Buch und Lesen: Historical Perspectives on Literacy and Schooling

Book learning, something that in medieval world was preserve of old men and monks, has become a universal experience of growing up in modern West. Historian Elizabeth Eisenstein (1979, p. 432) calls this gradually wrought shift possibly most fundamental social revolution in European history. Previous transformations laid groundwork. The evolution of writing from symbols representing things (pictograms) to symbols representing sound of human speech created syllabaries and alphabets. This made writing and reading easier and more accessible. Hence gained greater utility. The invention of paper, printing press, and substitution of wood pulp for rags in paper manufacture were both cause and effect of an expanding literacy. While alphabetization of oral language divides nonliterate and literate societies, becomes culturally significant only when a literacy consciousness is internalized by enough people beyond some priestly or civic elite. This necessitates perceiving as a valuable tool (Clanchy, 1981, pp. 14-45; Harman, 1970, p. 228). It means that writing-tablets, manuscripts, books-must, figuratively, be taken out of temples and monasteries where is treated as holy relics and be given some circulation among populace and its wider concerns. This process was accomplished only slowly before 17th century. Moreover, literate societies maintain vigorous oral tradition and memory arts alongside writing and its cultural and cognitive progeny. In formal education of literate societies, lectures and teacher talk coexist with book learning. Perhaps analogous to our contemporaries who deplore using hand-held calculators in schools because they fear loss of mastery of memorized arithmetic facts, Socrates reportedly preferred oral teaching to use of texts; he contended that reliance on writing promotes forgetfulness and appearance of mastery without substance. (For a review of question of literacy's relationships to mental abilities, see Scribner & Cole, 1978.) Plato argued that, compared to dialogue, reading's effects are shallower and less persisting. Being social, oral language is less easily evaded than are solitary activities of reading and writing. Where latter seem difficult, unrewarding, or excessively abstract, they may be avoided by technically literate persons. Moreover, even today, print is typically an incidental and auxiliary feature of a great many social situations and settings; there are many substitutes for and strategies for circumventing it (Levine, 1982). Thus, our disappointments with schooling for mass may be somewhat due to the gap between public literate tradition of school, and very different and indeed often directly contradictory private oral traditions of pupil's family and peer group (Goody & Watt, 1962; their term buch und lesen culture I adapted for my title). This is a broader view of sometimes troublesome relationships between oral