Education
Details, details!
Marshall McLuhan (July, 1948, age 37). Finkelstein versus McLuhan.
My son, Eric, brought to my attention a slim volume of criticism on my books, Sense & Nonsense of McLuhan, by one Sidney Finkelstein. In it Finkelstein alleges a good deal of nonsense and it would appear no sense.
The lamenting and lamentable Finkelstein, is caught up with details. That’s not my bag. However, I cannot resist pointing out that on page 17 he gets a detail wrong himself. He writes, “Another great media revolutionist to McLuhan was Johann Gutenberg, who printed a Latin Bible from movable type in Mainz in 1437. (sic)“ Dates are not my strong point, but I think Finkelstein got that one wrong. I’m a word man not a numbers man, myself. For example, as Corinne keeps reminding me, I can never seem to remember the kids’ birthdays.
Me (February 2010, age 57). How important are the details?
The details would appear to be, although I am not an expert on the early book: 1436 is the year Gutenberg and his partner, Andreas Dritzehn, first started work on printing by movable type. And the Mainz bible was not printed until 1454 or 1455. But what does it matter 1436, 1437, 1454, 1455?
Mistakes in detail bothered McLuhan’s critics. Why? Scholars generally believe that errors in small things suggest the possibility of errors in big things. They reveal a failure in seriousness – that you do not care enough to get them right. And they worry about errors a great deal. One professor of mine once offered to pay a dollar (a dollar was worth a good deal more then than it is now) for every mistake we could find in one of his textbooks. It is amazing the number of errors you will find in any book, if you examine it closely.
In general Marshall McLuhan did not worry about details, although he could be a stickler for some details. For example in the 1970s he insisted that his students refer to the “divisions” of rhetoric rather than the “parts” of rhetoric. Details or facts, I seem to recall he once said somewhere, should never be allowed to interfere with the truth.
(More on McLuhan’s critics tomorrow.)
Do you sweat the small stuff? Is it small stuff?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Sidney Finkelstein. Sense & Nonsense of McLuhan, New York: International Publishers, 1968.
Inviting, confronting, and ignoring criticism
Marshall McLuhan (July, 1948, age 37). Everybody’s a critic!
Ted Carpenter is a breath of fresh air. With him at St. Michael’s Toronto is getting less parochial with every passing second. Last night he had my darling wife Corinne in stitches at dinner. He was lecturing he told us at the university on the sexual practices of the natives of Polynesia. Apparently he upset the tender sensibilities of one of the more prudish co-eds in the class, and she walked out in disgust. “No need to hurry,” he shouted after her, “there’s plenty of time to book your ship to the islands.” Between giggles Corinne remarked that perhaps Ted was too hard on the girl. I looked over at him. “See Ted, everybody’s a critic.”
Me (February 2010, age 57): Perhaps not everybody. But there certainly were a lot!
Ted Carpenter and Marshall McLuhan met at Toronto in 1948. They became close friends and worked together closely on the study of media in the 1950s and most of the 1960s. Carpenter was known for his volubility, an ability to rub people the wrong way, and a wicked sense of humour – a teacher at a Catholic college he built up according to Phillip Marchand, “the largest collection of books on the devil and diabolism in Canada.” Not surprisingly, he and McLuhan developed a large number of enemies at the university. Anyone who has taught at a university knows this is not hard to do, but Carpenter and McLuhan seemed to have had a gift for it. One of Carpenter’s favorite gambits, for example, was that when an enemy came in the common room and a chair was open beside him he would catch the man’s eye and at the same time, slowly tip the chair over. McLuhan preferred to ignore his critics. “Come on Ted,” he used to say, “if this is what we’re up against, we’re destined for kudos.”
And, of course, they were. (More on McLuhan’s critics tomorrow.)
How do you deal with your critics? Head on like Carpenter? Or forget about them, like McLuhan?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Phillip Marchand. Marshall McLuhan: The medium and the messenger, 1989, p. 124-125.
Look to the media
Marshall McLuhan (February 27, 1962, age 50). TV!
Every family’s got a drop-out, magazine’s like Life are in trouble, the auto industry is veering out of control, the textbook industry and our schools are being completely overhauled. Why do so few people see that these things and a great many more are directly attributable to the impact of TV!
TV is not the first medium to have entirely reshaped society and it will not be the last. But in many ways it is the most obvious. The book escaped me for years. I caught on to TV in seconds.
Me (February, 2010, age 57). What if he’s right?
Marshall McLuhan’s observation about TV suggests the connection between the rise of the internet and the decay of newspapers.
