The Civilization of Illiteracy Part 3

The Disneyland near Paris, more of an import (the French government wanted it badly) than an export product, was called a "cultural Chern.o.byl." Tourists from all over the crumbled Soviet Empire are no longer taken to Lenin's Mausoleum but to Moscow's McDonald's. The j.a.panese, reluctant to import American-made cars and supercomputers, or to open their markets to agricultural goods (except marbled beef), will bend over backwards for baseball. Add to all this the symbolism of blue jeans, Madonna or Heavy Metal (as music or comic books), Coca-Cola, the television series Dallas, the incessant chomping on chewing gum and bubble-gum popping, Texan boots, and the world-wide sneaker craze, and you have an image of the visible threat of Americanization. But appearance is deceitful.

Taken out of their context, these and many other Americanized aspects of daily life are only exotic phenomena, easy to counteract, and indeed subject to counteraction. Italians protested the culture of fast food near the Piazza d'Espagna in Rome (where one fast food establishment rented s.p.a.ce) by giving out free spaghetti carbonara and pizza. (They were unaware of the irony in this: the biggest exporter of pizza restaurants is no longer Italy, but the USA.) The rightist Russian movement protested McDonald's by touting national dishes, the good old high-calorie menu of times when physical effort was much greater than in our days (even in that part of the world). The Germans push native Lederhosen and Dirndls over blue jeans. The German unions protest attempts to address structural problems in their economy through diminis.h.i.+ng social benefits with a slogan that echoes like a hollow threat: American conditions will be met by a French response, by which they mean that strikes will paralyze the country. The j.a.panese resisted the Disney temptation by building their own lands of technological marvels. When an athlete born in America, naturalized as j.a.panese, won the traditional Sumo wrestling champions.h.i.+p, the j.a.panese judges decided that this would be his last chance, since the sport requires, they stated, a spirituality (translated by demeanor) that a foreign-born sportsman cannot have.

On closer examination, Americanization runs deeper than what any a.s.sortment of objects, att.i.tudes, values, and imitated behavior tell us. It addresses the very core of human activity in today's global community. It is easy to understand why America appears to embody efficiency reached at the expense of many abandoned values: respect for authority, for environment, for resources, even human resources, and ultimately human values. The focus of the practical experience through which American ident.i.ty is const.i.tuted is on limitless expectations regarding social existence, standard of living, political action, economic reward, even religious experience. Its encompa.s.sing obsession is freedom, or at least the appearance of freedom. Whatever the pragmatics affords becomes the new expectation and is projected as the next necessity. The right to affluence, as relative as affluence is in American society, is taken for granted, never shadowed by the thought that one's wealth and well-being might come at the expense of someone else's lack of opportunity.

Compet.i.tive, actually adversarial, considerations prevail, such as those manifest in the morally dubious practices accepted by the legal and political systems. "To the victor go the spoils"

is probably the most succinct description of what this means in real life.

The American way of life has been a hope and promise for people all over the world. The mixed feelings they have towards America does not necessarily reflect this. The entire world is probably driven by the desire for efficiency that makes such a standard of living possible more than by the pressure to copy the American style (of products, living, politics, behavior, etc.). This desire corresponds to a pragmatics shaped by the global scale of humankind, and by the contemporary dynamics of human self-const.i.tution. Each country faces the battle between efficiency and culture (some going back thousands of years), in contrast to the USA, whose culture is always in status nascendi.

The American anxiety over the current state of literacy is laden with a nostalgia for a tradition never truly established and a fear of a future never thought through. It is, consequently, of more than doc.u.mentary interest to understand how America epitomizes a civilization that has made literacy obsolete.

