specific assemblies around a so-called teacher, for three to six hours on 200 days of the year; yearly promotions which also celebrate the exclusion of those who fail or who are banished into a lower stratum; subject matter more detailed and carefully chosen than any known monastic Liturgy.
Everywhere attendence varies from 12 to 48 pupils, and teachers are those who have absorbed several years of this mumbo-jumbo in excess of their pupils. Everywhere, pupils are judged to have acquired some ‘education’ — which school by definition monopolizes — and which is thought necessary to make pupils into valuable citizens, each knowing at which class level he has dropped out of this ‘preparation for life.’ I then saw how the liturgy of schooling creates the social reality in which education is perceived as a necessary good. And I was even then aware how enveloping, lifelong education could, in the last two decades of the twentieth century, replace schooling in its myth-making function. However, I did not suspect what I now propose as a subject for research: the waning of the traditional key concepts of literate education, since the terms for them are used in analogy with computer program language. I did not then conceive of schooling as one of the masks behind which this transmogrification could take place.
At the time I was engaged in these reflections we were at the height of the international development effort. One could see that school was like a world-wide stage on which the hidden assumptions of economic progress were being acted out. The school system demonstrated where development could not but lead: to international, standardized stratification; to universal dependence on service; to counterproductive specialization; to the degradation of the many for the sake of a few. As I wrote Deschooling, the social effects, and not the historical substance of education, were still at the core of my interest. I still accepted that, fundamentally, educational needs of some kind were a historical given of human nature.
Constitution and evolution of a mental sphere#
My acceptance of the unexamined assumption that by nature human beings belong to the species of homo educandus started to dim as I studied the history of economic concepts from Mandeville to Marx (with Réné Dumont), and from Bentham to Walrass (with Elie Halévy) and, as I became aware of the historical nature of my own certainties regarding scarcity through reading Karl Polanyi. I recognized that in economics there exists an important critical tradition which analyzes as historical constructs the assumptions which economists of all colors make. I became aware that homo economicus, with whom we identify emotionally and intellectually, is of quite recent creation. And thus I came to understand education as ‘learning,’ when it takes place under the assumption of scarcity in the means which produce it. The ‘need’ for education in this perspective appears as the result of societal beliefs and arrangements which make the means for so-called socialization scarce. And, in this same perspective, I began to notice that educational rituals reflected, reinforced and actually created belief in the value of learning pursued under conditions of scarcity. With rather limited success, I have tried to encourage my students to do for the field of pedagogics what others have done in the field of economics.
Polanyi shows that the exchange of goods predates by many centuries, if not millenia, the economic marketing of commodities. This pre-economic exchange is performed by status traders who act more like diplomats than businessmen. Commenting on the Politics of Aristotle, Polanyi shows that the technique of marketing, in which the value of a good is made to depend on demand and supply and provides a profit for the merchant, is a Greek invention of the early fourth century B.C. I then found increasing evidence that the conceptual space within which paideia acquired a meaning comparable to what we call education, was defined at about the same time. What Polanyi calls the ‘dis-embedding’ of a formal economic sphere within society happens during the same decade in which a formal educational sphere is also dis-embedded.
During the same century Euclidian space came into formal existence. Its creation and destiny provide a useful analogy to illustrate what I mean by ‘a mental space.’ Euclid was careful to state the axioms on which he built his geometry. He wanted them remembered as stipulations. However, as we moderns are now acutely aware, in one instance he stated as a self-evident axiom something which in fact requires a postulate. When Euclid stated as axiomatic that two parallel lines never intersect, he unknowingly implied the existence of only one space, namely, the particular one now named after him. He made an assumption which, remaining unexamined, turned into a certainty. And, for 2000 years, Western learned tradition took it as a natural fact. Not until the turn of our century did Riemann demonstrate that a space in which two parallel lines never intersect is, for the mathematician, only a special case.
