When I was a young learner, a student, teachers still stressed memorization. Before writing, memorization -- inscribing on the brain -- was the main receptacle for preserving human wisdom. Yet, even fully 5 centuries after Gutenberg, memorization was still central to education. I memorized a Hamlet soliloquy.

So, despite our privileging print to the extent where a commercial -- even today -- can claim "if it wasn't true, we couldn't put it in print" -- education never lost its ties to the essential centrality of speech and hearing ("orality"). Vestigial orality always lurked beneath the print world, ready to spring back.

And, now, in this blog, I write in a kind of "secondary orality" -- electronic text is ephemeral like speech, replies are often as quick as speech, and perfect form is less important than communicating.

Education, always struggling, never fully adapted to print, and now a new millennium finds us talking as never before -- as if print never really happened. Was it an illusion?

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Tags: Secondary Literacy