Neil Postman quotes - page 3

In the Middle Ages, there was a scarcity of information but its very scarcity made it both important and usable. (Neil Postman)

Print, in even more revolutionary ways than writing, changed the very form of civilization.

Neil Postman

As one learns the language of a subject, one is also learning what the subject is.

Neil Postman

One of the most common manifestations of the lack of this kind of semantic awareness can be found in what is called "prejudice": a response to an individual is predetermined because the name of the class in which the person is included is prejudiced negatively.

Neil Postman

Very often children make declarative statements about things when they really mean only to elicit an informative response. In some cases, they do this because they have learned from adults that it is "better" to pretend that you know than to admit that you don't.

Neil Postman

Children come to school having been deeply conditioned by the biases of television.

Neil Postman

What might have been politically therapeutic at one time may prove politically fatal at another.

Neil Postman

Every course would be a course in methods of learning and, therefore, in methods of teaching.

Neil Postman

Definitions, like questions and metaphors, are instruments for thinking. Their authority rests entirely on their usefulness, not their correctness. We use definitions in order to delineate problems we wish to investigate, or to further interests we wish to promote. In other words, we invent definitions and discard them as suits our purposes.

Neil Postman

There is no consistent, integrated conception of the world which serves as the foundation on which our edifice of belief rests. And therefore... we are more naive than those of the Middle Ages, and more frightened, for we can be made to believe almost anything.

Neil Postman

Someone needs to mention what may be lost. (Neil Postman)

All the while, let's not forget, very little, if any, substantive intellectual activity is going on.

Neil Postman

In order to understand what kind of behaviors classrooms promote, one must become accustomed to observing what, in fact, students actually do in them.

Neil Postman

The relationship between information and the mechanisms for its control is fairly simple to describe: Technology increases the available supply of information. ...control mechanisms are strained...

Neil Postman

Eliminate all restrictions that confine learners to sitting still in boxes inside of boxes.

Neil Postman

All reading, in truth, is reading in a content area.

Neil Postman

Language education... may achieve what George Bernard Shaw asserted is the function of art.

Neil Postman

What causes us the most misery and pain... has nothing to do with the sort of information made accessible by computers.

Neil Postman

The type who is now successful may be regarded as a handicapped learner - slow to respond, far too detached, lacking in emotion, inadequate in creating mental pictures of reality.

Neil Postman

No one I have ever known is so brilliant as to have learned the languages of all fields of knowledge equally well. Most of us do not learn some of them at all.

Neil Postman

It may come as a surprise to our technocrat philosophers, but people do not read, write, speak, or listen primarily for the purpose of achieving a test score. They use language in order to conduct their lives, and to control their lives, and to understand their lives. (Neil Postman)

Cultures may be classed into three types: tool-using cultures, technocracies, and technopolies.

Neil Postman

In schools, print shifted the emphasis from oral to written and visual communication.

Neil Postman

We no longer have a coherent conception of ourselves, and our universe, and our relation to one another and our world.

Neil Postman

In plain, what passes for a curriculum in today's schools is little else than a strategy of distraction... It is largely defined to keep students from knowing themselves and their environment in any realistic sense.

Neil Postman

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Neil Postman

Occupation: American Writer
Born: March 8, 1931
Died: October 5, 2003
Quotes count: 126
Wikipedia: Neil Postman

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