Two responses: First, this piece makes me think of The Closing of the American Mind, by Allan Bloom. Highly recommended, it's more relevant than ever. Second,

Two responses: First, this piece makes me think of The Closing of the American Mind, by Allan Bloom. Highly recommended, it's more relevant than ever. Second, I am reminded of these passages from Justin E.H. Smith: > Yet the new social mores are not going to last forever either, and sooner or later the young people who memory-holed so many of the things I once thought would last forever are going to have to begin again the work of mining the past for tried-and-true moral sensibilities with the suppleness and vigor to help them navigate through this objectively problematic world, and to thrive. We might be depressed, but we are not without purpose: our purpose is preservation. The bubble of “false representation” is going to burst sooner or later, and when it does the value of our investment in old-style commodities will become clear again. And: > I have become convinced that the best way to respond to the threats posed by new technologies to the conventions of literacy that we continue to strive to maintain is to return to the practices of knowledge transmission that preceded literacy altogether and that characterized oral cultures: namely, education should involve the rote internalization of texts. Make kids memorize epic poetry, or the Bible, or King Lear, or the Upanishads, through recitation, adding a few lines each day over the course of several years. They do not even need to see the texts in written form, but only to hear them and speak them. Eventually one might make them compose epic poetry in their heads, too, like Solzhenitsyn biding his time in the Gulag by reverting to oral literature when his writing implements had been taken away, adding a few lines each day, accreting a world inside of himself.