COMMUNICATION AND SOCIAL CHANGE
Communication theorists maintain that periods of human social change correlate with changes in communications technologies. The human being and his brain have remained essentially the same for unimaginable stretches of time, because biological change is evolutionary change, which takes place over millions of years.
But changes in communications, we have seen, can occur very rapidly, within a single lifetime. Such communication changes have brought about social changes that seem to fundamentally alter the kinds of learning that our brains must adapt to.
They also alter our perceptions of nation, society, family and values. Can you think why this would happen? Let's take one example. The invention of printing made possible à transition from oral to literate societies.
Before printing, most people were illiterate:
it wasn't expected that everyone should be able to read and write, because the materials for reading and writing were not available cheaply and plentifully. Books were handwritten and illustrated by hand, and very precious because there were no cheap copies.
It was printing that made the idea of universal literacy feasible. It was printing that led to the expectation that every human being should be able to read and write, and attend school !
Earlier, when the transmission of knowledge was oral, the idea of "distance education" was unimaginable. Both teacher and taught had to be physically present, and each teacher had only a few pupils; knowledge was imparted through interaction between teacher and taught, and perhaps this is what gave rise to the guru-shishya parampara, or the Socratic mode of education through dialogue.
(Today we can return to oral education and combine it with distance education, because of the availability of media that carry the spoken word across distances: the radio and television!) When education (and communication) was primarily oral, there was a great emphasis on memory, and speech skills.
Memory was the technology that preserved information and passed it on from generation to generation, in the absence of books, and audio or video cassettes, CDs and DVDS. Both a grammar of Sanskrit (by Panini) and a dictionary of Sanskrit, the Amara Kosha, have been preserved in this way for generations by inemorization, for example.
This is why it was important to memorize things accurately. Speech was the medium through which information was passed on; so it was important to recite what you knew clearly and exactly.
The importance of memorization in education has steadily decreased, as we depend increasingly ori books and reference documents, and calculators and cell phones, to store information such as facts and figures, or phone numbers and addresses.
0 Comments