LEND ME YOUR EAR: STILL TRAVELING ALONG THE PAPER CHASE HIGHWAY

Still traveling along the Paper Chase Highway

Anyone out there baffled by the word "origami"? The art was featured some time back in an article on the flexibility of paper. "Origami" is the art of folding paper into anything desired by the artist, beginning with flowers, birds, and animals. This ancient art originated in Japan and was popular in Egypt and southern Europe long before America was discovered.

Our grade school teachers may not have known the foreign term, but they taught us to fold paper into snowflakes and houses, and to fashion other objects familiar to children. Mischievous boys folded their writing paper into airplanes to fly in the faces of girls they wanted to tease or annoy, and sometimes their artistry landed on the teacher's desk or hit her in the face. The little rascals were promptly punished, and I was once scolded for passing paper dolls to playmates while the teacher was explaining sums on the blackboard. Our fifth-grade teacher, Myrtle Seabaugh, had eyes at the back of her head. Never mind that she was Rush Limbaugh's grandmother Bea's sister.

The dolls were original with me, but folding paper into dolls had not occurred to me, so I drew them on drawing paper and cut them out. The first paper known to man was made from "papyrus," an aquatic plant with stems that served as tools for writing whatever was important to communal life. As most literates know, mankind's first "books" were actually scrolls of papyrus.

Today, those scrolls are worth millions, and we still set great store by information on paper. Although our public libraries are now being connected with Internet, and Missouri schools with MOREnet, local librarians report that the number of readers and requests for all kinds of books continues to grow. Information on paper is still the highway to learning the basics, formerly touted as the essential Three R's.

Educators, however, are boasting that Internet will change the face of education forever. Obviously, they believe that information per se is more important to school children than learning how to communicate that information in understandable language. How many times in the last 200 years has hands-on teaching failed to deliver? Letting the fingers do the thinking is so unrealistic, there is no need to argue the point. It takes thought to guide the fingers, and thought originates in the brain.

School-age children are already learning how to spell words by using computers to prepare them for Internet and MOREnet. Commendable, we grant, but the information they need early-on can be accessed more easily from dictionaries than machines, however tempting the challenge.

But there are other valid reasons for depriving six-year-olds of the fun of playing with these complicated toys. To quote my nephew Gus, alias M.G. Lorberg III, who has a master's degree in computer science:

"... If high school students are to be given access to the Internet, they must be supervised! The `net' is uncensored (full of explicit sexual pictures and stories) and full of waste time interactive games."

If the Internet is likely to give the wrong signals to high school students, why expose younger children to the risks involved? Play schools provide our small fry with suitable interactive games. Is spelling more urgent than values? How many words in the English language are spelled alike but have different meanings? How many sound the same but have different spellings? Do the computers children use explain pronunciation and usage? Dictionaries do. Textbooks and teachers do.

Recently, a struggling TV staffer told us his memory was "not very well." My memory is not very "good" either, but I learned the difference between "good" and "well," between "good" and "bad," and between "bad" and "well" from textbooks, teachers, and reading for pleasure as well as knowledge."Knowledge," as we all know, is a synonym for "information," and the Book of Knowledge is still highly prized as a reference work for children.

On Parris Island, where American Marine Corps trainees endure the toughest training of their careers and lives, the standard word for knowledge is--Guess what. "Books"!

~Aileen Lorberg is a language columnist for the Southeast Missourian.