Same power structures, different time period

Let me blame paper. Better yet let me blame the printing press. But it seems in Murphy’s account of the typical Renaissance school day that the focus is on reproduction. Texts, he says, “become objects of imitation” (151). So students copy texts, so what? Who hasn’t copied sentences at some point in their school career? Then there’s the translating from Latin to English and back (155) that, besides being draconian, seems to go one step too far. I have to wonder what the political motivation for this type of schooling is.

            [Hint: It won’t be optimistic.]

            The technological advances of the Renaissance—namely the printing press—should have given rise to diversified knowledge. What happens instead is the reproduction and amplification of the power structures already put in place. Writing, Murphy says, becomes far more “central to education” (156). Except the writing being performed is mimicry—and highly organized mimicry at that (see 159’s list of imitation practices). Rote memorization (which through repetition just becomes habit) replaces the art of memory as several of the readings make passing note of. So then we have this dangerous (yes, I’ll be that melodramatic) situation where critical views of history are eliminated by removing memory as an art and mimicry is promoted as composition.

            Imagine a world where all you could do is re-tweet... and you would never know the historical context.

            The politics, as I’ve read them work like this: the rhetorical move of “I’ll agree with you all enough to steal your ethos then break away” became a dominant and potent move. The Lutheran Reformation it should be noted worked because it did not throw out all of Catholicism—just the parts people didn’t like. When the Italians claimed the Classics through translating they essentially make the same power play (RT 559). Women rhetors also replicated power structures with enough variation to become recognized, though they were still a far cry from being treated equally (RT 562-64; Murphy 168). On the whole, the education of women merely reproduced the role of women on a larger level. Much the same, the Jesuit schooling system with its focus on only male students, could be said to perpetuate the male hierarchy created by the clergy—a fairly obvious claim.

            The irony here is the rise of humanism—a supposed focus on the individual. But humanism became a philosophy reserved for the monarchs with the likes of Machiavelli advocating for the individual to reflect the values of the populace. A good man speaking well doesn’t quite work in this new schema. What happens in actuality is a stratification of social class (as described on page 571 in RT with the Tudors’ tutors).

            I use this as a lead in to a statement that may ruffle some feathers: Maybe Peter Ramus gets a bad rap. Yes, his method of doing rhetoric is not composed of the critical awareness we want students to have; however, I have to respect him looking critically at the power systems that created the patriarchic highly stratified oligarchic society at the time and saying, “Maybe Aristotle isn’t all that great; why should we replicate his stuff?” When it comes to this sort of critical examination I wish there was more reflection on how the printing press would be used. After all, the printing press has a direct relationship with my favorite period in history (to gripe about anyways), the Industrial Revolution.