Soon after Riemann laid the mathematical foundation for relativity, anthropologists noticed that the members of many cultures do not see with Euclidian eyes. Ethnolinguists then confirmed that, for instance, Hopis or Dogons speak about space and directions in ways that can more easily be translated into the terms of mathematical tensors than into any Indo-Germanic language. On the other hand, historians found that ancient literatures describe space much more thoroughly by reference to smells, sounds and the experience of moving through an atmosphere than by evoking visual experience. Art historians like Panofsky and philosophers like Susan Langer, have made plausible that most artists paint the space which they and their epoch see. They do not organize their perception in the perspective that Dürer created, or within the coordinates of Descartes. Perspective, so the argument goes, was introduced into painting to express the newly-found ability to see the world predominantly in a self-centered way. Parallel to Kuhn’s chain of descriptive paradigms succeeding each other in the sciences, art historians find successive descriptive paradigms which correspond to distinct ways of perceiving visual space.
Revolution by the alphabet#
No attempt comparable with the historiography of economic or visual space has so far been made to explore the constitution and evolution of the mental space within which pedagogical ideas take their shape. This does not mean that all academic disciplines have remained prisoners of one space; it only means that the principal challenge to this mental confinement has come from non-educators and, so far, has not been acknowledged within the educational profession. Millman Parry’s discovery of the heteronomy between oral and alphabetic existence could have made educators recognize the questionable postulates which they unknowingly accept as the axioms of their field. But the relevance of Parry’s discovery for a historical theory of education has so far gone unnoticed.
In his doctoral thesis on Homeric epithets (1926), Parry was the first to notice that the transition from epic orality to written poetry in archaic Greece marks an epistemic break. He argued that for the literate mind it is nearly impossible to imagine the context within which the pre-literate bard composes his songs. No bridge built out of the certainties inherent in the literate mind can lead back into the oral magma. I cannot here sum up the insights and conclusions reached during the last fifty years by Lord, Havelock, Peabody, Notopoulos and Ong — the work which convinced me. But, for those who have not followed their writings on the heteronomy of epic orality and literate poetry, let me briefly note some of the firm conclusions I draw. In an oral culture there can be no ‘word’ such as we are accustomed to look up in the dictionary. In that kind of culture, what silence brackets may be a syllable or a sentence, but not our atom, the word. Further, all utterances are winged, forever gone before they are fully pronounced. The idea of fixing these sounds into a line, of mummifying them for later resurrection, cannot occur. Therefore memory, in an oral culture, cannot be conceived as a storage room or a wax tablet. Urged on by the lyre, the bard does not ‘look up’ the right word; rather, a fitting utterance from the grab-bag of traditional phrases moves his tongue to the appropriate beat. Homer, the bard, never tried and rejected le mot juste. But Virgil changed and corrected the Aeneid up to the hour of his death; he was already the prototype of the literate poet, the genial Schrift-Steller.
Appropriately, the equivalent of our curriculum was called Musiké in the schools of fifth-century Athens. Students learned to compose music; writing remained a servile skill exercised mostly by potters until around the year 400 B.C., when Plato went to school. Only then does true subject matter come into being; only then can the wisdom of a previous generation be transmitted in that generation’s words, to be commented upon in distinct and new words by the teacher. Alphabetic recording is as much a condition for what we call science/literature, as it is necessary for the distinction between thought and speech. Plato, one of the few giants who struggles with the divide between orality and literacy, makes this transition from ever newly recalled experience to literate memory the subject of his Phaedrus. He was acutely aware that with the teacher who sows (written) words, which can neither speak for themselves nor teach the truth adequately to others (Phaedr. 276a), an entirely new epoch was opening, and that the use of the alphabet would bar a return to the oral past.
With more clarity than the moderns, Plato seems to have been aware that with literacy a new mental space had come into existence and, within it, previously unimagined concepts that would give an entirely new meaning to the upbringing of Lysias. Two things therefore can be distinguished in the history of educational assumptions: the beginning of pedagogical space — which might now be threatened — and the transformations of the web of pedagogical concepts that take place within this space.
To demonstrate how one such axiom fitting literate space has expanded and acquired a certain dominance, I offer as example ‘the text.’ The word is classical: in Latin textus is a woven fabric and — only rarely — the composition of well-running words. At the time of the Lindisfarne Bible, the word is first used as an equivalent for Holy Scripture. Then, in the fourteenth century, it is actually used for the concept which we now take for granted, a concept which — as I will immediately show — under different designations had already appeared 200 years earlier. I want to speak about the emergence of the idea or concept, not about the use of the term.
