Kids are wired to ask questions, but we often squash those tendencies. “No medium is excessively dangerous if its users understand what its dangers are,” he said. Blind belief and passive consumption can be broken through the simple act of asking questions. We have access to TV and videos in any location. We live in a society where we can spend hours on devices entertaining ourselves. Everyone is worried about Big Brother… but we should really fear ourselves. It is to deny them knowledge of their roots, about which no other social institution is at present concerned.”įear Huxley’s future, not Orwell’s. To teach about the atom without Democritus, to teach about electricity without Faraday, to teach about political science without Aristotle or Machiavelli, to teach about music without Haydn, is to refuse our students access to The Great Conversation. “It is to deprive students of a sense of the meaning of what we know, and of how we know. To teach a subject without the history of how it happened “is to reduce knowledge to a mere consumer product,” he said. Facts and dates are memorization, not understanding. “Every teacher,” Postman said, “must be a history teacher.” Every subject has a fascinating history. “Sesame Street doesn’t teach children to love school or anything about school,” he said. Postman lamented that by equating education with entertainment children would never learn the rigorous of serious schooling. TV is always fun and entertaining serious education is not. School is about the development of language TV demands attention to images. Shows like Sesame Street undermine schooling - “it encourages children to love school only if school is like Sesame Street.” School is about asking questions TV is about passive consumption. These biases mean that news from a newspaper and a television, even with the same subject, have two different messages.Įducation ≠ entertainment. Video tends to bias towards the “peek-a-book world”: trivial content that vanishes in seconds, constantly flickering images, yet the viewer has a hard time turning away no matter the subject… because the medium is just so darn entertaining and engrossing. The written word, for example, tends to bias the message towards linear thinking, logic, exposition, and delayed response. Borrowing from McLuhan, he explained that every medium - TV, radio, typography, oral transmission - changes and biases the message itself. But here are some Big Ideas that have stuck out to me: He said a lot of things, thus those seventeen books. He was a professor of media ecology at New York University and died in 2003. He also wrote essays and lectured about lots of other things that you can find here if you scroll down long enough. He wrote on the disappearance of childhood, reforming public education, postmodernism, semantics and linguistics, and technopolies. Just imagine FOX News during an election cycle and you’ll get the idea. His most famous (and controversial) was Amusing Ourselves to Death, a screed against television and how it turns everything into banal entertainment - including education and news. Neil Postman (1931 - 2003) was an American critic and educator. Oh man, if you don’t know, your world is about to be rocked. All The Things You Never Even Knew You Wanted To Know About Neil Postman
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