Extra! Extra! Read all about it! In Atlanta where I was early last month for a conference, the 5 star hotel I stayed in (thanks to the special deal the American Economic Association was able to arrange for its members) did not supply newspapers for its guests, as the big hotels do in Toronto. Their thinking being, I imagine that their guests would rather be on-line or in front of the TV. In Montreal the English language newspaper The Gazette is given away outside metro stations to commuters in the mornings and in the afternoons, but few appear to want to take a paper. Increasingly, the front page of the Gazette has become a showcase for advertisements, colour pictures and teasers about blogs and on-line stories. Some days, like last Monday, the lead story no longer leads on the front page.
The French seem to be lagging in the abandonment of the newspaper. The leading intellectual newspaper here is called Le Devoir. What English language daily would call itself Homework?
Are you more likely to get your news from TV, on-line, or from a newspaper? When the newspaper disappears, where will the radio morning shows get their stories?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
The Montreal Gazette, February 1, 2010.
Who should take the risks?
Marshall McLuhan (March, 1962, age 50). Risk is not for the young scientist!
Gordie Thompson, one of the boffins – one of the senior engineers, that is – in the research group at Bell, was telling me that as one of the old buggers he’s the one who has to be the guy who puts the breaks on, who slows things down, who is the sober voice of second thoughts. I told him, Gordie, you’ve got it all wrong. When it comes to scientific research, you’re the only one who understands the science who can afford to take risks, to make a big mistake. The boys in administration won’t take chances because they don’t understand the science. The young guys just out of graduate school are too busy worrying what will happen to them and their jobs if things don’t work out. Gordie, I said, you’re the one who has to do it. You understand what’s going on. You’ve already proved your worth. You can afford to get things wrong. So go out and take a chance. What if you turn out to be right?
Me (February, 2010, age 57). What if he’s right?
Marshall McLuhan’s genius was to be able to pick the counter-intuitive out of thin air, brush it off and get you to look at it and the world in a new way. The conventional wisdom says the old are the spokesmen for stasis. It’s the young you need to look to for change. McLuhan says no. Of those who can take risks in science the young aren’t strong enough in their position in their jobs, in their world to be truly creative.
What McLuhan says about science, I think applies equally to the Arts and every other area of life in which there is a discipline to be mastered. To hazard a prediction of my own, the people I would suggest you look to for the next truly innovative risky technical moves are the old: Margaret Atwood, Myrill Streep, Leonard Cohen, Stephen King, Stephen Hawking, David Susuki, Bill Gates …
Who are the risk takers in your business?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Philip Marchand, Marshall McLuhan: The medium and the messenger, 1989, p. 186.
Things change but we do not know it (continued)
Marshall McLuhan (November 18, 1961, age 50). The medium is invisible.
As I was saying no one sees the medium at work. It is invisible. It does its work on us and we go on differently, but do not see that everything has changed.
Me (January 2010, age 57). Another example?
PowerPoint has not only changed the world of work it has also dramatically changed the world of education. Consider this. Most lectures at universities – even in graduate school – are given using PowerPoint. Lecturers (or should I say PowerPointers) like it because they feel more in control of the lecture process. It gives them more confidence to have the slides at their command when they stand up to speak, say, for 1 to 2 hours in a large lecture hall. Students (the PowerPointed), however, also like it because it gives them more control over what they have to learn. How? PowerPoint typically reduces what students have to know for “the exam.” More and more, by tacit agreement between professor and student, what students are required to know is what is on the slides. And the slides reduce what students need to know. Conservatively, the maximum information you can reasonably get on a slide is 125 words. (Half the number of words you can fit on a single type-written, double-spaced 8½-by-11 inch page. But this is far in excess of the ideal of educational PowerPoint. The ideal is 5 to 7 bullet points each with no more than 5 to 7 words (The 5X5 rule or the 7X7 rule). The ideal reduces 125 words to 25 to 49 words a saving to students of 60.8 to 80 percent.
The medium of PowerPoint may be one of the more powerful and unseen forces that has driven the much-discussed decline in university education over the last generation. In education, unlike architecture or design, less may not be more.
Do you agree? Is PowerPoint enabling students to get by knowing less?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987, pp. 280-281.
The practical side of Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan (January 4, 1961 age 49). The President needs me
I don’t know what our President would do without me. Claude Bissell that is, the President of dear old Toronto University, not Ike, the President of the United States, who by the way I do not like. Claude has asked me to give his advisory group of senior academics the benefit of my views on the changes in higher learning necessitated by the electric age. It pains me to think of the changes sweeping through our leather-patched, tweed-ridden, and chalk-dusty world of which this august body is totally oblivious. No matter, it is my duty to tell them what they do not know. In short they are obsolete. I wonder how they will take the news.
Me (January 2010, age 57). I wonder?