Revolution by the text#
I choose the idea of the text for two reasons: the idea is important in educational theory, and — thoroughly transmogrified — it is also central to communication theory. From the mid-twelfth century onward, the text is past speech, so encoded that the eye can pick it up from the page; in communication theory, the term stands for any binary sequence. The text, as a hinge element within the literate mind, has a beginning and an end.
By definition, the alphabet is a technique to record speech sounds in visible form. In this sense it is much more than any other notational system. The reader who is faced by ideograms, hieroglyphs, or even the non-vocalized Semitic betabet, must understand the sense of the line before he can pronounce it. Only the alphabet makes it possible to read correctly without any understanding. And, in fact, for well over 2000 years, the decoding of the alphabetic record could not be performed by the eye alone. ‘Reading’ meant loud or mumbled recitation. Augustine, the champion orator of his time, was surprised when he discovered that it was possible to engage in silent reading. In the Confessions he tells of his discovery: he learned to read without making a noise and without waking his brethren.
While occasionally practiced, silent reading would have been normally impossible until the seventh century; the break or empty space between words was unknown. Only a few monumental inscriptions spoke to the eye by separating word from word. On wax tablets, papyrus or parchment, each line was an uninterrupted sequence of letters. There was almost no other way of reading than rehearsing the sentences aloud and listening to hear whether they made sense. Mere dicta — speech fragments out of context — were practically unreadable. A sentence, meant for the record, was ‘dictated’; it was spoken in cursus, the classical prose-rhythm which we have now lost. By getting the hang of the cursus that the dictator had chosen, reading by sight became possible. The sense remained buried on the page until it had been voiced.
Word breaks were introduced in Bede’s time (672–735) as a didactic device. They were meant to facilitate the acquisition of Latin vocabulary by ‘thickheaded Scottish novices.’ As a side effect, the procedure of copying manuscripts changed. Thus far, either the original had to be dictated by one monk to several scribes, or each scribe had to read aloud as many words as he could keep in his auditory memory, and then write them down while ‘dictating to himself.’ Spaces between words made silent copying possible; the copyist could now transcribe word for word. The earlier line, made up of an uninterrupted sequence of thirty to fifty minuscules, just could not have been copied at sight.
Even though the codex of the Middle Ages then contained visibly separated words rather than the unbroken Indian line of letters, it still did not make the text visible. This new reality takes shape only after the death of Bernard and Abelard. It is brought forth by the convergence of two dozen techniques, some with Arabic, others with Classical antecedents, some entirely new. These innovations together conspire to support and shape a substantially new idea: that of a text which is distinct both from the book and from its readings.
Chapters get titles, and these are divided by sub-titles. Chapter and verse are now numbered; quotations are marked by underlining with a different color ink; paragraphs are introduced and, occasionally, marginal glosses summarize their subject; miniatures become less ornamental and more illustrative. Thanks to these new devices, a table of contents and an alphabetical subject index now could be prepared, and references from one part to the other could be made within chapters. The book that formerly could only be read through is now made accessible at random: the idea of consultation acquires a new meaning. Books can now be chosen and picked up in a new mode. At the beginning of the twelfth century, it was still the custom that on certain feast days of each season, the abbot would solemnly take the books from the treasury where they were kept with jewels and relics of saints, and lay them out in the chapter room. Each monk then picked one for his lectio during the following months. By the end of this same century, books were moved out of the ark in the sacristy and begin to be stored in a separate library, well titled, on shelves. The first catalogs are made of the monastery’s holdings, and by the end of the next century Paris and Oxford each boast of a union catalog.
Thanks to these technical changes, consultation, the checking of quotations and silent reading become common, and scriptoria ceased to be places where each one tried to hear his own voice. Neither the teacher nor the neighbor can now hear what is being read and, partly as a result, both bawdy and heretical books multiply. As the old habit of quoting from a well-trained memory palace was replaced by the new skill of citing right out of the book, the idea of a text which is independent from this or that manuscript becomes visible. Many of the social effects which have often been attributed to the printing press were in fact already the result of a text that can be looked up. The old clerical skill of taking dictation and reading out lines is now complemented by the skills of contemplating and searching the text with the eyes. And, in a complex way, the new reality of the text and the new clerical skill affect the literate mind, common to clerisy and laity alike.
