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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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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
Mind
Skeptical
Outlook
Inevitably
Uses
Leads
Educated
Use
Reason
Practiced

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A definition is the start of an argument, not the end of one.
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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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Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas, they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions they argue with good looks, celebrities and comercials.
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When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk culture-death is a clear possibility.
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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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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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When media make war against each other, it is a case of world-views in collision.
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Children enter school as question marks and leave as periods.
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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.
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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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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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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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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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As a culture moves from orality to writing to printing to televising, its ideas of truth move with it.
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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 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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The past is strapped to our backs. We do not have to see it we can always feel it. People gather bundles of sticks to build bridges they never cross. People in distress will sometimes prefer a problem that is familiar to a solution that is not.
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The whole problem with news on television comes down to this: all the words uttered in an hour of news coverage could be printed on a page of a newspaper. And the world cannot be understood in one page.
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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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Cyberspace' is a metaphorical idea which is supposed to be the space where your consciousness is located when you're using computer technology on the Internet, for example, and I'm not entirely sure it's such a useful term, but I think that's what most people mean by it.
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