Neil Postman
Neil Postman
Neil Postmanwas an American author, educator, media theorist and cultural critic, who is best known for his seventeen books, including Amusing Ourselves to Death, Conscientious Objections, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, The Disappearance of Childhoodand The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth8 March 1931
CityNew York City, NY
CountryUnited States of America
Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death.
Once you have learned to ask questions - relevant and appropriate and substantial questions - you have learned how to learn and no one can keep you from learning whatever you want or need to know.
Make no mistake about it: the labeling of someone's language as 'sexist' involves a political judgment and implies the desirability of a particular sociological doctrine. One may be in favor of that doctrine (as I believe I am) but it is quite another matter to force writers by edicts and censorship into accepting it.
My argument is limited to saying that a major new medium changes the structure of discourse; it does so by encouraging certain uses of the intellect, by favoring certain definitions of intelligence and wisdom, and by demanding a certain kind of content - in a phrase, by creating new forms of truth-telling.
School has never really been about individualized learning, but about how to be socialized as a citizen and as a human being, so that we, we have important rules in school, always emphasizing the fact that one is part of a group.
It is a mistake to suppose that any technological innovation has a one-sided effect. Every technology is both a burden and a blessing; not either-or, but this-and-that.
It is inescapable that every culture must negotiate with technology, whether it does so intelligently or not. A bargain is struck in which technology giveth and technology taketh away.
You can only photograph a fragment of the here and now. The photograph presents the world as object; language, the world as idea.
We are more naive than those of the Middle Ages, and more frightened, for we can be made to believe almost anything.
TV serves us most usefully when presenting junk-entertainment; it serves us most ill when it co-opts serious modes of discourse - news, politics, science, education, commerce, religion.
There is no way to help a learner to be disciplined, active, and thoroughly engaged unless he perceives a problem to be a problem or whatever is to-be-learned as worth learning, and unless he plays an active role in determining the process of solution.
The effects of technology are always unpredictable. But they are not always inevitable.
Public schooling does not serve a public; it creates a pubic.
Remember: in order for a perception to change one must be frustrated in one's actions or change one's purpose.