Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker (Preface)
Most of us, I think, will rejoice in this clear exposition of facts. We may also be inclined to think that if this was true of the educational system of Britain during World War II, that in our time and place it must be rather worse - and that may be true. But given that almost all our interaction on this board depends on reading, and constructive discussions depend upon reading well and answering carefully, it will also be profitable for each one to ask, not so much whether he has spotted other people making these mistakes, but rather whether he himself has been guilty. Ironically, Dorothy Sayers herself once misread, misunderstood, misreprented and consequently misreplied (rather hostilely) to a letter C.S. Lewis sent her.
It is common knowledge among school-teachers that a high percentage of examination failures results from "not reading the question." The candidate presumably applies his eyes to the paper, but his answer shows that he is incapable of discovering by that process what the question is. This means that he is not only slovenly-minded but, in all except the most superficial sense, illiterate. Teachers further complain that they have no to spend a great deal of time and energy in teaching University students what questions to ask. This indicates that the young mind experiences great difficulty in disentangling the essence of a subject from its accidents; and it is disconcertingly evident, in discussions on the platform and in the press, that the majority of people never learn to overcome this difficulty. A third distressing phenomenon is the extreme unwillingness of the average questioner to listen to the answer—a phenomenon exhibited in exaggerated form by professional interviewers on the staffs of popular journals. It is a plain fact that ninety-nine interviews out of a hundred contain more or less subtle distortions of the answers given to questions, the questions being, moreover, in many cases, wrongly conceived for the purpose of eliciting the truth. The distortions are not confined to distortions of opinion but are frequently also distortions of fact, and not merely stupid misunderstandings at that, but deliberate falsifications. The journalist is, indeed, not interested in the facts. For this he is to some extent excusable, seeing that, even if he published the facts, his public would inevitably distort them in the reading. What is quite inexcusable is that when the victim of misrepresentation writes to protest and correct the statements attributed to him, his protest is often ignored and his correction suppressed. Nor has he any redress, since to misrepresent a man's statements is no offense, unless the misrepresentation happens to fall within the narrow limits of the law of libel. The Press and the Law are in this condition because the public do not care whether they are being told the truth or not.
The education that we have so far succeeded in giving to the bulk of the citizens has produced a generation of mental slatterns. They are literate in the merely formal sense—that is, they are capable of putting the symbols C, A, T together to produce the word CAT. But they are not literate in the sense of deriving from those letters any clear mental concept of the animal. Literacy in the formal sense is dangerous, since it lays the mind open to receive any mischievous nonsense about cats that an irresponsible writer may choose to print—nonsense which could never have entered the heads of plain illiterates who were familiar with an actual cat, even if unable to spell its name. And particularly in the matter of Christian doctrine, a great part of the nation subsists in an ignorance more barbarous than that of the dark ages, owing to this slatternly habit of illiterate reading. Words are understood in a wholly mistaken sense, statements of fact and opinion are misread and distorted in repetition, arguments founded in misapprehension are accepted without examination, expressions of individual preference are construed as oecumenical doctrine, disciplinary regulations founded on consent are confused with claims to interpret universal law, and vice versa; with the result that the logical and historical structure of Christian philosophy is transformed in the popular mind to a confused jumble of mythological and pathological absurdity.
Most of us, I think, will rejoice in this clear exposition of facts. We may also be inclined to think that if this was true of the educational system of Britain during World War II, that in our time and place it must be rather worse - and that may be true. But given that almost all our interaction on this board depends on reading, and constructive discussions depend upon reading well and answering carefully, it will also be profitable for each one to ask, not so much whether he has spotted other people making these mistakes, but rather whether he himself has been guilty. Ironically, Dorothy Sayers herself once misread, misunderstood, misreprented and consequently misreplied (rather hostilely) to a letter C.S. Lewis sent her.
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