For the love of trade

As a country formed by unending waves of immigration, America can be seen, superficially though, as a civilization of many parallel literacies. Ethnic neighborhoods are still a fact of life. Here one finds stores where only the native language is spoken, with newspapers printed in Greek, Hungarian, German, Italian, Ukrainian, Farsi, Armenian, Hebrew, Romanian, Russian, Arabic, j.a.panese, Mandarin, Korean. Cable TV caters to these groups, and so do many importers of products reminiscent of some country where "food tastes real" and goods "last forever." All of these carried-over literacies are, in final a.n.a.lysis, means of self-const.i.tution, bridges between cultures that will be burned by the third generation. In practicing the literacy of origins, human beings const.i.tute themselves as split personalities between two pragmatic contexts. One embodies expectations characteristic of the context that relied upon literacy- h.o.m.ogeneity, hierarchy, centralism, tradition. The other, of the adopted country, is focused upon needs that effect the transition to the civilization of illiteracy- heterogeneity, horizontality, decentralism, tradition as choice, but not way of life.

Aspects of immigration (and in general of human migration) need to be addressed, not from the perspective of parallel literacies, but as variations within a unifying pragmatic framework. The de-culturization of people originating from many countries and belonging to many nations is probably a unique feature of America. It impacted all aspects of life, and continues to be a source of vitality, as well as tension.

Immigrants arrive as literates (some more so than others) only to discover that their literacy is relatively useless. That things were not always like this is relatively well doc.u.mented. Neil Postman reported that the 17th-century settlers were quite literate in terms characteristic of the time. Up to 95 percent of the men were able to read the Bible; among women the percentage reported is 62. They also read other publications, some imported from England, and at the beginning of the second half of the eighteenth century supported a printing industry soon to become very powerful.

In importing their literacies, the English, as well as the French and Dutch, imported all the characteristics that literacy implies and which went into the foundation of the American government. Over time, in the successive waves of immigration, unskilled and skilled workers, intellectuals, and peasants arrived. They all had to adapt to a different culture, dominated by the British model but moving farther away from it as the country started to develop its own characteristics. Each national or ethnic group, shaped through practical experiences that did not have a common denominator, had to adapt to others. The country grew quite fast, as did its industry, transportation system, farming, banking, and the many services made possible and necessary by the overall economic development. To some extent, literacy was an integral part of these accomplishments.

The young country soon established its own body of literature, reflecting its own experience, while remaining true to the literacy of the former mother country. I say to some extent because, as the history of each of these accomplishments shows, the characteristics inherent in literacy were opposed, under the banner of States' rights, democracy, individuality, or progress.

With all this in mind, it is no wonder that Americans do not like to hear that they are a nation of illiterates, as people from much older cultures are sometimes inclined to call them (for right or wrong reasons). No wonder either that they are still committed to literacy; moreover, that they believe that it represents a panacea to the problems raised by fast technological cycles of change, by new modes of human interaction, and by circ.u.mstances of practical experiences to which they have to adapt. Educators and business-people are well aware, and worried, that literacy in the cla.s.sical sense is declining. The sense of history they inherited makes them demand that effort and money be spent to turn the tide and bring America back to past greatness, or at least to some stability.

Probably the nature of this greatness is misunderstood or misconstrued, since there is not much in the history of the accomplishments of the United States that could rank the country among the cultural giants of past and present civilizations.

Throughout its history, America always represented, to some degree, a break with the values of the old world. The Europeans who came to the Dutch, French, and English colonies had at least one thing in common: they wanted to escape from the pragmatics of hierarchy, centralized political and religious domination, and fixed rules of social and cultural life representing a system of order that kept them in their place. Freedom of religion-one of the most sought after-is freedom from a dominant, unified church and its vision of the unconditionally submissive individual. Cultivating one's own land, another hope that animated the settlers, is freedom from practical serfdom imposed by the landowning n.o.bility on those lower on the hierarchy. John Smith's maxim that those who didn't work didn't eat was perhaps the first blow to the European values that ranked language and culture along with social status and privilege.

