Indeed, you will not find two high school seniors in a hundred who could tell you-within a five-hundred-year margin of error—when the alphabet was invented. I suspect most do not even know that the alphabet was invented. I have found that when the question is put to them, they appear puzzled, as if one had asked, When were trees invented, or clouds? It is the very principle of myth, as Roland Barthes pointed out, that it transforms history into nature, and to ask of our schools that they engage in the task of de-mythologizing media is to ask something the schools have never done.
This is my experience in teaching History of the Biblical World to college honors classes. I am often surprised that they've made it through High School without even the first idea as to how the alphabet was invented and how writing evolved.
