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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.
Neil Postman
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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
Human
Engaged
Humans
Scientific
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Mind
Mistakes
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Huxley
Normal
Correcting
Mistake
Henry
Working
Thomas
More quotes by Neil Postman
Make no mistake about it: the labeling of someone's language as 'sexist' involves a political judgment and implies the desirability of a particular sociological doctrine. One may be in favor of that doctrine (as I believe I am) but it is quite another matter to force writers by edicts and censorship into accepting it.
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The written word endures, the spoken word disappears
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I believe I am not mistaken in saying that Christianity is a demanding and serious religion. When it is delivered as easy and amusing, it is another kind of religion altogether.
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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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Watching television requires no skills and develops no skills. That is why there is no such thing as remedial television-watching.
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At its best, schooling can be about how to make a life, which is quite different from how to make a living.
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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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The effects of technology are always unpredictable. But they are not always inevitable.
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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.
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Children enter school as question marks and leave as periods.
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...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.
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A definition is the start of an argument, not the end of one.
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We do not measure a culture by its output of undisguised trivialities but by what it claims as significant.
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An educated mind is practiced in the uses of reason, which inevitably leads to a skeptical outlook.
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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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[It] is not that television is entertaining but that it has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience. […] The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining. (87)
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Education Research: This is a process whereby serious educators discover knowledge that is well known to everybody, and has been for several centuries. Its principal characteristic is that no one pays any attention to it.
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As a culture moves from orality to writing to printing to televising, its ideas of truth move with it.
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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 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.
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