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In the Basement of the Ivory Tower

theatlantic.com

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Re: In the Basement of the Ivory Tower

#71

Post by maw »

neilk wrote: post #48
marvin wrote: post #32

This is a very interesting story. What I'm left with is the question of 'who are these people, really'? Is there really a considerable portion of American (or we could say Western) society that is practically illiterate? This seems counter-intuitive to me, I thought it was hardly possible to function at all without a basic understanding of the written word. If these people are out there, I have certainly never had an…

Is there really a considerable portion of American (or we could say Western) society that is practically illiterate? Yes. 21-23%. Or, higher, depending on how you count. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_illiteracy I thought it was hardly possible to function at all without a basic understanding of the written word. Correct again. The wikipedia article notes the high correlation of illiteracy to delinquency and…

Of that 21-23%, how many of them are poor and uneducated immigrants whose children we can expect to be better educated?

That's not to say it's good for there to be people so uneducated, but it might not be as bad as a naïve reading of official figures might make one think.

Instead, it's the illiterate children of nonimmigrants that make me really worry, but I don't know how many of them are.

Re: In the Basement of the Ivory Tower

#72

Post by Andys »

marvin wrote: post #32

This is a very interesting story. What I'm left with is the question of 'who are these people, really'? Is there really a considerable portion of American (or we could say Western) society that is practically illiterate? This seems counter-intuitive to me, I thought it was hardly possible to function at all without a basic understanding of the written word. If these people are out there, I have certainly never had an…

Have you turned on a TV lately?

Re: In the Basement of the Ivory Tower

#73

Post by aspirant »

Thoreau said, "For every thousand hacking at the leaves of evil, there is one striking at the root."

Here is my attempt.

Shortly after we're born, we begin to perceive a certain amount of value in everything we encounter. We assign value to food, attention, comfort, safety, pleasure, affection, entertainment, possessions, virtue, appearance, and a million other things. We assign value to a thousand instances of a hundred types of those things - particular tv shows, certain cars, particular kinds of attention, certain types of pleasure, even one virtue over another. Automatically, they line up along a spectrum of desire and the sorting continues each moment till we die.

Some people value books more than people. Books have never hit them. Some people value an infomercial on tv more than any book imaginable. They still remember all those years ago how the class laughed when they had to read aloud. They don't feel stupid watching tv. They don't feel poor, inferior, or much of anything while it's on. A superficial man can see a woman and in a tenth of a second assign a value to her. We call him superficial in hopes that he will start valuing her other qualities more. A child of six in a bad neighborhood somewhere has never seen any of their friends or family open a book for fun. With perfect logic the child's mind takes note of what seems valued and what does not, by people like him. A very reasonable, and very wrong valuing ensues.

And there is something out there that each person on this website ought to value but doesn't for the very same reasons: We haven't yet encountered it, or we didn't understand it when we did, or the people around us didn't seem to value it, etc. High school art class comes to mind.

You are on this website right now because at this very moment you value it more than everything else that can at this moment be had. Not because of your DNA or inherent intellect, but because at some point you began to value time on this website, and before that websites in general, and before that time on computers, and before that a million other things that compose rungs on a ladder to somewhere.

And by my simply saying that, many of you will suddenly call into question the value of being on this site right now. That questioning is the combination of your own ability to reason, imagine, and introspect as well as your environment of which my words are now a part. And those four ingredients more than anything else are what have formed your beliefs, including your beliefs about what is to be valued.

Scholastically, life works out better for people who value books more than television. And better still for people who value knowledge more than almost everything else.

Things work out better when we value things of value.

Re: In the Basement of the Ivory Tower

#74

Post by dfranke »

orib wrote: post #15
micah63 wrote: post #10

Very insightful view into the mind of an essay marker. I've always loathed the subjectiveness of English courses, that's why I took computer science :) I agree with the author, not everyone is cut out for English classes, but I think an alternative to these "trying help you an write essay" classes should be some kind of "just read a book and enjoy it" class. It would be a start anyway. In school, any hope of loving E…

The problem with dissecting a book is that -- just like dissecting an animal -- at the end of the exercise, the subject of the dissection is dead. While mulling over a good book and discussing it can be enjoyable, the attempt to squeeze deep meaning out of something that the author put in by chance simply kills the joy of a good book. Besides, I find that often the books that tend to be chosen for literature classes…

Tolkien is a strange exception to that rule. You can get into endless debates about symbolism or about the influences that Tolkien built on, and end up enjoying his work more than you ever did before. I can't think of any other author who's like that.

Re: In the Basement of the Ivory Tower

#75

Post by yummyfajitas »

marvin wrote: post #32

This is a very interesting story. What I'm left with is the question of 'who are these people, really'? Is there really a considerable portion of American (or we could say Western) society that is practically illiterate? This seems counter-intuitive to me, I thought it was hardly possible to function at all without a basic understanding of the written word. If these people are out there, I have certainly never had an…

I'm just curious, what does it mean to "comment intelligently" on a literary work? It's a skill I never learned (1), nor could I even explain what the skill consists of. It hasn't really impeded my (non-corporate) career, although I did need to learn how to write when I got to grad school (note: I learned to write based on Principles of Software Engineering, not Strunk&White).

(1) I took english 101-102 at a community college, similar to what author describes. But the professor neither explained how to write literary papers, nor read student papers before giving out grades.