Most likely, the immigrants, highborn and low, did not come with the intention of overthrowing the sense and morals prevailing at the time. The phase of imitation of the old, characteristic of any development, extended from religious ceremonies to ways of working, enjoying, educating, dressing, and relating to outsiders (natives, slaves, religious sects). In this phase of imitation, a semi-aristocracy established itself in the South, emulating the English model. In protesting the taxes and punitive laws imposed by King George III, the upper-cla.s.s colonials were demanding their rights as Englishmen, with all that this qualifier entailed. Jefferson's model for the free United States was that the agrarian state best embodied the cla.s.sic ideals that animated him. Jefferson was himself the model of literacy-based practical experiences, a landed aristocrat who owned slaves, a man trained in the logic of Greece and Rome. His knowledge came from books. He was able to bring his various interests in architecture, politics, planning, and administration in focus through the pragmatic framework for which literacy was adequate.

Although Jefferson, among others, rejected monarchy, which his fellow citizens would have set up, he did not hesitate to exercise the almost kingly powers that the executive branch of government entailed. His activity shows how monarchic centrality and hierarchy were translated in the new political forms of emerging democracies, within which elective office replaced inherited power. In the history of early America, we can see how literacy carries over the non-egalitarian model as it advanced equality in people's natural rights and before the law, the power of rules, and a sense of authority inspired by religion, practiced in political life, and connected to expectations of order.

Just as new trees sprout from the trunk of an old tree, so new paradigms take root within an old one. People immigrated to America to escape the old models. Challenged by the need to provide a framework for their own self-identification, they ended up establis.h.i.+ng an alternative context for the unfolding of the Industrial Revolution. In the process, they changed in more ways than they could foresee. Politically, they established conditions conducive to emanc.i.p.ation from the many constraints of the system they left. Even their patterns of living, speaking, behaving, and thinking changed. In 1842, Charles d.i.c.kens observed of Americans that "The love of trade is a.s.signed as a reason for that comfortless custom...of married persons living in hotels, having no fireside of their own, and seldom meeting, from early morning until late at night, but at the hasty public meals. The love of trade is a reason why the literature of America is to remain forever unprotected: 'For we are a trading people, and don't care for poetry: though we do, by the way, profess to be very proud of our poets.'" d.i.c.kens came from a culture that considered literacy one of the highest achievements of England, so much so that, according to Jane Austen, Shakespeare could be particularly appreciated by the English alone (cf. Mansfield Park). She gave cultivation of the mind the highest priority. Literature was expected to a.s.sist in defining values and pointing out the proper moral and intellectual direction. France was in a very similar position in regard to its culture and literature; so were the German lands and Holland.

Even Russia, otherwise opposed to acknowledging the new pragmatic context of industrial production, was affected by the European Enlightenment.

De Toqueville, whose journey to America contributed to his fame, made his historic visit in the 1830's. By this time, America had time and opportunity to establish its peculiar character, so he was able to observe characteristics that would eventually define a new paradigm. The a.s.sociated emerging values, based on a life relatively free of historic constraints, caught his attention: "The Americans can devote to general education only the early years of life. [...] At fifteen they enter upon their calling, and thus their education generally ends at the age when ours begins. If it is continued beyond that point, it aims only towards a particular specialized and profitable purpose; one studies science as one takes up a business; and one takes up only those applications whose immediate practicality is recognized. [...] There is no cla.s.s, then, in America, in which the taste for intellectual pleasures is transmitted with hereditary fortune and leisure and by which the labors of the intellect are held in honor. Accordingly, there is an equal want of the desire and power of application to these objects."

Opinions, even those of scholars of de Toqueville's reputation, are inherently limited in scope. Sent by the French government to examine prisons and penitentiaries in the New World, he wound up writing a study of how a highly literate European understood America's social and political inst.i.tutions. Many of the characteristics of the civilization of illiteracy were emerging during the years of his visit. He highlighted the shortness of political cycles, the orality of public administration, the transience of commitments (the little there is of writing "is soon wafted away forever, like the leaves of the sibyl, by the smallest breeze"). Severance from the past, in particular, made this visitor predict that Americans would have to "recourse to the history of other nations in order to learn anything of the people who now inhabit them." What we read in de Toqueville is the expression of the surprise caused by discontinuity, by change, and by a dynamics that in other parts of the world was less obvious.

