Title: Interpreting Across the Abyss: A Hermeneutic Exploration of Initial Literacy Development by High School English Language Learners with Limited Formal Schooling
1Interpreting Across the Abyss A Hermeneutic
Exploration of Initial Literacy Development by
High School English Language Learners with
Limited Formal Schooling
Presentation at 2009 LESLLA Conference Low
Educated Second Language and Literacy
Acquisition Banff, Alberta, Canada Sept. 28,
2009 Jill Watson Department of Curriculum
Instruction, Second Languages Cultures
Education University of Minnesota, Minneapolis,
MN, USA wats0023_at_umn.edu
2- On Interpreting
- A. Antecedents of modern hermeneutics
- II. The Abyss
- A. Four Dimensions
- B. Interpreting Orality
- C. The New World of Literacy, Hyperliteracy
Digitacy - D. Political Epistemological Considerations
The gift of orality - III. An existential portrait of oral L2 learners
making the leap to literacy digitacy in US high
schools -
3I. Interpreting A Brief History of Hermeneutics
-
- Derives its name from Hermes, a god of the Greek
pantheon, who was charged with delivering
messages from the gods of Mt. Olympus for human
beings. Associated with eternal youthfulness,
volubility, creativity, trickery, duality,
diplomacy, fertility, prophetic power. - Aristotles Peri hermenia a treatise on what we
do when we are interpreting - Ancient Alexandria had a school of hermeneutics,
1st century BCE
4A. Antecedents of modern hermeneutics
- Schleiermacher, early 1800s
- Interpretation is a form of divination a
feminine art. - The point is not to document and record, but to
engage - the text (a book, an experience) in profoundly
creative - ways that allow new meanings to emerge and permit
- new understanding of the relationships between
things - and between people.
- Knowledge is never fixed, but is emergent and
evolving it takes a diviner, not a scientist, to
be able to read it.
5- Dilthey, late 1800s
- First to make the distinction between
- Geisteswissenschaften (Human Sciences) and
- Naturwissenschaften (Natural Sciences), and to
propose that study of each must be distinctly
appropriate to each. - Diltheys argument because human lives are
constructed historically, with unique and
evolving human consciousness, we cannot
understand the meaning of human experience using
scientific methods. - Nature we can explain, but humans we must
understand. - Understand verstehen. Contains the notion of
standing for, standing in proximity, intimacy of
experience as prerequisite for understanding
human experience.
6- Husserl, early 1900s
- Refuted the new positivist movements in human
science research. -
- His doctrine of intentionality describes the
way in which the world is always already present
in our thinking, and we are always present in the
world, so, given this intersubjectivity, we cant
be objective about worldthere is no world as
utterly separate from us. - Heidegger, mid 1900s
- Since Aristotle, Being has been the focus of
philosophy, but what is Being? Heidegger
people can only talk about being in time, in the
world as historical beings (Dasein). As such,
knowledge about humans, like human being itself,
is always finite and contingent, subject to
disclosure and concealment.
7- Gadamer, pre-eminent scholar of hermeneutics of
the 20th century - Wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein
- effective historical consciousness the
essential openness of history and interpretation - On method It is impossible to decide on a
method of inquiry in advance, since what is being
investigated always holds part of the answer to
how it needs to be investigated.
8Gadamer, continued
- Prejudice acknowledging our fore-structures of
understanding - Fusion of horizons an essential openness to
understanding the other with his/her own
forestructures, and to seeing how my identity is
in fact a function of relationships in history
and culture that always pre-exist me.
9- As a hermeneutic project, this study aims to
- 1. unpack some of the epistemological and
teleological orientations inherent in an
encounter between primarily oral students and the
world of hyperliteracy, already itself in
transition to a world of digitacy.
10- 2. Speak divinitively, intersubjectively, from a
position of long and embedded proximal intimacy.
As a teacher in a high school for language
learners without literacy or prior schooling, I
am a participant hermeneut. - 3. Inspire new ways of seeing and understanding
the experience of older students with limited
formal schooling, learning language and literacy
at the same time, in a US high school context.