Claude Bissell was one of Marshall McLuhan’s great supporters at U. of T. Both were professors of English and had known each other since the late 1940s. Bissell is said to have woken up to the brilliance and rising celebrity of McLuhan shortly after he had become President of the university. He was surprised on a speaking tour of American universities when the first question he was asked after one presentation was not about the university but about McLuhan: Could he explain the new theories of Professor McLuhan? Toronto, he realized, had an asset the value of which he and the school was unaware. How Bissell’s senior academic advisory group reacted to McLuhan’s presentation is not known. However, I would have liked to have been a fly on the wall at that meeting. The points McLuhan planned on making are almost certainly ones designed to raise the blood pressure of senior academics – even today – to dangerous levels. For example, he predicted that increases in information in the electric age will result in startling reversals of role for and within the university. For example: The ivory tower will become the city center. Students will become teachers. TV will replace the book in the curriculum.
This news – especially when presented in the opaque language of “changes in centre-margin roles” – McLuhan must have known would be met with considerable rolling of eyes and raising of brows among the assembled professors. And therefore it is understandable that at the same time as he agreed to Bissell’s request McLuhan also asked if he could make “an initial presentation to you” (that is Bissell.) For people who only know about Marshall McLuhan from the pages of Playboy, Wired, or Rolling Stone, this hard-headed, practical strategy will come as quite a shock. And even to those familiar with McLuhan’s books this may come as a shock. Marshall McLuhan the practical rhetorician? The sensible persuader? However easily forgotten, this is a part of McLuhan, too, and one from which we can all learn.
What presentation do you or someone you know have to make that would benefit by being preceded by an initial presentation to one or two key people?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Marshall McLuhan and George B. Leonard. “The Future of Education: the Class of 1989,” Look, February 21, 1967, pp. 23-25.
More on education at high speed
Marshall McLuhan (February 1960, age 48). The adolescent has been replaced by the teenager
Teachers are failing to teach because they insist on treating teenagers as if they were adolescents. (See Edgar Friedenberg’s fine book The Vanishing Adolescent.) Adolescent means the stage between childhood and adulthood. That stage no longer exists. Electronic media have abolished the adolescent. What we are left with is the teenager. An adult aged 13 to 19. I should know, several of them are underfoot at home. To paraphrase the familiar anecdote, take my teenager, please.
Me (December 2009, age 57). McLuhan underestimated the size of the problem
In The Disappearance of Childhood, Neil Postman argued that the electronic age has not only abolished adolescence it has robbed children of a great deal of their childhood. In the middle ages children were treated as adults as soon as they could speak with fluency, say, age 6 to 8. The print revolution caused childhood to be extended and adolescence added on because of the extra demands learning to read placed on young people in addition to learning to speak. Today, Postman argues electric media have undone the work the print revolution did.
What does this mean for the understanding of schooling? Basically, the problems of the teenager – disaffection and disengagement with traditional class room teaching, dropping out, illiteracy - will be found increasingly among older children.
Why do people keep on insisting that children and teenagers be book-learned in the age of digital and social media? You can try to keep twitter out the classroom but can you keep the classroom out of twitter?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Neil Postman. The End of Education: Redefining the value of school. New York: Vintage Books, 1995; 1996.
Education at high speed
Marshall McLuhan (May 1959, age 47). Consumers are now producers
As I was saying yesterday my efforts to enlighten the Winnipeg Ad and Sales Club about the new business rules in our electronic age were not entirely successful. If the only constant today is change, I told them, you will remember, it’s obvious that at the high speeds we are living at everyone is switching roles to keep up. This is not a prediction it is an observation. Just as producers are becoming consumers, the corollary is that consumers are becoming producers. They gave me a puzzled look. So I gave them something else to be puzzled about. What I asked do Alexander the Great and Winnie the Pooh have in common? Give up? They both have the same middle name.
Me (December 2009, age 57). What about in education?
“A lot of education,” says the writer of a letter to the editor of the Montreal Gazette, “takes place outside of school, and much it is self directed.” (Wednesday, December 16, 2009.) Marshall McLuhan would have agreed that most education takes place outside school, but I believe he would have disagreed with the idea that it is self-directed. In fact it is media-directed. The difference is profound and if true disturbing. (We continue the examination of education tomorrow. Hang on to your mortar boards.)
If most education today takes place outside the classroom, what is the content of the current curriculum? Who or what sets the curriculum? What do you think is the greatest difference between the education that goes on today inside and outside the class room?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987, pp. 252-255.
A Fitting Memorial?
Marshall McLuhan (March, 1970, age 58). The Coach House!