The New World certainly provided new themes, addressed and interpreted differently by Americans and Europeans. The more European cities of the Northeast- Boston, New York, Philadelphia-maintained cultural ties to the Old World, as evidenced by universities, scholars, poets, essayists, and artists. Nevertheless, Was.h.i.+ngton Irving complained that one could not make a living as a writer in the United States as one could in Europe. Indeed, many writers earned a living as journalists (which is a way of being a writer) or as civil servants. The real America-the one d.i.c.kens so lamented-was taking form west of the Hudson River and beyond the Appalachian Mountains. This was truly a world where the past did not count.

America finally did away with slavery (as a by-product of the Civil War). But at the same time, it started undoing some part of the underlying structure reflected in literacy. The depth and breadth of the process escaped the full understanding of those literate Founding Fathers who set the process in motion, and was only partially realized by others (de Toqueville included). It clearly affected the nature of human practical experiences of self-const.i.tution as free citizens of a democracy whose chance to succeed lay in the efficiency, not in the expressive power, of ideas. America's industrial revolution took place against a background different from that of the rest of the world- a huge island indulging in relative autarchy for a short time. Forces corresponding to the pragmatics of the post-industrial age determined a course of opening itself and opening as much of the world as possible-regardless of how this was to be accomplished.

The process still affects economic development, financial markets, cultural interdependencies, and education.

"The best of the useful and the best of the ornamental"

Some will protest that over 150 years have gone by and the American character has been shaped by more than the love of trade. They will point to the literary heritage of Was.h.i.+ngton Irving, Mark Twain, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James. Indeed, 20th century American writers have been appreciated and imitated abroad.

Faulkner and Hemingway are the best known examples. Today, American writers of lesser stature and talent are translated into the various European languages, for the same reasons that Disneyland was brought to France. Americans will point to theaters (which presented European plays) and opera houses, forgetting how late these acquisitions are, inst.i.tuted when economic progress was on a sound track. Indeed, the response to these a.s.sertions is simple: the result of other influences is not a change of course, but a much faster movement in the direction America pursues.

A good example is given by education. The American colleges and universities founded in the 18th and early 19th centuries attempted to follow the traditional model of learning for its own sake; that is, moral and intellectual improvement through study of the age-old cla.s.sics. This lasted until various interest groups, in particular businessmen, questioned the validity of an educational program that had little or no pragmatic value. These schools were in the East-Harvard, Brown, Yale, Columbia, William and Mary- and the curricula reflected that of the Old World. In general, only the elite of America attended them. The newer universities, the so-called Land Grant colleges, later called state universities (such as Ohio State University, Texas A & M), established west of the Allegheny River during the last quarter of the 19th century, did indeed pursue more pragmatic programs-agriculture and mechanics-to serve the needs of the respective state, not the nation.

In view of this demand for what is useful, it is easy to understand why American universities have become high (and sometimes not so high) level vocational schools, subst.i.tuting for what high school rarely provided. Pragmatic requirements and anti-elitist political considerations collided with the literate model and a strange hybrid resulted. A look at how the course offerings changed over time brings clear evidence that logic, rhetoric, culture, appreciation of the word and of the rules of grammar and syntax-all the values a.s.sociated with a dominant literacy-are relegated to specializations in philosophy, literature, or written communication, and to a vast, though confusing, repertory of elective cla.s.ses, which reflect an obsession with free choice and a leveling notion of democracy.

Literature, after being forced to give up its romantic claim to permanency, a.s.sociates itself with transitory approaches that meet, with increasing opportunistic speed, whatever the current agenda might be: feminism, multiculturalism, anti-war rhetoric, economic upheaval. Human truth, as literary illusion or hope, is replaced by uncertainty. No wonder that in this context programs in linguistics and philology languish or disappear from the curriculum. Economics lost its philosophic backbone and became an exercise in statistics and mathematics.

