For three weeks I phoned and waited in vain for LG to come and set up our new washing machine. Fed up at last, I did what I should have done first: folded up my sleeves, took out the screwdriver and cracked open the Owner’s Manual.
Setting up a washing machine is easy. You hook up the in-pipes, clamp on the out-pipe, flip the switch and the thing is more or less ready to rumble. But you’d never know that from LG’s manual. This horrible booklet put “Installation” on page 28 (of 40), and offered un-doable and vaguely Freudian instructions like: “The Basement is not flat, fill the water just touching the Pulsator and see uniform distribution. If not, adjust the legs as shown in the figure.” And it warned, “Don’t add anything under back side legs.”
A few days later I set up an HP printer-scanner. It is just as easy to set up, but took as long because I spent so much time gazing in rapture at the installation instructions.
These came on a single sheet of good paper. Every step was laid out in beautiful, logical, accurate illustrations. My favourite bit was where you are asked to take the test printout and scan it to get the alignment right. Tricky to explain even in full sentences, but here it was accomplished in two little drawings, with one line of elucidation: “Open lid. Place alignment page face down.” What economy! What mastery! What humanity!
Eventually I calmed down. Until, the other day, I read a short essay, dated mid-2008, on the blog of a youthful American lecturer named Jason W Ellis. Ellis was then attending a summer course on “teaching college writing”. One section was on “multimodal composition”.
This is “the use of media other than paper and pencil for rhetorical communication and composition. For example, blogs, PowerPoint presentations, YouTube videos, Podcasts, brochures etc. are other ways to make persuasive arguments and enter critical discourse. In multimodal composition, the printed essay does not reign supreme.”
Ellis adds: “There seems to be a push in writing programs... to teach students to compose by any means available. This means that students should be encouraged to create arguments, whether it be with audio essays or videos for example, with the tools at hand in order to increase their own involvement in the increasingly technologized mediums of communication.”
But students, he says, ought to learn to communicate first in the old-fashioned way. Teach them to write, he says, before allowing these “expressive, yet not as directly translatable” practices into the classroom.
It’s inevitable, though, as education tries to stay up-to-date. Old-style school learning, dominated by the liberal arts and sciences, aimed to produce a well-rounded amateur: a gentleman. Specialisation happened afterwards. Before university, specialisation was only for manual workers, and it was called apprenticeship or vocational school.
Now, youngsters study themselves into the job market. Thus the announcement this week that the CBSE school exam board was adding “mass media studies” to its list of 30-plus vocational subjects. Teachers and students both said they’d be very interested — if the marks count for college admission.
So: a mix of eras. No, to universal skills. Yes, to apprenticeship. But the tools, thanks to multimedia, are now universal. If the mix results in HP-like clean thinking, wonderful. If all we get is LG’s half-educated muddle, then... Sure, it sells, but is it satisfying?
