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Nadin, Mihai, 1938-

"The Civilization of Illiteracy"

This, too, was a long process, with
many intermediate steps, which eventually resulted in the
generalized system of education we now have in place, and which
reflects the separation of church and state. Liberal education
and all the values attached to it are the foundational matrix of
the current system of general education.
If you give someone a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. If
you give someone an alphabet, every problem becomes one of
literacy and education-this would probably be a good paraphrase,
applicable to the discussions on education in our day. It should
not follow, however, that with the World Wide Web, education is
only a matter of on-line postings of classes and the accidental
matching of educational needs to network availabilities. In our
world of change and discontinuity, the end of literacy, along
with the end of education based on literacy, is not a symptom,
but a necessary development, beyond on-line studies. This
conclusion, which may appear to be a criticism of the digital
dissemination of knowledge, might seem hasty at this point in
the text. The arguments to follow will justify the conclusion.
"Know the best"
Resulting from our self-constitution in a world obsessed with
efficiency and satisfaction, the insatiable effort to exhaust
the new-only to replace it with the newer- puts education in a
perspective different from that opened by literacy.


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