The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children

by Alison Gopnik

Socrates feared that reading and writing would undermine the kind of interactive, critical dialogue that was so important for reflective thought. You couldn’t talk back to a written text or ask it questions, and you were far too likely to think that something was true just because it was written down. Socrates also thought that writing would undermine the capacity for memory. In the ancient world, poets had developed an amazing ability to memorize thousands of lines of verse. Homer’s epics were orally transmitted from bard to bard through memory alone. But if you had a written copy of Homer’s Iliad, why would you go through all the trouble of memorizing it? Those impressive and hard-won memory skills would disappear. And, of course, Socrates was completely right. Reading is different from talking; we do tend to accept things just because they’re written down; and no one now knows the Iliad by heart. Indeed, reading reshaped many broader aspects of our culture and thought. The rise of literacy was connected to the emergence of the modern concepts of individualism and privacy, as well as the birth of Protestantism.