More Eagerly Sought When It Was Precious

More Eagerly Sought When It Was Precious - Melvyn Dubofsky, New York Times


Melvyn Dubofsky is distinguished professor emeritus of history and sociology at Binghamton University. He is the author of, among books, "Hard Work, the Making of Labor History.''

OCTOBER 22, 2012

Never before has a population -- nearly all of whom has enjoyed at a least a secondary school education -- been exposed to so much information, whether in newspapers and magazines or through YouTube, Goodlge, and Facebook.

A century ago, even the semi-literate attended lectures, had lectors read to them at work and knew their Shakespeare.
Yet I remain unsure that Americans today are more knowledgeable than their predecessors 100 years ago, many of whom were barely literate. A century ago nearly every city, town, and village had a lyceum or other venue in which visiting speakers regaled packed auditoriums with lectures on popular and abstruse subjects. In Brownsville, Brooklyn, a poor, largely East European Jewish neighborhood, the local Labor Lyceum scheduled talks on Marxism, socialism, anarchism, evolution, and religion as well as performances by talented musicians. There as a teenager the famous mid-20th century impresario Sol Hurok honed his talent for staging concerts and developing musical virtuosos.

Such venues existed even in such far off places as Lead, S.D., Butte, Mont., and Cripple Creek, Colo., often in conjunction with local trade unions or labor and/or socialist parties. In unionized cigar-making factories in Tampa, Fla. and New York City lectors, or readers, sat on high stools reading Shakespeare, Marx, Engels, Darwin, Hugo, Balzac, and Tolstoy as cigar rollers performed their skilled work. Decades later during the depths of the Great Depression and the emerging New Deal, the union leader John L. Lewis and President Franklin D. Roosevelt battled each with fierce oratory that drew on the Bible, Shakespeare, and other classical sources, knowing full well that their auditors would understand literary allusions and flourishes.

While teaching undergraduate college students for 50 years spanning the eras when knowledge derived from printed materials to the days of Wikipedia and the World Wide Web, I saw how contemporary advances in technology offered more serious and inquisitive students access to realms of knowledge previously unimaginable and unavailable.

But I also observed how such readily available knowledge led many more students away from serious study, the reading of actual texts, and toward an inability to write effectively and grammatically. It has let people choose sources that reinforce their opinions rather than encouraging them to question inherited beliefs. And it has diluted the shared bases of knowledge that a Lewis or a Roosevelt assumed bound their listeners together.

Having made citizens more and less knowledgeable than their predecessors, the Internet has proved to be both a blessing and a curse.