Professor Bertonneau Replies

Tom Bertonneau's recent articles for the Pope Center have drawn some criticism on the NAS blog. He has written this reply: The responses posted on this site to my recent Pope Center articles (“Can’t Read, Can’t Watch, Can’t Comprehend” and “Literacy Lost”) indicate a failure either to read my essays carefully or to understand them objectively.  Nowhere in either of the two recent articles, or in the three previous ones from 2009, for example, do I “blame students” for their shortcomings.  In the three previous articles, indeed, I go out of my way to say repeatedly that I do not blame students. In the two recent ones, I’m sure that I make it clear that where blame is assignable, I assign it to the culture, not to the students. I see the students as grossly cheated by the culture. In respect of “Can’t Read, Can’t Watch, Can’t Comprehend,” the respondent has not noticed any of my carefully placed qualifications – simple words like “many,” which bring a portion of students under the observation but exculpate the rest. The respondent has also not noticed that my first example has to do with East Lansing, Michigan, not with Oswego, New York, students. As for this: “I taught Oswego students film courses in foreign language department courses, sometimes with a separate component for students who only spoke English. I generally constructed courses where the films were based in a literary work so that the written word and the visual and auditory esthetic were compared and contrasted” – Well, so did I! This comment exemplifies a remark in the opening paragraph of the second recent essay, where I note that describing what students actually can or cannot do (especially the latter) drives many faculty-members into a kind of defensive emotional posture. As for this: “The problem may be that most faculty have not mastered the rhetoric of the visual, the auditory, hypertext, multimedia, etc., and therefore are less capable of even, themselves, truly fully comprehending the films which they analyze without the essentially-sensed dimensions of the rhetoric of the visual, etc” – The respondent should reread my discussions of The Maltese Falcon and Things to Come, which make it clear that if students understood the verbal aspect of the story, they would not make the mistakes that they do make concerning the visual aspect!  I am not sure what to make of the phrases “essentially sensed” or “rhetoric of the visual,” which sound like jargon to me. As for the comments on “Literacy Lost,” insofar as I understand them, they strike me as obtuse.  Postman, for example (I cite him on just this), mentions telegraph, photography, and mass-circulation newspapers as the original anti-literate technologies; in fact, he quotes from Henry David Thoreau on the probable culturally deleterious effects of the telegraph and the mass-circulation newspaper.  That was in 1848.  Movies, radio, and television are latecomers in the process of literacy-subversion.  Postman was unaware in 1985 of video games and cell phones. That books were relatively scarce in Lincoln’s time is beside the point. Books were central to acculturation in nineteenth century America and images were not; images were also much scarcer than books. That is the point, both Postman’s point and Ellul’s.  Also, the fact that people are literate does not mean that they cease participating in oral communication. Literacy, however, informs oral communication, which is what Postman is pointing out in his discussion of the Lincoln-Douglas debates.  The Lincoln-Douglas debates were oratorical performances by massively literate people addressed to a massively literate audience. Of course, I “accept [sort of] that we are in an information age,” just as I “accept” that the water is wet and winter is cold. That is to say, along with Postman and Ellul, I acknowledge that in our day the realm of the symbolic is a shrunken one; but, like them, I do not see in the development some imposition of Fate about which it is useless or unseemly to form a judgment. To imply as much is to mistake the empirical for the necessary, a basic philosophical error.  On the contrary, I regard the “information age,” as the writer euphemistically calls it, as a cultural and social disaster. I make it clear that, in my judgment, students do, in fact, need to know how to decipher images and other non-verbal media; but my evidence – and so too my experience – tell me that they can only do so on the basis, first, of a genuine literacy, of which the prevailing culture has largely robbed many of them.