Mediacy Articles - Volume 18, No. 1
The Fifth Language: Learning a Living in the Computer Age
By Robert K. Logan
Stoddart, 352 pages, $26.95
ISBN: 0-7737-2907-0
Robert Logan is a physics and communications theory professor at the University of Toronto and he argues in The Fifth Language that speech, writing, mathematics, science and computing form an evolutionary chain of verbal languages. He suggests the malaise of education can be remedied by reorganising core curriculum to recognise this fact.
Ho-hum, we say, another ivory tower OISE professor who thinks that the problems of education can be solved with a curriculum fix. Well, there’s more to Logan’s book than that and much in it of interest to media teachers. The theoretical underpinning of this book is based on a revisionist reading of Marshall McLuhan, with whom Logan co-authored a book in the mid-seventies. At least half of this book is devoted to the notion that many of McLuhan’s ideas make far more sense now in the age of the personal and ubiquitous computer and he provides a succinct and readable summary of the communication guru’s theories.
Logan argues that core curriculum should focus on the generic skills associated with the five languages and that the actual topics studied are not critical and should be chosen to cater to the students’ and the teacher’s interest. Once students have mastered the five languages, they are then in a position to learn whatever topics or material they require for their work or their personal interest.
The problem with any book of this type is reconciling the new realities of educational financing with a call towards an increasing curricular emphasis on computer literacy. Teachers are fond of pointing out how much more computer literate students are than their teachers. If that’s so, then why should schools bother to teach this “fifth language” as students are learning it so well on their own?