It is significant, I think, that Clarisse objects Essays

It is significant, I think, that Clarisse objects explicitly to the lost social nature of learning, for it shows Bradbury's ideal of learning as a hermeneutical dialogue with two minds engaged in drawing out and re-forming the matter shaped between them. In the Metaphysics Aristotle points out that "experience is formed of many memories" ( I.i .), but by memories he mean s itemized result s of the mind working on data, either sensory or semiotic, and shaping it into knowledge by applying questions and heuristics as a way of " coming to terms " with it. Communication between people is the ideal way to commence this process, but in TV class the communication is monodirectional , and the resulting materiel transmitted to the student remains data rather than knowledge. In fact, the social element of learning is so valuable to memory that even books only represent the voice of a person whom time has rendered inaccessible. In the Phaedrus Socrates remind s his listeners that writing i s only of value as a reminder, but that i t can't be properly questioned because it has no power to listen it can only repeat itself (274D-275A). 3 The relative dismissal of memory as a goal of pedagogy was reflected in the now-famous Bloom's Taxonomy, written in 1956 by a group of educators who sought to clarify the goals of learning and taxonomi z e the tasks by which they were achieved. Although the group hoped to achieve a pedagogical unity between Cogniti ve, Affective, and Psychomotor "domains," the taxonomy is , even after its revision in 2000 , frequently understood as a hierarchy which places " remembering " at the bottom and " creating " at the top. While this echoes the Classical insistence on a solid base of texts grasped in and by the memory and then manipulated as a means of producing new compositions, poo r restatements of the Taxonomy 4 transmitted the idea of memory as the lowest order thinking skill and the one dismissed fastest by students hoping to hone their " cri tical thinking skills." Certain ly, Bloom's Taxonomy reflects m od ernity's view of memory as a " mere " ability to reproduce accurately rote-remembered data, and as separate from the Romantic notion of a Work inspired by ingenium rather than an orderly intellectual process.