The Print Media

Jacob Riis' How the Other Half Lives

There are certain stereotyped notions about the intrinsic superiority of print as a medium that stultify our effectiveness in handling the newer media. A good example of this fallacy is implicit, for example, in writer Theodore White's remarks in a speech at an American Booksellers Association convention. "Bookselling," he said, "is the last bastion of American individuality against the inroads of mass culture which is no culture at all."

White went on to qualify this by admitting that the circulation growth of magazines that further individuality such as Harper's, Saturday Review, and The Reporter was a hopeful sign because "If you carry this trend to its logical conclusion, it will take people right into bookstores where they can find books that appeal to individual taste." (PW, 6/20/60, p. 36). Now it is important not to be panicked into equating the profit and loss statements of 1,000 or more booksellers with the state of American culture.

First of all, great, inspiring civilizations have existed without the medium of print. We still profoundly admire and emulate Periclean Athens and medieval Chartres, in both of which cultures wisdom and meaning were embodied in visual and oral forms. Secondly, when we praise print or express dismay at its decline as a medium, we usually refer to literary uses of the print medium. But Jacob Bronowski in Science and Human Values (Harper Torchbooks, 95c) and other writers have emphasized the self-defeating folly of the alienation of the humanistic from the scientific. Who is to say really that a brilliant treatise on atomic physics is less revealing of man's creative impulses than a book of poems?

The mystique of print is very near becoming a rallying point for all those who hate the non-esthetic aspects of American civilization, its business system, its engineering and science, its bureaucratic organizations. This is a pity because the humanistic imagination should transform these institutions rather than whimper idly by. I think this defeatism largely stems from too careless a consideration of why print achieved a wide measure of respect from the elite. Once we ask what it is in print we treasure, then we may find that other media share in these same qualities, and incidentally, we may find a strategy for approaching all the media in our classrooms.

Print, especially books, earned our respect because it was the first example of mass production and it was compatible with quality. The first "interchangeable parts" after all were the fonts of printing type. The assembly line was foreshadowed when German craftsmen who were free of the restrictive regulations of the manuscript copyist guilds in other parts of Europe contrived to modify a wine press in such a way that multiple impressions of a text could be made. This freed the student from the tyranny of copying great texts and his professors' commentaries thereon; now the dullest student could in the silence of his study converse with the greatest sages. It is this widely diffused contact with greatness which began the tradition of respect for books.

Printing also boosted vernacular literatures and liberated political, economic, and technological energies through the succeeding centuries. It was because of what printing was instrumental in achieving-enhanced individuality, greater control over nature, maximized material abundance-that we respect books, not for some mysterious characteristic of hard covers. Now all these liberating things can be achieved by film and broadcasting and photojournalism as well. And an increasing number of books are not liberating at all, but just as stultifying as formula entertainment in other media.

So we must always remember that literacy is not exhausted, not even contained by a familiarity with books old and new. The standing criterion is always the same: Does this medium liberate the individualities inherent in these individuals, and does it do it without jeopardizing the future of that freedom and material abundance which makes individual growth possible in the first place. A cartoon by Jules Feiffer, a monologue by Mort Sahl, a film cartoon by UPA, a TV play by Tad Mosel, a newspaper column by James Reston, a magazine cover story, each in its own way can be every bit as liberating under certain circumstances as books. An ideal strategy for showing that literacy today must be a multi-media literacy is to try to connect many media in a single lesson or unit. I believe this can best be done with units, but it is certainly possible in chronological and genre surveys of literature if freshly conceived.

Scholastic Book Services has already tested a thematic program that deserves careful attention. It has prepared paperback collections geared to themes, and it has secured the talents of outstanding teachers and supervisors to prepare the study materials. All the books in a single unit center around a theme known to matter to adolescents, e.g., courage, self-understanding, family living. A unit includes forty copies of a new paperback unit anthology prepared especially for the unit; a forty-volume collection of (six different) books for group work; and forty books for individual enrichment; a 160-page Teacher's Notebook with complete plans for a twenty-five lesson program (from five to seven weeks' class time); ready-made quizzes, writing designs, reading placement tests, supplied in quantity for the students. All 120 paperbacks come in stiff paperboard bookcases, $44.50. The important thing about this imaginative device for using paperbacks is that it combines careful class and group instruction with individual differences. A teacher can be sure in this way of actually teaching every member of the class what is needed in common as well as capitalizing on the incentives of individual motivation.

If any criticism can be made of this approach for grades 8, 9, and 10, it is that the material chosen doesn't sound intellectually demanding enough for the upper grades. What we need there is an expansion of the concept of guided and free reading on more demanding subjects and including more inter-media analysis. For example, units could be prepared on major themes in American cultural history, e.g., the American West as myth and symbol, the comic tradition in America, the meaning of success, the split between the practical and speculative man in our intellectual life (businessman vs. artist), the idea of the dignity of the common man from Walt Whitman to Paddy Chayefsky, the adolescent becoming aware of the complexity of evil from Huck Finn to Holden Caulfield, the bizarre imagination from Charles Brockden Brown and Edgar Allan Poe to Ray Bradbury, the exciting discovery of the American land from Puritan times to the breathtaking photoessay by Ansel Adams and Nancy Newhall, This American Earth (Knopf, 1960), our compassion for the oppressed from the Indian captivity of Mary Rowlandson to Jacob Riis' How the Other Half Lives, the fight for equality from Bacon's Rebellion to Martin Luther King, the lyric imagination as embodied in the work of poets from Edward Taylor to Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost.

These come from the American experience; suitably complex themes can be found in British literature (a microcosm of Western Civilization) and in non-Western literatures-Russia, the Orient, Africa, Latin America. The use of theme-oriented paperbacks of differential difficulty is an important innovation as long as it is not hamstrung by timidity and too much deference to the mediocre. A climate of intellectual McCarthyism seems to be settling down over America today: One community bans Catcher in the Rye, another city banishes 1984 and the U.S. Commissioner of Education refuses to comment because he hasn't heard of it, and a paperback of modern poetry must not be purchased by an advanced English class because of Walt Whitman's sexuality.

English teachers, when they sing the praises of nonconformists and strong partisans of freedom in the curriculum, must not give their students reason to believe that courage is a textbook virtue. It will not be easy to stand up to the know-nothings, those simpleminded scoundrels who define patriotism as unquestioning acquiescence in the majority's prejudices or beliefs; increasingly as the Sino-Soviet threat bears down on us, it will be tougher and tougher to stick by a maturity in advance of the pack. But that is what teachers are for: to educate, by example if necessary. Timidity is not the only problem with this innovation in paperbacks. Paperbacks are the most profitable when appealing to lower medians; the lower the median the fewer the problems. As teachers we must demand that this not become a threat to the diffusion of difficult materials, for the tyranny of the majority and the corporation's pursuit of profit conspire in this instance to favor the bland and non-controversial.

The Public Arts: The Print Media
Author(s): Patrick D. Hazard and Mary Hazard
Source: The English Journal, Vol. 50, No. 1 (Jan., 1961), pp. 56-58
Published by: National Council of Teachers of English