Re: In the Basement of the Ivory Tower

#76

Post by smelendez »

maximilian wrote: post #51
sspencer wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I meant simple in the sense that it would be a pretty straightforward way for me to help people like Ms. L. I doubt it would be in any way easy. And I taught my mother from basic computer illiteracy into practically a power user (well, a relative power user: email and surfing and transferring images from her digital camera. she's the envy of all her friends, at least...). The biggest hurdle was getting her to believe…

I was basically joshing you. I agree with you on that hurdle though. Most people think of computers as machines. If you use a machine incorrectly, or in the wrong order, you can break it or even injure yourself. Computers, usually at least, don't work that way. It'd be pretty hard for my parents to mess up the computer more than losing that email they just spent the last hour hunt-and-pecking away at.

I think that it's not only that older people didn't grow up with, say, the Windows interface or, as someone mentioned earlier, a telephone interface where you have to press send to make a call, it's an even more basic issue. They grew up in a world where machinery was expensive, fragile and dangerous and a world where adults seldom learned to operate fundamentally new machinery. Even sturdy, harmless household machinery wasn't safe to "play around" with. One reason you had to dial 1 to make a long distance call, even before exchanges and area codes overlapped, is to reduce the risk of misdialing or misunderstanding your way into a big bill. If you pick up the phone in the middle of the night and dial random numbers to figure out the numbering scheme and whether it takes longer to call cross-country, you'll get a big bill and, if you piss enough people off, get a visit from the police or a stern letter from the phone company. If you enter random URLs into your browser, you're unlikely to break anything.

We (younger people) have an advantage in that we're used to pretty much everything being software driven, so we know that if we screw up our computer, phone or DVD player we can just pull the plug or the battery. We're also used to the idea that not every device will behave the same way to achieve the same function. We press "send" to "send" a call, but not to send an SMS message, even though the latter is standard usage and the former is not, but we don't care because we know that's how the UI works. And, we know that we'll have to keep learning new UIs as we get older. Older people don't have a problem dialing nine for an outside line, even though at home they just pick up the receiver, because they probably learned it in their 20s.

Re: In the Basement of the Ivory Tower

#77

Post by emmett »

dfranke wrote: post #58
marvin wrote: post #32

This is a very interesting story. What I'm left with is the question of 'who are these people, really'? Is there really a considerable portion of American (or we could say Western) society that is practically illiterate? This seems counter-intuitive to me, I thought it was hardly possible to function at all without a basic understanding of the written word. If these people are out there, I have certainly never had an…

How old are you? The baby boom generation seems mostly literate, but my generation, gen Y, is basically incapable of constructing a sentence. In my senior year high school English class I had a teacher who liked me, so she had me grade papers in lieu of some other work. In particular, I remember proofreading drafts of my classmates' college admissions essays. They were deplorable. The best one was grammatically toler…

The data seem to suggest that, while those students were certainly deplorable, average literacy is actually at an all time high:

http://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp

Re: In the Basement of the Ivory Tower

#78

Post by smelendez »

orib wrote: post #15
micah63 wrote: post #10

Very insightful view into the mind of an essay marker. I've always loathed the subjectiveness of English courses, that's why I took computer science :) I agree with the author, not everyone is cut out for English classes, but I think an alternative to these "trying help you an write essay" classes should be some kind of "just read a book and enjoy it" class. It would be a start anyway. In school, any hope of loving E…

The problem with dissecting a book is that -- just like dissecting an animal -- at the end of the exercise, the subject of the dissection is dead. While mulling over a good book and discussing it can be enjoyable, the attempt to squeeze deep meaning out of something that the author put in by chance simply kills the joy of a good book. Besides, I find that often the books that tend to be chosen for literature classes…

The arts and humanities are just terribly taught. People notice it more with regard to English than art or music class, because you have to take English every year pretty much anywhere, while usually you stop taking art or music before you realize how bad it is.

I had a lot of great science and math teachers and a few great history teachers. I had some good English teachers but none who were really great. I think that's because people with math and science degrees have plenty of job opportunities, so only the ones who really want to teach high school even consider it. Probably the best English teachers I had were baby-boomer or older women who would have done something else if not for workplace misogyny. As they retired they were generally replaced by ignorant young women.

I love reading and I can write lucidly, but I knew people in college who had had really strong English instruction and can analyze a novel on first reading in ways that wouldn't even occur to me after a month of full-time study.

Re: In the Basement of the Ivory Tower

#79

Post by dfranke »

emmett wrote: post #77
dfranke wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How old are you? The baby boom generation seems mostly literate, but my generation, gen Y, is basically incapable of constructing a sentence. In my senior year high school English class I had a teacher who liked me, so she had me grade papers in lieu of some other work. In particular, I remember proofreading drafts of my classmates' college admissions essays. They were deplorable. The best one was grammatically toler…

The data seem to suggest that, while those students were certainly deplorable, average literacy is actually at an all time high: http://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp

Those statistics end at 1979, but I don't doubt that you're correct. The problem here is not literacy per se: these students would have no trouble transcribing between written and spoken English. The problem is with composition and comprehension.

Re: In the Basement of the Ivory Tower

#80

Post by hugh »

edw519 wrote: post #56
oz wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aha, but walking is an inherent human capability, waiting to be learned. I honestly don't think that everyone can learn anything. we can certainly do better than the status quo, but expecting the average layman to grasp advanced physics seems a bit of a stretch. There's something to be said for raw talent.

I was careful to use the word "almost" twice. The interpretation of "almost" is obviously up to the reader. With that in mind, if you could teach many "average laymen" to grasp advanced physics, I really wouldn't be all that surprised. Of course, there is something to be said for raw talent, lots of which remains hidden because of many factors. The power of human capability never ceases to amaze me, even under the mo…

I dunno, advanced physics still baffles the hell out of me. And I'm an advanced physicist.
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