For most practical purposes, penmanship and clerical status coincided until well into the fourteenth century. The mere ability to sign and spell was taken as proof of clerical privilege, and anyone who could demonstrate such capacity escaped capital punishment — he enjoyed clerical privilege. But while the majority of clerics were still much too unskilled to ‘look up’ the text of a book, ‘the text’ became a constitutive metaphor for a vast lay population’s entire mode of existence during the fifteenth century.
For those who are not medievalists but still desire a solid introduction to what is known to historians about the growing lay literacy of the West at that time, I recommend a book by Martin Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record. He stresses not what clerical literacy contributed to literature and science, but how the spread of letters changed the self-perception of the age and ideas about society. In England, for instance, the number of charters used in the transfer of properties increased by a factor of one hundred or more between the early twelfth and the late thirteenth century. Further, the written charter replaced the oath, which is oral by its very nature. The ‘testament’ replaced the clod of soil which the father had formerly put into the hand of the son whom he had chosen as heir to his lands. In court, a writ got the last word! Possession, an activity exercised by sitting upon, sedere, was overshadowed in importance by the ‘holding’ (tenancy, maintenance) of a title, something one does with the hand. Formerly, you solemnly walked with the buyer around the property that you wanted to sell; now you learned to point it out with your finger, and had the notary describe it. Even the illiterate acquired the certainty that the world is owned by description: ‘thirty steps from the rock shaped like a dog, and then to the brook in a straight line…’ Everyone now tended to become a dictator, even though scribes remained few. Surprisingly, even serfs carried seals, to put beneath their dictation.
Everyone now keeps records, even the devil. Under the new guise of a hellish scribe, portrayed as the ‘writing devil,’ he appears in late Romanesque sculpture. He squats on his coiled tail and prepares the record of every deed, word and thought of his clients for the final reckoning. Simultaneously, a representation of the Final Judgment appears in the tympanum above the main entrance of the parish church. It represents Christ, enthroned as a judge between the gates of heaven and the jaws of hell, with an angel holding the Book of Life opened at the page corresponding to the individual Poor Soul. Even the rudest peasant and humblest charwoman can no longer enter the church portal without learning that their name and deeds appear in the text of the heavenly Book. God, like the landlord, refers to the written account of a past which, in the community, has been mercifully forgotten. In 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council makes auricular confession obligatory. The Counciliar text is the first canonical document which explicitly states that an obligation is binding on all Christians, both men and women. And confession interiorizes the sense of the text in two distinct ways: it fosters the sense of ‘memory’ and of ‘confession.’ For a millennium, Christians had recited their prayers as they picked them up within the community, with great local and generational variants. Sentences were often so corrupted that they might foster piety, but certainly did not make sense. The twelfth-century Church Synods tried to remedy this state of affairs. Their canons imposed on the clergy the duty of training the laity’s memory by having them repeat the words of the Pater and Credo word for word as they are in the Book. When the penitent went to confession, he had to prove to the priest that he knew his prayers by heart, that he had acquired the kind of memory on which words could be engraved. Only after this memory test could he proceed to the examination of another spot of his heart, henceforth called his conscience, in which the account of his evil deeds, words and thoughts had been kept. Even the illiterate ‘I’ that speaks in confession now perceives through new, literate eyes its own ‘Self’ in the image of a text.
Lay self, lay conscience, lay memory#
The new kind of past, frozen in letters, is cemented as much in the self as in society, in memory and conscience as much as in charters and account books, in descriptions and signed confessions. And the experience of an individual self corresponds to a new kind of subject of the law which takes shape in the law schools of Bologna and Paris, and becomes normative, over the centuries, for the conception of person, wherever Western society extends its influence. This new self and this new society are realities which can arise only within the literate mind.
In an oral society a past statement can only be recalled by a similar one. Even in societies where non-alphabetic notations are kept, speech does not lose its wings; once uttered, it is gone forever. Pictographic or ideographic notation suggests to the reader an idea for which he must, anew, find a word. The alphabetic text fixes the sound. When it is read, the past dictator’s sentences become present. A new kind of building material for the present has come into being; it is made up of the actual words of speakers long dead. And, in the late Middle Ages, the constitution of the visible text brings whole constructions from the past, in a new way, into the present.
