Neil Postman quotes - page 2

Neil Postman was an American media theorist, educator, and cultural critic, known for his analysis of technology and communication. His most influential works explored how media shapes society and affects public discourse. He warned about the dangers of technology dominating culture and encouraged critical thinking about media consumption. Here are 126 of his quotes:

What the advertiser needs to know is not what is right about the product but what is wrong about the buyer.

Neil Postman

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

What can be called "consciousness of the process of abstraction." That is, consciousness of the fact that out of a virtually infinite universe of possible things to pay attention to, we abstract only certain portions, and those portions turn out to be the ones for which we have verbal labels and categories. What we abstract, i. e., "see," and how we abstract it, or see it, or see it or think about it, is for all practical purposes inseparable from how we talk about it.

Neil Postman

We do not know nearly as much as we should about how children learn language, but if there is one thing we can say with assurance it is that knowledge of grammatical nomenclature and skill in sentence-parsing have no bearing whatsoever on the process.

Neil Postman

In a technocracy, tools play a central role in the thought-world of the culture. Everything must give way, in some degree, to their development. The social and symbolic worlds become increasingly subject to the requirements of that development. Tools are not integrated into the culture; they attack the culture. They bid to become the culture. As a consequence, tradition, social mores, myth, politics, ritual, and religion have to fight for their lives...

Neil Postman

But what started out as a liberating stream has turned into a deluge of chaos. ...matters have reached such proportions today that for the average person, information no longer has any relation to the solution of problems. ...The tie between information and action has been severed. ...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

Reflect on these questions - and others that these can generate. Please do not merely react to them.

Neil Postman

Writing freezes speech and in so doing gives birth to the grammarian, the logician, the rhetorician, the historian, the scientist -- all those who must hold language before them so that they can see what it means, where it errs, and where it is leading.

Neil Postman

What ideas are convenient to express inevitably becomes the important content of a culture.

Neil Postman

In introducing the personal computer to the classroom, we shall be breaking a four-hundred year-old truce between the gregariousness and openness fostered by orality and the introspection and isolation fostered by the printed word. Orality stresses group learning, cooperation, and a sense of social responsibility... Print stresses individualized learning, competition, and personal autonomy. Over four centuries, teachers, while emphasizing print, have allowed orality its place in the classroom, and have therefore achieved a kind of pedagogical peace between these two forms of learning, so that what is valuable in each can be maximized. Now comes the computer, carrying anew the banner of private learning and individual problem-solving. Will the widespread use of computers in the classroom defeat once and for all the claims of communal speech? Will the computer raise egocentrism to the status of a virtue?

Neil Postman

As technical people, we are apt to be preoccupied with scores, not competence...

Neil Postman

Of all things to be learned, in school or out, languaging, as I prefer to call the process, is least like a mechanical skill. It is, in fact, the most intimate, integrated, emotion-laden learning we do. At no point can we separate what we know and what we are from how our linguistic powers develop...

Neil Postman

In the field of education. I refer to the meaning of the word "basic," ...the meaning given to this word by some educators is not its "real" meaning. The word "basic,"... has been assigned certain meanings in order to further an education philosophy which is thought to be both sensible and effective.... neither you nor I are under any obligation to accept their definition of what is "basic." ...In short, the definition of something is usually the starting point of a dispute, not the settlement.

Neil Postman

There are two levels of knowing a subject. There is the student who knows what the definition of a noun or a gene or a molecule is; then there is the student... who also knows how the definition was arrived at. There is the student who can answer a question; then there is the student who also knows what are the biases of the question. There is the student who can give you the facts; then there is the student who also knows what is meant by a fact. I am maintaining that, in all cases, it is the latter who has a "basic" education; the former, a frivolous one.

Neil Postman

I don't think any of us can do much about the rapid growth of new technology.

Neil Postman

It is precisely through one's learning about the total context in which the language of a subject is expressed that personality may be altered.

Neil Postman

Conventional "requirements" ...are systems of prescriptions and proscriptions intended solely to limit the physical and intellectual movements of students - to "keep them in line, in sequence, in order," etc.

Neil Postman

Two opposing world-views - the technological and the traditional - coexisted in uneasy tension. The technological was the stronger, of course, but the traditional was there - still functional, still exerting influence...

Neil Postman

A new technology sometimes creates more than it destroys. Sometimes, it destroys more than it creates. But it is never one-sided.

Neil Postman

There are many books that are mechanically faultless but which contain untrue, unclear, or even nonsensical ideas.

Neil Postman

Survival in a stable environment depends almost entirely on remembering the strategies for survival that have been developed in the past, and so the conservation and transmission of these becomes the primary mission of education. But, a paradoxical situation develops when change becomes the primary characteristic of the environment. Then the task turns inside out - survival in a rapidly changing environment depends almost entirely upon being able to identify which of the old concepts are relevant to the demands imposed by the new threats to survival, and which are not.

Neil Postman

Even when the problem of the access to technology is solved so that anyone who wishes can have access to technology, there still remains a problem.

Neil Postman