When faced with a list of courses that a university requires, most students ask, "Why do I need...?" In this category fall literature, mathematics, philosophy, and almost everything else definable within literacy as formative subject matter or discipline. Blame for this att.i.tude, if any can be uttered, should not be put on the young people processed by the university system. The students conform, as difficult as it might be for them to understand their conformity, to what is expected of them: to get a driver's license and a college diploma, and to pay taxes. The expectation of a diploma does not result from requirements of qualification but from the American obsession with equality. America, which revolted against hierarchy and inequality, has never tolerated even the appearance of individual superiority. This led to a democracy that opposed superiority, leveling what was not equal-rights or apt.i.tudes, opportunities or abilities-at any price. College education as privilege, which America inherited from the Europe it left behind, was considered an injustice. Over time, commercial democracy turned college into another shopping mall. Today, diplomas, from BA to Ph.D., are expected just for having attended college, a mere prerequisite to a career, not necessarily the result of rigorous mental application leading to quality results. Young adults go to college because they heard that one can get a better (read higher paying) job with a college education.

The result of broadening the scope of university studies to include professions for which only training is required is that the value of a college diploma (but not the price paid for it) has decreased. Some say that soon one will need a college diploma just to be a street cleaner (sanitation engineer). Actually, a person will not need a diploma, but will just happen to have one. And the wage of a sanitation worker will be so high (inflation always keeps pace with demagogy) that a college graduate will feel more ent.i.tled to the job than a high school dropout. When Thomas Jefferson studied, he realized that none of his studies would help him run his plantation. Architecture and geometry were subordinate to a literacy-dominated standard.

Nevertheless, education inspired him as a citizen, as it inspired all who joined him in signing the Declaration of Independence.

A context was established for further emanc.i.p.ation. The depth and breadth of the process escaped the full understanding of those who set the process in motion, and was at best partially realized by very few others, de Tocqueville included. It clearly affected the nature of human practical experiences of self-const.i.tution as free citizens of a democracy whose chance to succeed lay in the efficiency of ideas, not in their expressive power. Inventiveness was unleashed; labor-saving devices, machinery that did the work of tens and hundreds of men provided more and more immediate satisfaction than intellectual exercise did.

Americans do not, if they ever did, live in an age of the idea for its own sake or for the sake of the spirit. Maintaining mental faculties or uplifting the spirit are imported services.

In the early history of the USA, the Transcendentalist movement, of a priori intuitions, was a strong intellectual presence, but its adherents only transplanted the seed from Europe. Those and others-the schools of thought a.s.sociated with Peirce, Dewey, James, and Royce-rarely took root, producing a flower more appreciated if it actually was imported. This is not a country that appreciates the pure idea. America has always prided itself in its products and practicality, not thinking and vision. "A plaine souldier that can use a pick-axe and a spade is better than five knights," according to Captain John Smith. His evaluation summarizes the American preference for useful over ornamental.

Paradoxically though, business leaders argued for education and proclaimed their support for schools and colleges. At a closer look, their position appears somewhat duplicitous. American business needed its Cooper, Edison, and Bell, around whose inventions and discoveries industries were built. Once these were in place, it needed consumers with money to buy what industries produced. Business supported education as a right and took all the tax deductions it could in order to have this right serve the interests of industry and business. Consequently, in American society, ideas are validated only at the material level, in providing utility, convenience, comfort, and entertainment, as long as these maximize profit. "The sooner the better" is an expectation of efficiency, one that does not take into consideration the secondary effects of production or actions, as long as the first effect was profit. Not the educated citizen, but the person who succeeded in getting rich no matter how, was considered the "smart" fellow, as d.i.c.kens learned during his journey through America. Prompted by such a deeply rooted att.i.tude, Sidney Lanier, of Georgia, deplored the "endless tale/ of gain by cunning and plus by sale." To value success regardless of the means applied is part of the American teleology (sometimes in complicity with American theology).

Bertrand Russell observed of Machiavelli that no one has been more maligned for simply stating the truth. The observation applies to those who have taken upon themselves the task of writing about the brave citizens of the free land. d.i.c.kens was warned against publis.h.i.+ng his American Notes. European writers and artists, and visitors from Russia, China, and j.a.pan have irritated their American friends through their sincere remarks.