In an oral society, a man has to stand by his word. He confirms his word by taking an oath, which is a conditional curse called upon himself in the event that he should become unfaithful. While swearing he grasps at his beard or his balls, pledging his flesh as a troth. When a freeman swears, any case against him comes to rest. But under a literate regime, the oath pales before the manuscript; it is no longer recall, but the record that counts. And if there is no record, the judge is empowered to read the heart of the accused. So torture is introduced into the proceedings. The question is applied and pries open the heart. Confession under torture now takes the place of oath and ordeal. Inquisitorial techniques teach the accused to accept the identity between the text that the court reads out to him and that other text which is etched in his heart. Only in the visual comparison of two texts can the identity of the two contents — that of the original and that of the copy — be imagined. A miniature of 1226 preserves the first picture of the ‘corrector,’ a new official who leans over the shoulder of the scribe to certify the ‘identity’ between two charters. It is again a clerical technique which is reflected in the new law of judicial evidence which demands that the judge check the defendant’s utterance against the truth at the bottom of his heart.
The literate mind implies a profound reconstruction of the lay self, the lay conscience, the lay memory, no less than the lay conception of the past and the lay fear of having to face the Doomsday Book at the hour of death. All of these new features, of course, the laity and the clergy share: and they are effectively transmitted outside of schools and scriptoria. So far, this point has been largely neglected by historians of education. They have mainly focused on the evolution of clerical literacy and have seen in these transformations of mental space but a side-product of chancellery skills. Historians have well explored the style of letters, of abbreviation, of integration between text and ornament. They have enlarged our knowledge of the impact that paper-making and the new smooth writing surface had on the evolution of a cursive script in the thirteenth century, something which enabled scholastic masters to lecture from notes written by their own hand rather than dictated. They have observed the enormous increase in sealing wax used in chancelleries. They can tell us that, for a typical court session in the mid-twelfth century, barely a dozen sheep would lose their skin, while a century later several hundred hides would be needed to make the necessary parchment.
If historians have paid attention to the evolution of lay literacy, or more generally to the new configuration taken by the literate mind, they have usually observed how it takes shape among clerics, how the new self came to be explored as a new psychological domain in the autobiographies of someone like Guibert and Abelard, how new scholastic logic and grammar presupposed the visual textualization of the page. At best, some historians have attempted to understand how the increasing frequency with which fabliaux romances, travelogues and homilies were written for reading in front of a large public had affected the style in which these were composed. Yet, obviously, while schools and scriptoria and the new technical notions of clerical literacy were essential to the spread of the literate mind among clerics, these were not the means through which lay literacy spread.
The details I have given, taken from the later twelfth century which I know best, all illustrate what I mean by the impact which one particular literate technique can have on the shape of an epoch’s literate mind. They illustrate the effect which the visible text had at that moment on a web of other concepts which, in their formation, are dependent on the alphabet. I point to such notions as self, conscience, memory, possessive description, identity. It would be the historian’s task to establish the epochs of this web, its transformation under the influence of late medieval narratio, of ‘fiction,’ of Renaissance critical text editions, of the printing press, of vernacular grammar, of the ‘reader.’ At each stage, the historian of education would get new inspiration by starting his inquiry from the evidence of new forms of lay literacy rather than from new ideals and techniques of teachers. However, my plea for research is not primarily motivated by my interest in this neglected side of educational research, dealing with phenomena that take place within the alphabetic culture space. My main reason for pleading for this research is concerned with the exploration of that space itself. I feel my very self threatened by the waning of this space.
Exile of the literate mind#
I still remember a shock I had in Chicago in 1964. We were sitting around a seminar table; opposite me sat a young anthropologist. At the critical point of what I thought was a conversation, he said to me, ‘Illich, you can’t turn me on, you do not communicate with me.’ For the first time in my life I became aware that I was being addressed not as a person but as a transmitter. After a moment of disarray, I began to feel outrage. A live person, to whom I thought that I had been responding, experienced our dialogue as something more general, namely as ‘one form of human communication.’ I immediately thought of Freud’s description of three instances of sickening outrage which were experienced in Western culture: the Kränkungen when the heliocentric system, the theory of evolution, and the postulate of the unconscious had to be integrated into everyday thinking. It is then, twenty-five years ago, that I began to reflect on the depth of the epistemological break which I propose for examination. I suspect that it goes deeper than the breaks suggested by Freud — and it is certainly more directly related to the subject with which educators deal.
