Fire and Knowledge

Alex Golub–a self-appointed “network-ready scholar”–talks about his “Passion for Paper.” An excerpt:

It’s true that there is a lot of stuff you can do with PDFs and the Web that you can’t do with paper, but too often people take this to mean that digital resources “have features” or “are usable” while paper is just, you know, paper. But this is not correct — paper (like any information technology) has its own unique form of usability just as digital resources have theirs. Our current students are unused to paper and attribute the frustration they feel when they use it as a mere lack of usability when in fact they simply haven’t figured out how it works. Older scholars, meanwhile, tend to forget about paper’s unique utility because using it has simply become second nature to them.

Some of the features of paper are well known: Reading more than three pages of text on a screen makes your eyes bleed, but I can read paper for hours. You can underline, highlight, and annotate paper in a way that is still impossible with Web pages. And, of course, in the anarchy after The Big Electromagnetic Pulse the PDFs will be wiped clean off my hard drive but I will still be able to barter my hard copy of Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of the Religious Life for food and bullets.

In a medium in which the image captures most attention, personality supercedes—in fact, all but obliterates—ideas and issues. That is why one becomes a celebrity by the mere fact of appearing on television. No prior accomplishment is required. Nor a reason for being there. It is accomplishment enough for one’s image to be on television. It is its own reason. In such a situation, individualism takes on a wholly different aspect from its meaning in a book culture. The individualism of the book leads to the dominance of the mind. The individualism of TV leads to the dominance of personality.

–Neil Postman, Teaching as a Conserving Activity (1979), p. 66

A Christian Philosophy of Education

Douglas Groothuis writes a short but winsome essay about his goals in teaching philosophy. Well worth reading.

To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.

—Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854), pp. 83-84

When the boy passes from nursery literature to school stories he is going down, not up.

–C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (1955), p. 35

[T]he adventurous student will always study classics, in whatever language they may be written and however ancient they may be. For what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man? They are the only oracles which are not decayed, and there are such answers to the most modern inquiry in them as Delphi and Dodona never gave. We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old.

—Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854), p. 83

[W]hile friendship has been by far the chief source of my happiness, acquaintance or general society has always meant little to me, and I cannot quite understand why a man should wish to know more people than he can make real friends of.

–C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (1955), pp. 32-33

Orion - “I’m Recycling as Fast as I Can”

A well-written and humorous essay about our junk mail problem. There is also a link to a site with helpful information about removing our addresses from direct mailing. It’s nice to see that someone gets as frustrated with junk mail as I do!