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Neil Postman Quotes
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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.
Neil Postman
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Textbooks, it seems to me, are enemies of education, instruments for promoting dogmatism and trivial learning. They may save the teacher some trouble, but the trouble they inflict on the minds of students is a blight and a curse.
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Our priests and presidents, our surgeons and lawyers, our educators and newscasters need worry less about satisfying the demands of their discipline than the demands of good showmanship.
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We can make the trains run on time but if they are not going where we want them to go, why bother?
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I mean to suggest that without a transcendent and honorable purpose, schooling must reach its finish, and the sooner we are done with it, the better.
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Reading is the scourge of childhood because, in a sense, it creates adulthood.
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.. Americans are the best entertained and quite likely the least well-informed people in the Western world.
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What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.
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The price of maintaining membership in the establishment is unquestioning acceptance of authority.
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An educated mind is practiced in the uses of reason, which inevitably leads to a skeptical outlook.
Neil Postman
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The making of adaptable, curious, open, questioning people has nothing to do with vocational training and everything to do with humanistic and scientific studies.
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In the development of intelligence nothing can be more "basic" than learning how to ask productive questions.
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America was founded by intellectuals, a rare occurrence in the history of modern nations We might even say that America was founded by intellectuals, from which it has taken us two centuries and a communications revolution to recover.
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'The scientific method,' Thomas Henry Huxley once wrote, 'is nothing but the normal working of the human mind.' That is to say, when the mind is working; that is to say further, when it is engaged in correcting its mistakes.
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In Russia, writers with serious grievances are arrested, while in America they are merely featured on television talk shows, where all that is arrested is their development.
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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.
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I don't think any of us can do much about the rapid growth of new technology.
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The word educate is closely related to the word educe. In the oldest pedagogic sense of the term, this meant a drawing out of a person something potential or latent.
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People in distress will sometimes prefer a problem that is familiar to a solution that is not.
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Why do we think technology is above morality?... The real question is, 'How should I conduct my life?' rather than 'What tools should I use?'.
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In the Middle Ages, there was a scarcity of information but its very scarcity made it both important and usable. This began to change, as everyone knows, in the late 15th century when a goldsmith named Gutenberg, from Mainz, converted an old wine press into a printing machine, and in so doing, created what we now call an information explosion.... Nothing could be more misleading than the idea that computer technology introduced the age of information. The printing press began that age, and we have not been free of it since.
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Of all things to be learned, in school or out, languaging, as I prefer to call the process, is least like a mechanical skill. It is, in fact, the most intimate, integrated, emotion-laden learning we do. At no point can we separate what we know and what we are from how our linguistic powers develop...
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Since there is no such thing as complete knowledge of a subject, one is always working to improve one's reading, writing, etc., of a subject. As Thomas Henry Huxley said, "If a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, is there anyone who knows so much as to be out of danger?" …. The problems of learning to read or write are inexhaustible.
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Language education... may achieve what George Bernard Shaw asserted is the function of art.
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Childhood is analogous to language learning. It has a biological basis but cannot be realized unless a social environment triggers and nurtures it, that is, has need of it. If a culture is dominated by a medium that requires the segregation of the young in order that they learn unnatural, specialized, and complex skills and attitudes, then childhood, in one form or another, will emerge, articulate and indispensable.
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Quote of the day
Autumn burned brightly, a running flame through the mountains, a torch flung to the trees.
Faith Baldwin
Neil Postman
Born:
March 8, 1931
Died:
October 5, 2003
(aged 72)
Bio:
Neil Postman was a prominent American educator, media theorist and cultural critic, associated with New York University for more than forty years.
Known for:
Technopoly (1992)
The Disappearance of Childhood (1982)
The End of Education (1996)
Conscientious objections (1988)
Most used words:
subject
language
technology
education
knowledge
people
learning
culture
read
student
question
law
computer
kind
social
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