Not many Americans refer to Thorston Veblen, Theodore Dreiser, Henry James, or to Gore Vidal, but the evaluations these authors made of the American character have been criticized by the majority of their compatriots whose sentimental vision of America cannot cope with legitimate observations. Mark Twain felt that he'd rather be "d.a.m.ned to John Bunyan's heaven" than be obliged to read James's The Bostonians.

The rear-view mirror syndrome

So why do Americans look back to a time when people "knew how to read and write," a time when "each town had five newspapers?"

Big businesses, consolidated well before the invention of newer means of communication and mediation, have large investments in literacy: newspapers, publis.h.i.+ng houses, and especially universities. But the promise of a better material life through literacy today rings tragically hollow in the ears of graduates who cannot find jobs in their fields of study. The advertis.e.m.e.nt most telling of this state of affairs is for a cooking school: "College gave me a degree in English. Peter k.u.mp's Cooking School gave me a career."

Granted that literacy has never made anyone rich in the monetary sense, we can ask what the pragmatic framework set up in this part of the New World did accomplish that literacy could not. In the first place, escape from one dominant mode embodied in literate practical experiences facilitated the a.s.sertion of other modes of expression and communication. Peter Cooper, founder of the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York City, made his fortune in railroads, glue, and gelatin desserts. He was truly illiterate: he could not read. Obviously he was not unintelligent. Many pioneers had a better command of their tools than of their pen. They read nature with more understanding than some university students read books. There are other cases of people who succeed, sometimes spectacularly, although they cannot read. The illiterate California businessman who taught high school social sciences and mathematics for eighteen years became known because television, for some reason, saw in him a good case for the literacy cause. People like him rely on a powerful memory or use an intelligence not based on literate conventions. Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences (formerly known as apt.i.tudes) seems to be ignored by educators who still insist that everyone learn to read and write-better said, conform to the conventions of literacy-as though these were the only ways to comprehend others and to function in life. There are few commentaries that contradict this att.i.tude. William Burroughs thought that "Language is a virus from outer s.p.a.ce." Probably it feels better to perceive language like this in view of the many abuses to which language is subjected, but also in view of the way people use it to deceive.

A more direct criticism states: "The current high profile of literacy is symptomatic of a speedy, ruthless transition from an industrial to an information-based economy. [...] Literacy, to be sure, is a powerful, unique technology. Yet literacy remains a human invention contained by social contract, and the maintenance of that contract in education betrays our ideas of humanity as surely as our use of literacy enforces them" (cf.

Elsbeth Stuckey)

American experience shows that the imposition of a sole model of higher education, based on literacy, has economic, social, and cultural consequences. It is very costly. It levels instead of addressing and encouraging diversity. It introduces expectations of cultural h.o.m.ogeneity in a context that thrives on heterogeneity. The literate model of education with which the country flirted, and which still seems so attractive, negates one of America's sources of vitality-openness to alternatives, itself made possible by the stubborn refusal of centralism and hierarchy. Held in high esteem in the early part of American history, literacy came to students through schoolhouses in which Webster's Speller and McGuffey's Reader disbursed more patriotism (essential to a nation in search of an ident.i.ty) and more awareness of what "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"

should mean than quality writing or the possibility to select good books for reading. Literacy with a practical purpose, and the variety of literacies corresponding to the variety of human practical experiences, is a discovery made in America.

Understanding pragmatic requirements as opposed to pursuing literacy for the sake of literacy, at the price of rejecting its rewards, is where the road forks. But here America follows Yogi Berra's advice: "When you come to a fork in the road, take it."

