As an anthropologist who is expected by disciplinary mandate to apprehend and analyze evolving patterns of cultural behavior, I have noted with considerable interest and at least a small measure of anxiety the growing and sometimes gratuitous technological intricacy underlying the modern educational environment. Nowhere is this phenomenon more evident than in the visible contemporary interest by academicians from all fields of endeavor in the classification and synthesis of research information through the use of electronic computer systems, a process which inevitably circumscribes the range of topics amenable to investigation and also dictates that resulting data be capable of organization into self-contained and easily quantifiable increments lending themselves to unambiguous reciprocal comparisons.

I can give assurances that I have nothing against quantitative methods as legitimate tools of scholarly inquiry. We are all counters from birth, it seems, and even our most subjective and qualitatively bankrupt observations are generally based upon the feeling that, in our experience, the issue being addressed has customarily unfolded and been resolved in a manner consistent with our particular expressed opinion. We must also remember that, as Norman Horowitz has observed, Gregor Mendel's powerful insights into genetic principles failed to find initial acceptance among peers, who rejected them as mere numerology, and had to be independently rediscovered decades later.