ning as in the Greek era was a different mode of thinking than we are accustomed to using. Literacy brought about a new mode of thinking. In many oral societies, there is a stronger sense of connection with nature, while literate societies tend to be more separated from nature.
This distinction has implications for educational practice. Children come to school with an oral tradition, and this also means that they have a particular mode of thought that is sophisticated but different from the norms of literate adult cultures. It is necessary to understand children's orality to make their learning experience meaningful, and some of the valuable forms of thought belonging to orality need to be maintained and developed. The task of the teacher is not merely to put literacy in place but to integrate literacy with the learning that has already taken place. Olson sees the development of literacy as producing more explicitness through writing, and thus he suggests the formal essay as a teaching method. This is preferable to the idea of Havelock and Egan that literacy is superimposed on oral capacities.
The great debate over literacy is whether literacy is autonomous, a neutral technology that can be detached from specific social contexts, or ideological, a process that cannot be separated from social context. In the latter view, literacy has an impact on consciousness, shaping the way we think. This latter view is at least as old as Plato, whose critique of writing indicated that the effects of literacy may be negative. Plato saw the dialectic as the only way to reach truth, while he found writing to be such as to foster illusions. Others, such as Ong, see the development of writing as inevitable, as a part of human cultural evolution.
However, it seems clear that literacy does have an impact on how we think and that it is attached to the social context in which it is developed. Olson indicated this with reference to th...