Quote

At its best, schooling can be about how to make a life, which is quite different from how to make a living.

Neil Postman

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Neil Postman
Age: 72 †
Born: 1931
Born: March 8
Died: 2003
Died: October 5
Author
Communication Scholar
Essayist
Journalist
Media Critic
Pedagogue
Sociologist
University Teacher
Writer
New York City
New York
Best
Different
Schooling
Make
Attitude
Love
Quite
Life
Happiness
Success
Family
Living

More quotes by Neil Postman

Image
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.
Neil Postman
Image
Printing links the present with forever. It carries personal identity into realms unknown.
Neil Postman
Image
Computers are merely ingenious devices to fulfill unimportant functions. The computer revolution is an explosion of nonsense.
Neil Postman
Image
As a culture moves from orality to writing to printing to televising, its ideas of truth move with it.
Neil Postman
Image
Through the computer, the heralds say, we will make education better, religion better, politics better, our minds better — best of all, ourselves better. This is, of course, nonsense, and only the young or the ignorant or the foolish could believe it.
Neil Postman
Image
...there must be a sequence to learning, that perseverance and a certain measure of perspiration are indispensable, that individual pleasures must frequently be submerged in the interests of group cohesion, and that learning to be critical and to think conceptually and rigorously do not come easily to the young but are hard-fought victories.
Neil Postman
Image
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.
Neil Postman
Image
Typography fostered the modern idea of individuality, but it destroyed the medieval sense of community and integration.
Neil Postman
Image
. . . Americans are the best entertained and quite likely the least well-informed people in the Western world.
Neil Postman
Image
When media make war against each other, it is a case of world-views in collision.
Neil Postman
Image
People in distress will sometimes prefer a problem that is familiar to a solution that is not.
Neil Postman
Image
We do not measure a culture by its output of undisguised trivialities but by what it claims as significant.
Neil Postman
Image
The effects of technology are always unpredictable. But they are not always inevitable.
Neil Postman
Image
Remember: in order for a perception to change one must be frustrated in one's actions or change one's purpose.
Neil Postman
Image
Public schooling does not serve a public it creates a pubic.
Neil Postman
Image
The making of adaptable, curious, open, questioning people has nothing to do with vocational training and everything to do with humanistic and scientific studies.
Neil Postman
Image
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.
Neil Postman
Image
The key to all fanatical beliefs is that they are self-confirming....(some beliefs are) fanatical not because they are false, but because they are expressed in such a way that they can never be shown to be false.
Neil Postman
Image
A definition is the start of an argument, not the end of one.
Neil Postman
Image
It is not entirely true that a TV producer or reporter has complete control over the contents of programs. The interests and inclinations of the audience have as much to do with the what is on television as do the ideas of the producer and reporter.
Neil Postman