image cannot be met by mere program changes. Imaginative 
strategy based on adequate diagnosis would prescribe a 
corresponding depth or structural approach to the existing 
literary and visual world. If we persist in a conventional 
approach to these developments our traditional culture will be 
swept aside as scholasticism was in the sixteenth century. Had 
the Schoolmen with their complex oral culture understood the 
Gutenberg technology, they could have created a new synthesis 
of written and oral education, instead of bowing out of the 
picture and allowing the merely visual page to take over the 
educational enterprise. The oral Schoolmen did not meet the 
new visual challenge of print, and the resulting expansion or 
explosion of Gutenberg technology was in many respects an 
impoverishment of the culture, as historians like Mumford are 
now beginning to explain. Arnold Toynbee, in A Study of  
History , in considering “the nature of growths of civilizations,”