Only after several years of research on the history of the conceptual space which emerged in archaic Greece did I grasp the depth to which the computer-as-metaphor exiles anyone who accepts it — far from the space of the literate mind. I then began to reflect on the emergence of a new mental space whose generating axioms are no longer based on the encoding of speech sounds through alphabetic notation, but rather on the power to store and manipulate ‘information’ in bytes.
I do not propose that we examine the effects which the computer as a technical tool has on the keeping of and access to written records; nor how it can be used for teaching ‘the three R’s.’ Further, I do not ask for a study on the traces the computer leaves on modern style and compositions. Rather, I call for reflection on a web of terms and ideas which connects a new set of concepts whose common metaphor is the computer, and which does not seem to fit into the space of literacy, where pedagogics originally took shape.
In calling for such attention I want to avoid the temptation to assign any causal function to the electronic machine. Just as those historians made a major mistake who maintained that the printing press was necessary to have the Western mind molded by ‘linear thought,’ so it would be a mistake to believe that the computer itself threatens the survival of the literate mind. A combination of small techniques in the scriptoria of twelfth-century monasteries created the visible text in which a very complex evolution of literate lifestyles and imagery found its appropriate mirror, centuries before Gutenberg cut his first font. And I suspect that a future historian will see the relationship between the computer and the waning of literate space in a similar way. Under circumstances much too complex even to suggest, at the height of economic and educational development — during the second quarter of the twentieth century — the web of literate axioms was weakened, and a new mental space or ‘structure’ found its metaphor in the Turing Machine. It would be unwise, in this plea, to propose how this new break should be studied. But by recalling a story told by Orwell I hope to make it plausible that the exploration of the break we are witnessing is central to the concern of any research on what ‘education’ might be about.
It is important to remember that, at the time Orwell worked on 1984, the language of role theory which Mead, Linton and Murdock had coined in 1932 was just being picked up by sociology. The vocabulary of cybernetics was still confined to the lab. Orwell as a novelist sensed the mood of the time and invented the parable for a mind-set whose elements were as yet unnamed. He reflected on the effects which the treatment of speech as communication would have on people before the computer was available to model it on. In 1945 Western Union placed an ad in the New York Times seeking to employ ‘communications carriers,’ an euphemistic neologism for messenger boys. The Oxford English Dictionary Supplement gives this instance as the first use of the term with its current meaning.
Thus, Orwell’s Newspeak is much more than a caricature of propaganda, or a parody of Basic English — which in the thirties had fascinated him for a while. Newspeak, at the end of the novel, is for him the cipher for something which then had no English equivalent. This becomes clear in the scene where O’Brien from the Thought Police says to Smith whom he tortures: ‘We do not merely destroy our enemies, we change them […] we convert, we shape them […] we make our enemy one of ourselves before we kill him […] we make his brain perfect before we blow it out […]’ At this point Smith, the novel’s anti-hero, still believes that what O’Brien says must make sense to the listener. The next pages then describe how Smith is disabused of his literate mind. He will have to accept that O’Brien’s world is both senseless and selfless, and that the therapy he undergoes has the purpose of making him join it.
