Elizabeth Eisenstein
Paragraph Six - On Questions that Shouldn't be Answered
I ran out of space in my last post (last of the decade!) as I was turning to Neil Postman for perspective on the problem of questions that can’t be answered. His book The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School actually offers perspective on both questions that can and should be answered and those that can’t and shouldn’t. In the first category, he told the story of Elizabeth Eisenstein, author of a monumental two-volume study of the printing press as an agent of cultural change. After a speech, a member of her audience asked how she...