In their search for new values, or when faced with competing answers to tough questions, people tend to look back to a time when everything seemed all right. And they tend to pick and choose the characteristics that led to this perceived state of affairs. Things were all right, some want to believe, when kids, plodding along country roads, winter or summer, went to school and learned to read. Therefore, most people a.s.sume that the environment propitious to literacy will bring back the golden age. No one wants to see that America was never reducible to this romantic picture. In the South, education never seemed to be a mission. Slaves and poor whites remained outside the idealized stream. Females were not encouraged to study. A Protestant viewpoint dominated subject matter (recall the Puritan alphabet primer).

Americans seem intent on ignoring accomplishments outside the domain of literacy and the dynamics of the non-literate United States. In admiration of real cultures, Americans do not want to hear or see that many of them, of proud and ancient ancestry, started questioning their own values and the education transmitting them. The practical sense and pragmatism ascertained in the formation of America were adopted as causes worth fighting for. In Europe, students protested an education that did not prepare them for work. Thanks to universal education-European governments by and large offer publicly supported higher education, at no cost to the student, through college and graduate school-more young people received an education (in the cla.s.sical sense of the word) and their ranks flooded the market. They discovered that they were not prepared for the practical experiences characteristic of the new pragmatics, especially the new forms of mediations that characterize work and that are making headway around the world.

In Europe, there is a clear distinction between university studies and vocational studies. This has prevented universities from becoming the high-cla.s.s vocational schools that they are in America, and has maintained the meaning of the diploma as a proof of intellectual endeavor. On the other hand, they remain ivory towers, not preparing students for the practical experiences of the new pragmatics. Brotlose Kunst (breadless art) is what the Germans now call such fields of study as literature, philosophy, musicology, religion, and any other purely intellectual endeavor.

Looking at a totally different culture, Americans tend to respond to j.a.pan's economic success and criticism of our system by saying that our educational system must become more like that of America's leading compet.i.tor. They ignore the fact that j.a.pan's high rate of productivity has less to do with the nation's high rate of literacy than does the indoctrination and character formation that j.a.panese schooling entails. Fundamental att.i.tudes of conformity, team mentality, and a very strong sense of hierarchy, together with an almost sacred sense of tradition, are instilled through literate means. One does not have to be literate in any language in order to solder one circuit to another on an a.s.sembly line or to snap together modular components fabricated by advanced machines. What is necessary, indeed expected, is an ethic that calls for a sense of duty and pride in a job well done, a sense met by the social promise of permanency. All in all, the j.a.panese system allows for little variation from the consensus, and even less for the creation of new models. The only way j.a.pan stepped out of the literate mode in the manufacturing world is in quality control. Ironically, this idea was developed by the American Edward Denning, but rejected by his compatriots, who literally stagnated in a hierarchic model originating from circ.u.mstances of literacy.

This hierarchical model, now in obvious decline, gave to American businessmen the sense of power they could not achieve through education or culture.

The j.a.panese, living in a system that preserved its ident.i.ty while actively pursuing plans for economic expansion, formed strategies of self-containment (severely tested in times of economic downturn), as well as methods of relating to the rest of the world. This condition is manifest in their talent for spotting the most profitable from other countries, making it theirs, and pursuing avenues of compet.i.tion in which what is specifically j.a.panese (skills, endurance, collusion) and the appropriated foreign component are successfully joined. Almost the entire foundation of today's television, in its a.n.a.log embodiment, is j.a.panese. But if for some reason the programming component would cease to exist, all the marvelous equipment that makes TV possible would abruptly become useless. In some ways, j.a.pan has almost no interest in a change of paradigm in television, such as the revolutionary digital TV, because an enormous industry, present in almost every home where television is used, would have to reinvent itself. The expectation of permanency that permeates literate j.a.pan thus extends from literacy to a medium of illiteracy. In the American context, of almost no stable commitments, digital television, along with many other innovations in computation and other fields, is a challenge, not a threat to an entire infrastructure. This example was not chosen randomly. It ill.u.s.trates the dynamics of the change from a literacy-dominated civilization to one of many competing literacies. These emerge in the context of change from self-sufficient, relatively small-scale, h.o.m.ogeneous communities to the global world of today, so powerfully interconnected through television and through digital media of all kinds. As illiterates, Americans lead other nations in breakthroughs in medicine, genetics, networking, interactive multimedia, virtual reality, and inventiveness in general.

