If students are not trained to ask basic questions about the images which confront them, if they are not asked to examine the knowledge and assumptions which they already possess, they are being denied the opportunity to develop the most simple and essential critical tools.
Jennifer Swift-Kramer
I passed on my first chance to see The Ascent of Man because the photo in TV Guide gave me 2001: A Space Odyssey flashbacks. I didn't get another for 4 years, and to this day I regret putting myself that much out of step.
Everything you need to know to prepare you for Web 2.0 is there, no matter how stylistically or technologically outdated the series may seem at first glance. The startling and ultimately heart-rending tour of the spectrum in Knowledge Or Certainty is a benchmark in media studies, and make no mistake: Bronowski was the "auteur" of the entire series. (Dudley Herschbach, who worked with director Adrian Malone on The Nobel Legacy, verified this to me in an interview.)
If anything, Bronowski's works (even the posthumous Magic, Science & Civilisation or The Visionary Eye) are more "of the moment" in today's political climate than ever. I've spent almost my whole life in some academic sphere or other, but I only ever heard about Gauss from Bronowski. When I finally found out - just this past month - that the computerized world of today is fundamentally the result of the modular arithmetic Gauss invented, I felt sucker-punched.
Bronowski will be my anchor until the day I die.