A Digital Dumbing Down?

But that's only one half of me. The other half is thrilled that never before has physics been able to be taught in these three-dimensional ways and that we have access to knowledge that is extraordinary. So my hope is that we learn to use all this in better ways. The genie is out of the bottle. We can't and shouldn't turn back, but we should exert a more thoughtful, deliberate approach to knowledge so that at the end wisdom itself is not out the door. If we're talking about Socrates, we're talking about a relationship to knowledge, virtue, and wisdom. And those constants are part and parcel of what a deliberating society must have in its sights when it looks at how its children access knowledge.

James O'Donnell, a classicist and the provost of Georgetown University, is the author of Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace and the forthcoming The Ruin of the Roman Empire: A New History.
I was just talking to a young man who graduated from Georgetown and completed his first year at Harvard Law School last year, and I asked him what he had done this summer, and he answered, "Well, I was just working in Delhi all summer." I said let's slow down and ask when "just" would have been the right word to put in that sentence, as opposed to some form of, "I made this mighty pilgrimage halfway around the world; it was astonishing; I have to tell you about it." But instead he blithely goes off working on a project to help found a new law school in suburban Delhi with international faculty and so forth.

Chances are he didn't have a lot of time to put up his feet this summer and read Proust, and I am capable of regretting that. If I ask a question about intelligence and applied intelligence, it seems to me that I can find a great many measures of extraordinary success and functional achievement in the young people at Georgetown. So that's No. 1.

No.2 and No. 3 are the "howevers." The howevers are that the assiduous study of the written word and participation in the culture of the written word is undoubtedly under challenge, and I think we are a long way from being able to theorize and understand what a movement away from the normative culture of the written word will do to a society. You can get arguments that it is a culture that has made possible or facilitated the creation of relatively objective forms of knowledge, of practices of analysis, interpretation, and logic that are things of beauty on which we depend every day. At the same time, one needs to recognize that the written word, in the form that we know it, is a technology invented to achieve certain goals. It had its limitations as well as it strengths, and when it is competed with by other technologies that can do things never thought possible, it will necessarily move to a different place in the cultural organon.

My other "however" is the scientific and technical part of education. We can worry about the dumbing down of people who don't read Proust, but I worry at least as much about the people who don't need to study math or science in high school or university because somebody else will do that and I'd rather be a consultant at McKinsey where I don't actually have to know that stuff.

Both of these are sources of concern, and I think in both cases, we don't fully understand what the possibilities of the new are to match with the certain strengths that came to us from the old. A part of my book Avatars of the Word came about because in my electronic zeal of 15 years ago [when O'Donnell was vice provost for information systems and computing at the University of Pennsylvania], I said what I ought to do is go back and find the poor benighted people of the 15th and 16th centuries who were skeptical about print and show what silly fools they were as a way of showing what silly fools people are to worry about stuff now. What I found is that there were a fair number of people who had concerns and reservations about using the newfangled print technology. When you looked at their objections, they all made perfect sense. They were all smart and logical. We now don't see that because the thing they could not imagine in 1500 or 1550 was the sheer size, scale, and speed of communication that the new technology would bring about—size in particular, because humans are very bad at conceiving large quantities of anything. (That's why they have trouble understanding evolution; they can't imagine what a million years is like.) So, yes, there were costs brought to the face-to-face meditative community of the monastery in which people spent their whole lives meditating upon God's word, and monasteries probably haven't done as well in some respects in 1500 to 2000 as they did in 1000 to 1500. But the subset of monasteries called universities actually have had a pretty good run in the latter period. What the social forms are, what the practices are that will turn out to be functional—I don't think we are very good at imagining at this point.