Education

Abstract

Harold Adams Innis (1894–1952) knew that the university as a culturally beneficial and intellectually necessary environment was not perfect, in fact, far from it. He devoted much of his life to establishing and improving the higher education system of Canada. Among Innis’ many contributions is the clarification that borrowing from the past cultural milieu toward the new must be a rather selective process in order to avoid an over abundance of unneeded cultural baggage which simultaneously leaves a conditional void or a type of intellectual incompleteness. This progressive absence is necessary so that there is always a culturally perceived need for new ideas, and so that there is room for these innovative ideas to enter and flourish. Without this necessary incompleteness, the sense of a need for new ideas and innovation is aborted. Innis came to the conclusion that it is an effect of modern mediated communication, with its ever-increasing attribute of flawless efficiency and quantity of content (the record of cultural baggage), that rather senselessly and somewhat automatically fills this void and, in a sense, renders the incomplete complete, but in an insignificant way. For Innis this was a great crisis for the West, and a sign of its eventual downfall.