The Silence Before Drowning in Alphabet Soup

Résumé

The perspectives provided by the academic traditions of folklore and mythology, media studies, and studies in literacy, and, in keeping with oral tradition, the perspective provided by personal experience, are employed in this essay about differences in cosmologies between cultures that depend primarily on literacy and those that found their approach to knowledge on experience and oral mediation. Several concomitants
of both orality and literacy are described with reference to the self, silence, and the cognitive act of abstract referencing. It is argued that schooling contributes to a priority of legitimacy of literacy, and that this denies the legitimacy of experience, which is necessary for learning.