I’ll bring this article up in class tomorrow when we discuss “Why Johnny Can’t Read”.
“Socrates’ Nightmare,” by Maryanne Wolf (2007) http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/06/opinion/06iht-edwolf.4.7405396.html
Lending its voice to Socrates and Proust, and considering sociologies and materialities of composition, the digital transition, early literacy, and developmental neuroscience, this “article” is also superbly short, requiring not longer than three minutes to read or one minute to skim.
It will probably take longer to read this bit of Heidegger’s that I’m adding as a focal epigraph:
[M]an today is in flight from thinking. This flight-from-thought is the ground of thoughtlessness. But part of this flight is that man will neither see nor admit it. Man today will even flatly deny it. He will assert the opposite. He will say–and quite rightly–that there were at no time such far-reaching plans, so many inquiries in so many areas, research carried on as passionately as today. Of course. And this display of ingenuity and deliberation has its own great usefulness. Such thought remains indispensable. But—it also remains true that it is thinking of a special kind. (45-46)
Heidegger, Martin. Discourse on Thinking. 1959. New York: Harper and Row, 1966. Print.