11- 4. Acknowledge the fore-structures of my
understanding in attempting to interpret across
the abyss - A highly educated, extremely literate person
engaging in scholarly work, reading madly and
referencing the work of other scholars,
presenting the fruits of my scholarly work to
other extremely literate, academically proficient
people, in a conference context whose purpose and
structure is completely foreign to oral culture,
in order to understand and articulate what it is
like to live orally, without print, without words
that outlast their utterance, and to make the
transition from orality, to academic literacy, to
digitacy, all in one lifetime.
12- II. The Abyss How great is it?
- Fully literate persons can only with great
difficulty imagine what a primary oral culture is
like. Try to imagine a culture where no one has
ever looked up anythingthis is an empty
phrase, with no conceivable meaning. Without
writing, words as such have no visual presence.
They are sound. You might call them back,
recall them. But there is nowhere to look for
them. They are occurrences, events. - -Walter Ong (1982). Orality and Literacy The
technologizing of the word, p. 31.
13B. Interpreting orality
- Ong, Walter. (1982). Orality and literacy The
technologizing of the word. London New York
Routledge. - Three stages of orality
- 1. Primary the orality of cultures untouched
by literacy - Residual traces and practices of orality that
remain even as literacy becomes more meaningful
and important - 3. Secondary the kind of orality that arises in
highly literate, technologized cultures, for
instance telephone, radio, television, recorded
music. Orality that depends on writing and
technology. -
14A long distance to travel While most areas of
the earth have by now had some exposure to
writing, still we must face the reality that in
industrialized societies many of our older L2
students come to us directly from cultures
characterized by a very high degree of residual
orality. Minneapolis, MN, USA Somali, Oromo,
Hmong, Karen, Liberian, Indigenous people of the
Americas
15Ongs Characteristics of Oral Mind
- Its all about memory The residual orality of
a chirographic culture can be calculated to a
degree from the mnemonic load it leaves on the
mind, that is, from the amount of memorization
the cultures educational procedures require. -
16Contrastive interpretation with examples
- A look at Ongs 8 psychodynamic characteristics
of oral mind - Contrasting tasks required of successful high
school student in US.
171. Additive rather than subordinative
- The oral mind strongly favors additive
constructions (andand, rather than thus,
while-- subordinating structures). Oral
structures look to pragmatics (in the context of
speaking), while written structures turn to
syntactics, elaborate and fixed grammars which
rely heavily on subordination. (p. 39)
18US high school context
- Standards of good writing required for academic
success specifically reward subordinative writing
and punish additive, run-on constructions.
192. Aggregative rather than Analytic
- Clumps of fixed expressions, not so much simple
integers as clusters of integers. The sturdy
oak, the brave soldier, the beautiful princess,
the glorious revolution of October. - Need to be kept in tact, it has taken a long time
to establish them, and there is nowhere outside
the mind to store them. Without a writing
system, breaking up thoughtthat is, analysisis
a high-risk procedure. (p. 38)
20US High School contrast
- Repeating expressions others have used may be
plagiarism, at the very least it is not good,
inventive writing - Coining phrases denotes a good writer.
- Analytic thought is the hallmark of the
successfully educated person.
213. Redundant or copious
- Repetitiveness aids in comprehension, allows
audience to remember, allows speaker to collect
next thought. - Rhetoricians called this copia fluency,
fulsomeness, volubility. Sparsely linear thought
as occasioned by writing is an artificial
construction. Redundancy is much more natural to
human thought. (p. 39)
22US High School context
- Repetitiveness is to be avoided in tight academic
writing. - Focus of key academic standards being able to
condense large amounts of information to the
basic main idea - Emphasis on summaries, economy of expression.
- Bullet-point mentality
234. Conservative, Traditionalist
- In the absence of writing, knowledge must be
repeated or it will be lost. Great energy is
expended in oral cultures in saying over and over
again what has been arduously learned over the
centuries. - Hence, the figure of the wise elder has great
importanceimparter of sayings which constitute
the core knowledge of the culture. - Eg. It is often said that every time an elder
dies in Oromo society, a library is lost - This mindset discourages intellectual
experimentation. In typographic cultures,
storing knowledge outside the mind downgrades the
importance of the wise elder repeater of the
past, in favor of a younger discoverers of
something new. - Oromsis, iRep Oromia, Being Oromo in the States.
Downloaded Sept. 20, 2009 from opride.com/oromsis.
24US High School contrast
- New discoveries scholarship, inquiry
- New technologies elders are behind the times
- The individual reader is said to be constructing
meaning from the text - Thematic experimentation is encouraged and
rewarded - Anecdote My best day as a teacher is when the
students take over the class.
