Czechs came to these lands centuries ago. How do we know? Not from what your grandmother told you, or your school buddy yesterday. We know because many, many yesterdays ago someone wrote it down for us. In fact today someone is recording in writing what we know we have learned today. Someone did that yesterday and the day before that and the day before that. The accumulation of what we know and can know is mostly in written form.
There are signs that the Czech Republic shows vestiges of its tribal beginnings. An oral culture is alive and well. But in educated and educational circles, the culture is not oral but verbal, that is mostly written. With the advent of film and photography, visual records and memory are now also part of knowing.
Universities historically used libraries to hold all the verbal knowledge. They also packaged the knowledge into scripta (Czech academic texts and syllabi) and now textbooks.
The student today at university who finds reading boring probably needs to ask a fundamental question: Other than for credit or a piece of paper (ironically, a written and visual record)--why are you here?
Life is full of compromises. If you are here only for credit, perhaps there is a shortcut. Find that shortest way. Do the least amount . . .
Today is tomorrow's yesterday. But to understand will take knowing about more than one yesterday, or having a photo without caption or annotation, or a useful audiovisual clip without order and sound because someone forgot to script it. How will you do it without reading?
28.02.2005
