People of a television culture need “plain language” both aurally and visually, and will even go so far as to require it in some circumstances by law. The Gettysburg Address would probably have been largely incomprehensible to a 1985 audience.

Printing links the present with forever. It carries personal identity into realms unknown.

But it is much later in the game now, and ignorance of the score is inexcusable. To be unaware that a technology comes equipped with a program for social change, to maintain that technology is neutral, to make the assumption that technology is always a friend to culture is, at this late hour, stupidity plain and simple.

We can make the trains run on time but if they are not going where we want them to go, why bother?

At its best, schooling can be about how to make a life, which is quite different from how to make a living.

The effects of technology are always unpredictable. But they are not always inevitable.

As a culture moves from orality to writing to printing to televising, its ideas of truth move with it.