255. Close to human lifeworld
- All knowledge is conceptualized and verbalized in
reference to the lifeworld, even the objective,
alien world is reinterpreted according to the
known lifeworld. - Oral mind includes no statistics or abstract
lists. Note genealogies (the begats) are lists
but entirely concerned with lived history. No
such thing as trade manuals or how-to books
skills are transmitted by apprenticeship (even in
textual cultures, this is common), relying on
observation and practice and very little
verbalization. (p. 42)
26US high school contrast
- Anecdote In a classifying exercise in science
class, students are asked to sort pictures of
sporting goods with a capital letter attached to
each one according to whether it is done indoors,
outdoors, or both. - The science teacher goes through the exercise,
giving the correct answers. - Ice skating is classified as outdoors, despite
the account of a newcomer student that he has ice
skated indoors. - Tennis is classified as outdoors, despite an
adult describing the work of her husband tennis
pro indoors all winter. - The point Arbitrariness, unreality of
definition. Teacher I know you can do that
one outdoors, but well just call it indoors.
Also note the teacher has and claims the
authority to override the truth of experience,
and newcomer LFS ELL students accept it.
276. Agonistically toned
- Oral or residually oral cultures strike literates
as highly agonistic in their verbal performance
and their lifestyles. - Writing allows abstractions that disengage
knowledge from the arena of human struggle,
separating knower from known. In orality,
knowledge is embedded in the lifeworld, keeping
it within the context of struggle. Thus it is
common to engage others in verbal debate, also
bragging, parading ones exploits, flyting
(reciprocal name calling), the dozens, joining,
sounding (insulting anothers mother),
celebrating physical behavior, descriptions of
violence. - On the other side of the same coin fulsome
praise, celebrating glory of a hero or community.
What strikes the literate as insincere,
flatulent, and comically pretentious is the
natural product of highly polarized, agonistic,
oral world of good and evil, virtue and vice,
villains and heroes.
28US high school contrast
- Classrooms and hallways in newcomer high school
settings often drive teachers crazy because of
the verbal noise, volume, volubility, many people
speaking at once, even when the teacher is
speaking - Even the level of volubility in the British
parliament is considered inappropriate in US
political and school settings - Increasing medication of students, especially
boys, whose behavior needs to be modulated in
order for them to fit into school culture - Goal is to maintain an atmosphere of quiet work
and purpose, without passion or disruption
297. Empathetic participatory rather than
objectively distanced
- Learning or knowing means achieving close,
communal identification with the known. - Writing sets up the condition for objectivity in
the sense of personal disengagement or
distancing. Communal soul in oral culture as
opposed to individual soul in literate culture.
(p. 45) - Einstein What does a fish know about the water
in which he spends his life? (literate scientist
perspective.) Who knows more about water than a
fish? (oral perspective)
30US High School contrast
- Rugged Individualism vs. communal soul In
literature classes, strong emphasis on individual
reflection, making your own meaning - Scientific Stance vs. participatory
understanding Objectivity is required in
science and math
318. Homeostatic
- Oral societies live in a present whose
equilibrium is maintained by sloughing off
memories no longer relevant to the present
conditions. - Eg. Oral historians and W. African griots leave
out parts of genealogies and histories that dont
support the communal order of today (as opposed
to written records which show the situation of
the past). British vs. oral records in Ghana, of
land ownership. - Oral cultures uninterested in definitions such as
provided by dictionaries, elucidating layers of
old meanings. What matters is the functionality
of expressions and meanings todaydo they enhance
the social order we are living in now, which is
preferred to a factual account which might damage
or stir things up. - This principle strongly favors the winner, oral
culture encourages triumphalism.
32US high school contrast
- Fantastically heavy emphasis on defining words
and concepts, the act of definition - Examples and non-examples, True and False
- Distilling essential characteristics
- Copying vocabulary and definitions of terms
- Dictionary entriesmultiple and confusing
- History claims of legitimate grievance model
- The coin story why save money? To learn
history.
339. Situational rather than abstract
- Ong on Luria Oral noesis does not think in
purely artificial abstractions - Syllogisms (self-referential logic)
- Purely abstract categories, such as grouping
according to type rather than function (eg.
hammer, saw, log, hatchetall are alike say oral
folk). - If asked to identify shapes such as a circle or
square, oral people say the name of an objects,
eg. plate, those with some schooling say circle.
