Some thoughts from Neil Postman

Neil Postman (March 8, 1931 - October 5, 2003)

Media theorist, cultural critic, philosopher of education – probably best known to the general public for his 1985 book about television, Amusing Ourselves to Death.

Some Quotations

--Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see.

--I don't think any of us can do much about the rapid growth of new technology. However, it is possible for us to learn how to control our own uses of technology. The "forum" that I think is best suited for this is our educational system. If students get a sound education in the history, social effects and psychological biases of technology, they may grow to be adults who use technology rather than be used by it.

--Anyone who has studied the history of technology knows that technological change is always a Faustian bargain: Technology giveth and technology taketh away, and not always in equal measure. A new technology sometimes creates more than it destroys. Sometimes, it destroys more than it creates. But it is never one-sided. The invention of the printing press is an excellent example. Printing fostered the modern idea of individuality, but it also destroyed the medieval sense of community and social integration. Printing created prose but made poetry into an exotic and elitist form of expression. Printing made modern science possible but transformed religious sensibility into an exercise in superstition. Printing assisted in the growth of the nation-state but, in so doing, made patriotism into a sordid if not a murderous emotion.

--Television is altering the meaning of "being informed" by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation. Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information - misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information - information that creates the illusion of knowing something, but which in fact leads one away from knowing.

--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 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. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture.

--A definition is the start of an argument, not the end of one.

--The notion of childhood, while it might conceivably have a biological basis, is largely a social artifact.

We know, for instance, in the medieval world there was no such thing comparable to what we today call childhood. There were basically two stages of life: infancy and adulthood, with infancy ending at about the age of seven.

This form of social organization was the product of the kind of communication system that existed. That is to say, it was largely an oral culture in which most of the important social transactions occurred through speech in face-to-face situations. So in order to be an adult, one had to learn how to speak, which most people do by the age of seven.

In the sixteenth century, this began to change because the communication environment changed with the invention of the printing press. After the printing press, one had to earn adulthood by becoming literate. People are biologically programmed to learn how to speak, but they are not biologically programmed to be literate. This required the development of the modern school. And for the first time in centuries, a certain segment of the population was segregated from the rest of the population and sent to a special place, namely school, in order to learn how to become literate. After a while, the term schoolboy became synonymous with a certain age group, which developed into the idea of childhood—a special stage of life that was to act as a bridge between infancy and adulthood.

For about 350 years, we in the West have been developing this idea of three stages of life: infancy, childhood, and adulthood. Now, we have a new element in the communication environment called television, which is making the idea of childhood increasingly untenable; and it is doing this in several ways. One is that it makes the content of the adult world available to the young without them having to learn any special coding system such as the printed word. Previously adults revealed the secrets of adult life—by secrets, I mean the social, political, and sexual secrets that adults know but that are not considered appropriate for children to know—to the young in stages and in psychologically assimilable ways.

Now, television reveals all these secrets all at once, simultaneously to everyone in the culture, so that it becomes impossible to control the socialization of the young.

--In my books called Teaching as a Subversive Activity and Teaching as a Conserving Activity, I tried to develop some ideas for revolutionizing education.     

I think the most important thing we can do for our students is to help develop in them a sense of detachment and analytic skill so that they can look at their own culture with courage, calm, and intelligence. I would certainly agree that the present curricula for the most part try to get students to believe what their culture believes. This cannot be what we are about. 

Perhaps we should abandon the whole idea of trying to make students intelligent and focus on the idea of making them less ignorant. Doctors do not generally concern themselves with health; they concentrate on sickness. And lawyers don't think too much about justice; they think about cases of injustice. Using this model in teaching would imply identifying and understanding various forms of ignorance and working to eliminate as many of them as we can.

--What are some chief forms of ignorance?  (Postman also refers to ignorance as balderdash, baloney and bullshit.)  Some main ones are: pomposity, earthiness, euphemism, fanaticism, word magic, sloganeering.  Selections:

Pomposity is the triumph of style over substance, and generally it is not an especially venal form of balderdash. A little pomposity at a graduation ceremony is surely bearable. But it is by no means harmless. Plenty of people are daily victimized by pomposity—made to feel less worthy than they have a right to feel by people who use fancy words, phrases, and sentences to obscure their own insufficiencies. Many people in the teaching business dwell almost exclusively in the realm of pomposity and quite literally would be unable to function if not for the fact that the profession has made this form of balderdash quite respectable. Generally speaking, pomposity is not a serious affliction among the young, although they are easily victimized by it. There seems to be a correlation between pomposity and aging, as I am beginning to discover myself. Young people, however, suffer badly from a related form of balderdash—what might be called earthiness.

Earthiness is based on the assumption that if you use direct, off-color, four-letter words, you somehow are speaking more truth than if you observe the proper language forms. It is the mirror image of pomposity, because, like pomposity, it hopes that people will be so dazzled by the manner of speech that they will not notice the absence of matter. Earthiness becomes dangerous when we convince ourselves that four-letter words are the natural mode of expressing sincerity or honesty or candor.

Another, far more distressing variety of balderdash is called euphemism, and it is exemplified by the word “balderdash” itself. By using the word, I am guilty of euphemizing. But my guilt is not nearly as serious as the guilt of some other, more prominent people. One of the best examples of euphemizing in recent decades was provided by President Nixon’s press secretary, Ronald Ziegler, who instead of using the four-letter word “lies,” as in the sentence “The President’s previous statements were lies,” chose the eleven-letter word “inoperative.” President Nixon went Ziegler one better when he chose to say that members of his campaign organization were guilty of an excess of zeal. This was the first time to my knowledge that the word “zeal” has been used as a euphemism for illegal entry, stealing, bribery, and perjury. In any case, euphemism seems to be playing an increasingly important role in American public life. We have had to endure such phrases as “protective reaction strike,” “preventive detention,” “pacification programs,” and one of my all-time favorites, “disinformation.” The Reagan administration says it did not lie to the American public about Libya; it merely disseminated disinformation.

Euphemism, then, is that form of balderdash wherein we attempt to obscure the nature of reality. Like pomposity, this process is not always harmful, for there are some occasions when simple good taste, or good manners, requires euphemism.