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
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.
I am not a Luddite. I am suspicious of technology. I am perfectly aware of its benefits, but I also try to pay attention to some of the negative effects.
We had learned how to invent things, and the question of why we invent things receded in importance. The idea that if something could be done it should be done was born in the nineteenth century. And along with it, there developed a profound belief in all the principles through which invention succeeds: objectivity, efficiency, expertise, standardization, measurement, and progress. It also came to be believed that the engine of technological progress worked most efficiently when people are conceived of not as children of God or even as citizens but as consumers-that is to say, as markets.
If politics is like show business, then the idea is not to pursue excellence, clarity or honesty but to appear as if you are, which is another matter altogether.
There is no escaping from ourselves. The human dilemma is as it has always been, and we solve nothing fundamental by cloaking ourselves in technological glory.