Categorical thinking is uninteresting,
trivializing. (p. 49)
34US High School Contrast
- Largely consists in categorizing information, in
preparation for - Standardized education / assessments
- Move to standardize all knowledge National Core
Standards - Ability to learn and produce evidence of learning
without reference to experience is rewarded
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38Summary Interpreting Oral Noesis
- The mind (heart, spirit) develops distinctly in
an oral environment versus a high literate, or
digital environment. (Wolf, McCluhan, Ong,
Luria) - What it means to be intelligent in orality is
different than what it means to be intelligent in
literacy, which is different than intelligence in
digitacy.
39C. The New World of Literacy, Hyperliteracy,
Digitacy More is going on with literacy than
just acquiring a skill
40- You have to die (lose orality) to attain new
life (literacy). - There is hardly an oral culture or
predominantly oral culture left in the world
today that is not somehow aware of the vast
complex of powers that is forever inaccessible
without literacy. This awareness is agony for
persons rooted in primary orality, who want
literacy passionately but who also know very well
that moving into the exciting world of literacy
means leaving behind much that is exciting and
deeply loved in the earlier oral world. We have
to die to continue living (Ong, p. 15).
41Concerns over the costs of literacy are not
unknown in western tradition
- In the Phaedrus, Plato describes the inferiority
of writing as opposed to speaking, as writing is
helpless, cannot defend itself, always gives the
same answer when asked a question. - A truly intelligent person possesses the nimble
wit required for excellent oral discourse.
42- Platos concerns that a new technology will make
people less intelligent are echoed in our time..
43The Atlantic, July/August, 2008
44The Atlantic, Nov. 2008
45From Orality to Literacy and Hyperliteracy
The journey our students must make from
46School in Dadaab refugee camp, Kenya
47- To the palaces of literacy we are accustomed to
in the Western academic tradition
48The George Peabody Library, Baltimore, MD
49Gibert Jeune bookstore, Paris
Barnes Noble bookstore, US
50- So even as, in the U.S., hardly a day goes by
without renewed calls to address literacy
problems now understood to reach to secondary
school levels
51Education Week, Sept. 25, 2009
52- Still, in a high school with at least 25 of
students unable to read at a second grade
level, we find a graveyard in the basement
53Obsolete books Roosevelt High
School Minneapolis, MN Sept. 2009
54- Yet our enormous faith in literacy provides us
with the comforting assertion that even if we
destroy our environment and none of our digital
technology works anymore, we will still have
books, and happy reading time, in a
post-apocalyptic world
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56The Myth of Literacy
- Social Literacy is able to solve all manner of
societal problems - Actualization Literacy (leading to literature)
represents a unique actualization of full human
potentiality - Critical Empowerment Literacy allows us to name
the world and become empowered - Medical Illiteracy is a disease that must be
eradicated.
57- What all of this points to
- The crisis of literacy in our hyperliterate
world is not really a crisis of literacy but a
crisis of relationship. - Between humans and nature
- Between nations
- Between worldviews
- Between people
- Smith, D.G. (1999). Modernism, hyperliteracy and
the colonization of the word. In Pedagon Human
sciences, pedagogy and culture. Pp. 61-72. New
York Peter Lang.
58D. Political Epistemological Considerations
- Epistemological crises
- Logic of Empire
591. Epistemological Crises in the West
- Postmodern, Feminist, Systems Studies Tracing
the legacies of Literacy Scientism - (Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Kristeva, Bourdieu,
Polkinghorne) - Phonetic alphabet pre-requisite to scientific
method - Reading, writing, isolation (you talk together,
you read and write alone) - S/O split literacy and scientism as
prerequisite for ontological schism of
enlightenment age - Facts are determinable if you use the correct
method to ascertain them - Facts truth
60The Spirit of the Enlightenment
- Flower in a crannied wall
- Flower in the crannied wall, I pluck you out
of the crannies, I hold you here, root and all,
in my hand, Little flowerbut if I could
understand What you are, root and all, and all
in all, I should know what God and man is. - -Alfred Lord Tennyson
61Psychic Profile of Western CulturesAlthough
surrounded by libraries, bookstores, cell phones,
Blackberries, I-Pods, we are plagued by
- Exhaustion bitterness
- Growing sense of futility (depression, suicide,
civic violence) - Loss of meaning and sense of purpose
- Anomie, alienation from others, traditional bonds
- An awareness of our own psychoses must temper
our eagerness to export this developed way of
life, underwritten, literally, by a magical
belief in the power of literacy, science, free
markets, and academic degrees attained by
achievement on standardized tests.
