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Public schooling does not serve a public it creates a pubic.
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
Pubic
Schooling
Creates
Serve
Public
Doe
More quotes by Neil Postman
The written word endures, the spoken word disappears
Neil Postman
We do not measure a culture by its output of undisguised trivialities but by what it claims as significant.
Neil Postman
The effects of technology are always unpredictable. But they are not always inevitable.
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The idea of taking what people call the 'entertainment culture' as a focus of study, including historical perspective, is not a bad idea.
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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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A metaphor is not an ornament. It is an organ of perception. Through metaphors, we see the world as one thing or another.
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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
'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
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.
Neil Postman
When media make war against each other, it is a case of world-views in collision.
Neil Postman
An educated mind is practiced in the uses of reason, which inevitably leads to a skeptical outlook.
Neil Postman
A definition is the start of an argument, not the end of one.
Neil Postman
Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see. From a biological point of view it is inconceivable that any culture will forget that it needs to reproduce itself. But it is quite possible for a culture to exist without a social idea of children. Unlike infancy, childhood is a social artifact, not a biological category.
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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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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.
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Information is now a commodity that can be bought and sold, or used as a form of entertainment, or worn like a garment to enhance one's status. It comes indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, disconnected from usefulness we are glutted with information, drowning in information, have no control over it, don't know what to do with it.
Neil Postman
Typography fostered the modern idea of individuality, but it destroyed the medieval sense of community and integration.
Neil Postman
By itself photography cannot deal with the unseen, the remote, the internal, the abstract, it does not speak of Man, only of a man not of Tree, only a tree.
Neil Postman
[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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As a culture moves from orality to writing to printing to televising, its ideas of truth move with it.
Neil Postman