Walter J. Ong

Walter Jackson Ong SJ (November 30, 1912 – August 12, 2003) was an American Jesuit priest, professor of English literature, cultural and religious historian, and philosopher.

[4] His thesis on sprung rhythm in the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins[5] was supervised by the young Canadian Marshall McLuhan.

[1] In 1963 the French government honored Ong for his work on Ramus by dubbing him a knight, Chevalier de l'Ordre des Palmes académiques.

Furthermore, even a small amount of education in writing transforms people's mentality from the holistic immersion of orality to interiorization and individuation.

These include, for example, a reliance on proverbs or condensed wisdom for making decisions, epic poetry, and stylized culture heroes (wise Nestor, crafty Odysseus).

Peter Ramus (1515–1572), was a French humanist, logician, and educational reformer whose textbook method of analyzing subjects was very widely adopted in many academic fields.

In "Ramist Classroom Procedure and the Nature of Reality", Ong discusses Ramism as a transition phase between the Classical style of education and the modern one.

As a matter of fact, it has educational significance of the headiest sort, for it implies no less than that it is the "arts" or curriculum subjects which hold the world together.

"[11] The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (1967) is an expanded version of his 1964 Terry Lectures at Yale University.

[12] Ong subsequently developed his observations regarding polemic in The Presence of the Word (192–286) in his book length study Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness (1981), the published version of his 1979 Messenger Lectures at Cornell University.

Ong drew heavily on the work of Eric A. Havelock, who suggested a fundamental shift in the form of thought coinciding with the transition from orality to literacy in Ancient Greece.