Now that I have The Coach House I don’t think I will ever be happy anywhere else. Unfortunately it seems I’m booked to be everywhere else this year. Thanks to my assistant Margaret Stewart’s help here is the full list of destinations: “the Bahamas [no, it will not better there], Washington, New York [no, I do not love NY), Montreal, Greece, St. Louis, Ottawa, and San Francisco [no, I will not leave my heart there].” On top of this more brain problems. The Dr Barnett has given me these blood thinners to take. Well I’ll take them, if I remember to. Don’t want a stroke. But no more operations. Look what happened last time. I’ve got to keep going, even if I have to go away to do it. Today, I don’t mind telling you, the medium is a mess. Can’t seem to find anything. Never mind I’ll make do with what’s at hand. Let’s see what errors I can find today in Culture is Our Business. Somehow the damn thing got published without being proof read. Got to run, now, I’ve got work to do.
Me (December 2009, age 57). An insult to Marshall McLuhan
Just a little more than two years earlier McLuhan’s year of triumph, academic 1967/1968, (which he had spent at Fordham University in New York City, where he had held a $100,000 Schweitzer chair in the Humanities) was interrupted in November 1967 by a tortuous ordeal. He had undergone brain surgery to remove a tumor. The surgery had been long and trying. And his recovery had been long and trying. He had suffered loss of memory and even now years later he was far from his old self. The photographic memory was gone, the energy for which he was famous was damped down, and his quirks were exaggerated. On a good day you could almost see the old McLuhan, but there were few good days.
McLuhan loved The Coach House. The question is did he deserve the Coach House? The Coach House in the 1970s was a small “seedy” building set back from the street. In the Spring of this year on a trip to Toronto I went to visit it. It was a pilgrimage of sorts I wanted to see for myself where McLuhan worked and where the famous Monday night seminars took place. What I found was a small, locked, run-down, garbage-strewn, windows-papered-over, lightless shack with a plaque on it proclaiming it the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology. In a comment on a previous post, Michael Edmunds, wrote that the University of Toronto and St Michael’s College had “little respect for McLuhan.” It would seem they wanted neither his papers nor his program. It is understandable that neither Toronto nor St Mike’s had the money to bid for McLuhan’s papers. It is less understandable that they would insult his memory by making a run-down 19th century garage his most visible memorial.
Is this right? Why is the University of Toronto intent on insulting the memory of one Canada’s most extraordinary thinkers this way?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
www.mcluhan.program@utoronto.ca
Home Sweet Home
Marshall McLuhan (May, 1969, age 57). A Coach House of my own!
I never thought I’d say this, but I’m glad to be back in Toronto. Of course, after my nightmare year in New York in academic 1967/68 what with the brain surgery and ‘the recovery’ it’s hardly a surprise that I’m reveling in the quiet and still delights of dear old Hog Town. While I was away Toronto University gave me a new office and my own building to house it and my Center for Culture and Technology in, the Coach House. It’s tucked in back of the Pontifical Center of Medieval studies, and close to all my favourite haunts: my old office at 96 St. Joseph, the coffee shop in the basement of the ROM and the bar on top of the Sutton Place Hotel. Yesterday was the official opening. No expense was spared for the party. My secretary Margaret Stewart told me the final damage was $382.58. The Toronto Star reported the event today with the head line, ‘Guru’ McLuhan boy at heart. And so I am. Which reminds me I promised to meet Tom Easterbrook at the Sutton Place bar at 5 pm for whiskey and cigars – don’t tell Corinne, my Doctors say no scotch, no cigars, but I’m tired of Doctors orders. I’m back, and at long last I’ve got something to celebrate, and at the present moment I feel like celebrating. Got to run, Tom’s awaiting.
Me (December 2009, age 57). At least it made him happy
McLuhan loved The Coach House at 39A Queen’s Park Crescent. It was his place. And he filled it with the things he loved, his books, piled everywhere, his rowing oar from Cambridge, his files. And it contained things he loved: a wonderfully-1960s floor-to-ceiling mural by McLuhan’s friend, who worked as a designer at Eaton’s, René Cera, The Pied Piper, and of course the Monday night Seminars, which were the high point in his week in the 1970s. Here he brought and spoke with the wise and wonderful – Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Buckminster Fuller, Eric Havelock, and Peter Drucker to name a few. The question is couldn’t the University of Toronto given him something better than the Coach House? Even in the Spring of 1969 the Coach House, which was built in 1828, was small, rundown, “seedy,” and, well, as Bette Davis would have said, “a dump.” (More on this tomorrow.)
Do you have a place of your own to work? Is such a place necessary to be creative and productive? What is the minimum necessary?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Virginia Wolfe, A Room of One’s Own, 1929.