622. The Logic of Empire
- Post-colonial post-modern studies provide an
account of the effect of epistemological and
political empire on subjugated peoples - Said, Bhabha, Nandy, Mazrui, Spivak, Zizek
63Literacy, Hyperliteracy, Neocolonialism,
Globalization The Best of All Possible Worlds
- Kants logic of Emancipative Reason Those who
do not choose freedom are living in perpetual
immaturity - Hegel European civilization has transcended
culture, has created a Universal Culture of
Freedom through Reason. Others have quaint,
charming, or violent cultures, but they are
primitive, not yet developed, as the West is. - Fukayama proclaims the End of History U.S.
democracy buttressed by free-market economy
represents the culmination of History, a
transcending of the vicissitudes of developmental
history.
64The persistent violence of standardization
- Theweleit (Male Fantasies) The holocaust is not
an aberration but rather the logical result of
the Enlightenment - Dussel The Myth of sacrificethe flipside of
the Myth of Emancipative Reason. Those who do
not accept Western rationalism remain in a
primitive state and may be (must be) sacrificed
in service of global progress. - Deloria Although American society in a way
accepts the relativity of things as a leveling
device between comparative values, white society
has, on the whole, acted as if all things should
be related to its values only (p. 25). - Habermas (1984), a child of Frankfurt School
critical theory, persists in contrasting the
unreflective mode of mythical thought, as
exemplified by his essentialized portrait of the
Azande people of Africa, with occidental
rationalism that is a prerequisite to his theory
of communicative action. The putative message
every one can play, if they play our game by our
rules. - Smith (2006) Since the advent of The 1492
World System (Amin, 2001), the sacrificing of
people, by way of the murder and embalming of
their essential values as expressed in forms of
community and communication, takes place as a
largely unquestioned matter of course in Western
education (The specific challenges of
globalization for teaching and vice-versa. )
65Summary Legacies of Empire
- Literacy Scientism Objectivity
- European Culture is Universal, transcends Culture
- New Global Economic order requires uniformly
educated students to meet requirements of global
markets
66- The tacit message of neo-imperialism
- Those who do not or can not comply with the
noble gifts of enlightened academic scientism
employed in service of global market concerns
must be sacrificed, and its ok to do so.
67Whats missing in all of this a true
conversation
- You cannot have a conversation if one partner
has no desire for it or if his/her worldview does
not value it necessarily - What are the implications for a globalizing world
of traditions that are exclusive in their
self-interpretation, wherein being in
conversation with Others does not imply the
possibility of change within ones own
worldview? - (Smith, 1999, p. 108, italics added)
68The one-sided conversation that American
education is having with LFS oral L2 learners is
an expression of schools as agents of
neo-Hegelian empire
- Academic English is like medieval Learned Latin
the mother tongue of no one, unrelated to
anyones life - Standardized Tests embalmed knowledge
- Primary mode of instruction
- Definitional
- Abstract
- Factitious
- Determinate, sealed gt like the fate of oral
culture trying to acquire these norms
69III. Existential Portrait of students from
strongly oral cultures in their encounter with
academic hyperliteracy in US high schools
70Survival studentingPlaceholders
- Filled with ug, the younghede Tenderis groped his
way along the downsteepy path toward the cosh
wherein dwelled the feared spirit-person.
Squit-a-pipes that he was, Tenderis found
negotiating his way through the eileber and
venerated dway-berries very teenful in the nyle.
He tripped over zuches spiss with maily malshaves
that made him quetch at their touch. - (S.K. Sperling, Poplollies and Bellibones A
Celebration of Lost Words, pp.33, 35.) - 1. What was Tenderis emotion as approached the
cosh? - 2. Why was it difficult to go through the eileber
and dway-berries? - Define these terms younghede, teenful, maily
71- The Point LFS preliterate L2 learners develop
incredible skills at figuring out what might go
in what place, without actually understanding the
content. - The Metapoint Teachers and systems must not
allow the appearance of proficiency to outweigh
real proficiency. It is our lack of appropriate
preparation and pedagogy that allows, indeed
requires this type of studenting.