Obviously, it is easier to design a course of education a.s.suming some permanency or maintaining it, regardless of pragmatic requirements. Diane Ravitch stated that it is hard to define what education will be needed for the future when we don't know what skills the jobs of the future will require. An optimal education, reflecting pragmatic needs of highly mediated practical experiences of distributed effort and networking, will have to facilitate the acquisition of new cognitive skills.

Decentralized, non-sequential, non-deterministic experiences require cognitive skills different from those characteristic of literacy. Schools used to be able to prepare students to find their place in the workforce even before graduation. More schools than ever insist on churning out a strange version of the literate student who should go on to a college that is more (though still not enough) vocational school than university. The university, under the alibi of equal opportunity and more in consideration of its own agenda, has done more damage to education and literacy by forcing itself upon Americans as the only means to attain a better life. The result is crowded cla.s.ses in which pa.s.sive students are processed according to the industrial model of the a.s.sembly line, while the creative energy of faculty and students is redirected to a variety of ventures promising what a university cannot deliver. The very word university acknowledges one encompa.s.sing paradigm, prevalent in the Middle Ages, that the USA practically disposed of over a century ago. In an age of global reality and many paradigms, the university is in reality less universal and increasingly specialized.

In these times of change, America, founded on innovation and self-reliance, seems to forget its own philosophy of decentralization and non-hierarchy. By no surprise, the newer computer technology-based companies took the lead in decentralizing and networking the workplace, in re-engineering each and every business. Most business-people, especially in established companies, are reluctant to address matrix management methods or to use distributed forms of organization and decentralized structures. Consequently, after waves of corporate restructuring and resizing, presidents and chairmen (not unlike university presidents and school princ.i.p.als) are kings, and the laborer, when not replaced by a machine, is often a virtual serf. Surprisingly, the decentralized spirit of homesteading and the distribution of tasks and responsibilities, through which much of efficiency is reached, makes slow headway.

But things are changing! If there is an engine at work pulling the world from its literacy- based pragmatics to the future of higher efficiency required by the new scale of human activity, it has the initials USA written on it. And it is-make no mistake about it-digital.

When not faithful to its own experience of pluralism and self-motivation, the USA faces the inherent limitations of literacy-based practical experience in a number of domains, the political included. America once had a number of political parties. Now it seems that it cannot effectively get beyond the literate dualistic model of two antagonistic parties, emulating the Tories and the Whigs of the empire to which it once belonged. European countries and several African and Asian states have multi-party systems that reflect sensitivity to differences and take advantage of the variety they allow for. Such systems enfranchise more of a country's citizenry than does the two- party system in the USA. Every four years, Americans demand greater choice in elections, but only one state, Alaska, considers it normal to have more than two parties, and, incidentally, a governor who is neither Republican nor Democrat.

The USA has a complex about literacy to the extent that every subject is now qualified as literacy-cultural literacy, computer literacy, visual literacy, etc.-whether literacy is involved or not. Literacy has become its own specialty. In addition, new literacies, effectively disconnected from the ideals and expectations of cla.s.sical literacy, have emerged from practical experiences of human self-const.i.tution in realms where writing and reading are no longer required. This would not be so bad if it were not blinding people to the truth about a major characteristic of humankind. Diversity of expression and multiplicity of communication modes define new areas of human accomplishment and open avenues for further unfolding of people's creative and economic potential. The new condition of language, in particular the failure of literacy, is at the same time a symptom of a new stage in human progress. It in no way reflects a failure of national policy or will. As a matter of fact, the new stage we are entering is a reflection of the human spirit unfolding, refusing to be held captive to a dominant mode that has outlived its usefulness. It may well be that the coming of age of America is part of this new stage. After all, many believe that the crisis of language is the crisis of the white man (cf. Gottfried Benn), or at least of Western civilization.

So, is the USA the epitome of the civilization of illiteracy?