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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?

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
Train
Running
Going
Make
Time
Trains
Bother

More quotes by Neil Postman

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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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We do not measure a culture by its output of undisguised trivialities but by what it claims as significant.
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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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Remember: in order for a perception to change one must be frustrated in one's actions or change one's purpose.
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The spectacle we find in true religions has as its purpose enchantment, not entertainment. The distinction is critical. By endowing things with magic, enchantment is a means through which we may gain access to sacredness. Entertainment is the means through which we distance ourselves from it.
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Children enter school as question marks and leave as periods.
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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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Printing links the present with forever. It carries personal identity into realms unknown.
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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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The problem in the 19th century with information was that we lived in a culture of information scarcity, and so humanity addressed that problem beginning with photography and telegraphy and the - in the 1840s. We tried to solve the problem of overcoming the limitations of space, time, and form.
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The written word endures, the spoken word disappears
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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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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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. . . Americans are the best entertained and quite likely the least well-informed people in the Western world.
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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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Typography fostered the modern idea of individuality, but it destroyed the medieval sense of community and integration.
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Public schooling does not serve a public it creates a pubic.
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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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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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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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