It is a very easy game to play, showing that there is never anything new in complaints about What is the world coming to? But I could not resist the following quote from Sesame & Lilies:
There are masked words droning & skulking about us in Europe just now, - (there never were so many, owing to the spread of a shallow, blotching, blundering, infectious “information,” or rather deformation, everywhere, & to the teaching of catechisms & phrases at schools instead of human meanings)
Or this one:
You might read all the books in the British Museum (if you could live long enough), & remain an utterly illiterate, uneducated person; but if you read 10 pages of a good book, letter by letter, - that is to say, with real accuracy, - you are for evermore in some measure an educated person
They sound just like the complaints made nowadays about how the internet & the World Wide Web provide information rather than wisdom or knowledge, Y destroy the capacity for concentration & real thought
David Aaronovitch wrote a robust counterblast to all this recently
He ended with the thought that the challenge is to improve searching skills, perhaps even via a GCSE
It often surprises me how ill-informed people are about the finer points of search engine syntax. Mind you, it is not easy to learn, without a book or a tutor
When the university first went on line, the Library offered free courses: How to improve your internet search techniques (no Google, or even www then). I signed up, but somehow found myself in with a group of astronomers/cosmologists
Now, said the tutor, brightly, put in a search term to do with astronomy or cosmology & I will come round to talk about how you might get better results
Help! I do not know anything about them
Then inspiration struck
I typed in Big Bang
Well, you know what happened
I am afraid I did not get too much out of that class. I spent most of the time musing over whether academic freedom of enquiry trumped any need for an institution in charge of so much 18+ testosterone to put some kind of filter on to its computers