72Survival Studenting FakingIn the absence of
true meaning, students adapt by appearing to
understand and participate in order to satisfy
the teacher and get a grade
- Faking accomplishments
- Eg Teacher who got only one or two wrong?
Student who didnt complete any at all raises his
hand proudly. - Faking understanding what is going on
- Eg Responding to intonation raised voice
with right? Or dont you? Students just say
yes or no to comply. - Copy whatever looks like the activity we are
doing. - Eg Copying is perhaps the most pervasive form
of instruction used by underprepared teachers
in sheltered classes, both in lessons, and by
having students copy portions of answers in notes
to use in tests.
73- Pretending is the fate of the sacrificial
student, ghettoized to receive surface level,
tokenistic standards-based content instruction
that looks good only in curriculum guides and to
outside evaluators of the content area, but is
not meaningfully taught to students whose
deficits in language proficiency (L1 and L2), and
in cognitive academic preparation present an
incredible abyss between their actual state and
the subject matter we pretend to teach them and
they pretend to learn. - Basic telos underwriting all this It is the
authority of western education underwritten by
epistemological supremacy assumptions and the
weight of empire that compels teachers and
students to participate in the faking.
74Consequences of Literate Academic Culture in US
High Schools for those of Primary Oral Culture
- Mnemonic Plague Only written knowledge counts
(eg. citations) leads to devaluing of elders,
traditional knowledge - Forced choice between a better life encrypted
in academic literacy, and a life embedded in
authentic relationships - Forced to copy or fail, pretend or admit
ignorance - Forced to abandon the relationship between
language and meaning - Forced to see others as means to my ends (Western
globalization model).
75Hyperliteracy, Academic Language Embalming the
Living
- Words and concepts, and the discourse and
pedagogy that surround them, are treated like
Tennysons flower in the crannied wall, like
specimens in formaldehyde. - American education in its current manifestation
as a product of eurocentric scientism requires
that ideas and words be immobilized in this way.
Standardized tests are the penultimate expression
of preserved, embalmed knowledge the text
booklets are their caskets, the vaults where they
are locked for security are their vaults, the
results are the students and schools academic
epitaphs, published in papers for the public to
decry and to mourn. - Hermeneutically understoond, people who journey
from orality to literacy have to undergo the
process of embalming while they are living.
76Academic Rigor (mortis)where the right
questions and answers are predetermined by a
state or national boardversusAcademic
Vigorwhere learning is embedded in lived life,
and life is always considered interpretable
77The gift of oralityConsidered against the
psychoses of the occidental world, the noesis of
orality brings the possibility of a healing gift
much of what we in the academic cultures lack is
precisely what oral cultures possess. This
thought leads to a recognition of the pragmatic
and ethical imperative of deep reciprocity
The command to love your enemy (the other) is
not only about doing the right thing but also,
perhaps mostly, a statement of our own need the
oral other has noetic knowledge that the West is
suffering from a lack of, and requires to survive.
78The hermeneutic path the middle way
- Gadamer reconciling tradition and the presence
of the new - There is no responsible choice other than to
teach literacy and academic knowledge to all who
come to live in this society. Literacy does make
a big difference. Groups like LESSLA are devoted
to this goal. - But we must do it in a way that makes sense.
- We learn more about what makes sense for the
newcomers by reflecting on the existential nature
of oral cultural experience in its encounter with
literacy. That is, we learn about the weaknesses
and fallacies of our own instructional designs by
noticing how they are received by those who are
previously untouched by a cynical, distanciated
relation with knowledge and experience.
79A Two-Way Conversation
- We are not just teaching our older, limited
formal schooling, preliterate students-- They are
teaching us.
80An intersubjective, valence-structured
educational orientation suggests itself
- On the one hand, we have a responsibility to
teach in the most effective, humane way, so that
HS newcomers have a fair chance at practical
survival in a world of hyperliteracy. -
- On the other hand, we have the opportunity to
cultivate our ability to be open and attuned,
that we may learn about spontaneous, embedded,
orally-toned ways of being, to give our
hyperliterate selves a fair chance at our own
ontic survival.
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