Winston Smith works at the Ministry of Truth. He specializes in the abuse of language: propaganda in a caricature of Basic English. He practices extreme distortions that are possible within the literate mind. O’Brien has the task of leading him into an entirely new world, a space which Smith must first ‘understand’ and then accept. O’Brien says to him, ‘Tell me why we cling to power […] speak’! Strapped, Winston answers, ‘you rule over us for our own good […] you believe that human beings are not fit to govern themselves […].’ This answer would have pleased Ivan’s Inquisitor in Dostoyevsky’s novel, but it makes O’Brien turn the pain up to ‘33 degrees.’ ‘We seek power entirely for its own sake.’ O’Brien insists that the State is power, and he has previously made Smith understand that this power consists in the ability to write the book. Winston is to be a line in that book, written or re-written by the State. ‘Power is in tearing human minds to pieces,’ says O’Brien, ‘and putting them together again in new shapes of our own choosing.’ Torture forces Winston to abandon his belief that Newspeak is a degraded form of English; he ‘understands’ that Newspeak is an exchange of meaningless know-how, without any why and without any I. When O’Brien holds up four fingers and calls them ‘three,’ Winston is to understand the message, not the speaker. At a loss for an English word for the exchange of message units between machines, Orwell calls the intended relationship ‘collective solipsism.’ Without knowing the appropriate word, namely, ‘communication,’ Winston has come to understand the world in which O’Brien‘s state operates. Orwell insists that the mere understanding of this world is not enough, it must be accepted.
To accept his existence without sense and self, Winston needs the ultimate therapy of ‘Room 101.’ Only after the betrayal there does he take himself for granted as part of ‘a fantasy world in which things happen as they should’ — namely, on a screen. And to accept being just a message unit of senseless power, Winston has first to erase his own self. Neither violence nor pain could break what Orwell calls his ‘decency.’ To become self-less like O’Brien, Winston must first betray his last love, Julia (in room 101). Later, when the two former lovers meet as burned-out shells, they know that in Room 101 they had meant what they said. Self-betrayal in face of the rats was the last thing Winston meant. According to Orwell, only this kind of betrayal could integrate the victim into the executioner’s solipsistic system of meaningless communication.
I have now recounted the fable. It is a story of the State that has turned into a computer, and that of educators who program people so that they come to lose that ‘distality’ between self and I which had come to flower within literate space. They learn to refer to themselves as ‘my system,’ and ‘to input’ themselves as appropriate lines into a mega-text. In the novel, Orwell speaks tongue-in-cheek. He tells more than a cautionary tale, but he does not portray something he believes could ever come to be. He creates the cipher for the State that survives society; communication between role players that survives the literate mind; ‘people’ who remain after the betrayal of decency. 1984 is for Orwell the cipher of something impossible which his journalistic genius made appear imminent.
In retrospect, Orwell appears to some of us as an optimist. He believed that the cybernetic mind would spread only as a result of intensive instruction. In fact, many people now unthinkingly accept the computer as the key metaphor for themselves and for their place in the world, without any need for ‘Room 101.’ They quietly and uncomplainingly cross over from the mental domain of lay literacy to that of the computer. And they do so often with as little competence in the use of the machine as thirteenth-century laymen had in the use of pen and parchment. The cybernetic mind engulfs a new kind of layman without assistance from educational agencies. This is the reason why at the outset I called attention to two rarely formulated questions: first, is there any reason to believe that the new intense concern of the educational establishment with universal clerical literacy can, in fact, strengthen and spread the literate mind? And, second, has schooling now become an initiation ritual introducing students to the cybernetic mind by hiding from all its participants the contradiction between the literate ideas education pretends to serve and the computer image it sells?
With these suggestions I hope to have clarified the subject and argued the urgency of the research for which I plead. This research is based on historical phenomenology of assumptions about speech. Only the technique of the alphabet allows us to record speech and to conceive of this record — in the alphabet — as ‘language’ that we use in speaking. A certain view of the past and of bringing up the young is determined by this assumption. The research I call for could set out to identify the assumptions which are characteristic and proper to ‘education’ only within this mental space.
The research would further explore the degree to which literates and illiterates alike share the special mind-set which arises in a society that uses alphabetic record. It would recognize that the literate mind constitutes a historical oddity of seventh century B.C. origin. It would further explore this space which is uniform in its characteristics, but diverse in all the distortions and transformations these permit. Finally, this research will recognize the heteronomy of the literate space in regard to three other domains: the worlds of orality, those shaped by non-alphabetic notations and, finally, that of the cybernetic mind.
You can see that my world is that of literacy. I am at home only on the island of the alphabet. I share this island with many who can neither read nor write, but whose mind-set is fundamentally literate like mine. And they are threatened, as I am, by the betrayal of those clerics who dissolve the words of the book into just a communication code.