Freedom Then

...Jennings summarizes the history of reading and writing methods, arguing that the printing press was the real motive force in the Renaissance cultural revival...

...He places reading in full psychological, historical, and sociological perspective...

...During the recent drive to register the disenfranchised of Selma, Alabama, a young Negro boy stood in the street with a placard that read: Stop Taxation Without Representation...

...At the end of the March on Washington in 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr...

...heaped scorn on their "fasting, praying, nonimporting, nonexporting, remonstrating, resolving, and pleading . . ." Many of the men who wrote these pamphlets were cast aside, branded as too moderate, called traitors to the American cause, when the colonies despaired of civil protest and took up arms...

...Perhaps in the present dispensation," Goodman concludes, "we should be as well off if it were socially acceptable for large numbers not to read...

...Most textbooks are written by amateur writers (in the worst meaning of the phrase) or by literary hacks (ditto) whose knowledge of the child's mind is in...

...On a less cosmic level, Paul Goodman has cast a cold eye on the idea that the schools' chief task is to teach reading...

...In 1764, the governor of Connecticut wrote, "This privilege [of not being taxed by a government that denies the vote] is of ancient date, and whenever it hath been encroached upon has been claimed, struggled for, and recovered...

...Our sensibilities, our very ways of perceiving the world, McLuhan argues, are being reshaped, and largely to the good, by the new electronic media which transcend the rigid linear patterns of print...

...The dangers as well as the advantages of print as a medium of communication are analyzed incisively...

...Rather, he suggests it is mass consumption and advertising which really require that everyone read—and these messages are of dubious benefit...

...These fourteen pamphlets, political broadsides against discrimination and disenfranchisement, were written by colonials who wanted no more than equal rights as English citizens...

...Otis blamed the moderates, in part, for the failure of moderation: "There has been a most profound and I think shameful silence," he wrote in 1764, "till it seems almost too late to assert our indisputable rights as men and citizens...

...On the other hand a Baptist preacher, calling the colonials "ye trifling patriots...

...Bernard Bailyn, the editor of these papers, points out that "mobs terrified the stamp agents into resigning and forced a repeal of the tax...

...said, ""We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and the Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote...

...Long before there was any question of revolution, the colonials were prepared to protest the abridgment of their civil rights, through petition to Parliament, demonstration in the streets, and boycott of English goods...

...ers, teachers, librarians—and publishers...

...The current struggle of the descendants of those "sooty Africans" to gain at last the equal protection of American law lends new relevance to these long dead letters of the Revolution, disinterred after 200 years of neglect...

...He argues that with movies, television, and radio, there is plenty of "communication" going on, and that it is no longer true—as it was in the Nineteenth Century—that literacy is necessary for the operation of the industrial and bureaucratic system...

...you will become slaves indeed, in no respect different from the sooty Africans, whose persons and properties are subject to the disposal of their tyrannical masters...

...He traces the development in early childhood of language awareness and skill...

...he concludes that "the value of a book is in its ability to hold things still long enough for them to be understood, until fear and confusion can be replaced by something less paralyzing...

...Jennings is at his best when he gets into the classroom and applies his scalpel to current textbooks...

...The end of government, a Pennsylvania lawyer wrote, is "to secure the persons and properties of mankind from private injuries and domestic oppression...

...Jennings will have none of this, because for him reading is the finely honed, sophisticated cutting edge of a massive arsenal of symbolic skills by which we receive and interpret signs from the environment...

...James Otis, despite his concern for civil rights, counseled that an unjust law must be obeyed until "the courts will adjudge such act void...

...Marshall Mc-Luhan, the provocative Canadian social scientist, insists in book after book that books are obsolete...

...The protest embodied in these pamphlets is again disturbing the peace...

...There were diverse opinions regarding the right means of seeking redress...

...Reviewed by Paul Trachtman A n anonymous pamphlet, Letter to the People of Pennsylvania, published in 1760, concluded, "Be assured...

...In the course of his brief book, Jennings manages to cover virtually every topic related to reading...

...The defense of colonial rights was sparked by the stamp tax...

...But more than a tax was at issue, as James Otis, the Massachusetts lawyer and colonial leader, warned: "The very act of taxing exercised over those who are not represented appears to me to be depriving them of one of their most essential rights as freemen, and if continued seems to be in effect an entire disenfranchisement of every civil right...

...if an impartial and independent administration of justice is once wrested from your hands...

...Reading has been coming in for quite a beating recently...

...It was feared that "This doctrine [of disobeying unjust laws] tends to the dissolution of civil government and to introduce such scenes of wild anarchy and confusion as are more fatal to society than the worst of tyranny...