by Neil Postman
As to the first point, there is more talk than ever about schools’ being nineteenth-century inventions that have outlived their usefulness. Schools are expensive; they don’t do what we expect of them; their functions can be served by twenty-first-century technology. Anyone who wants to give a speech on this subject will draw an audience, and an attentive one. An even bigger audience can be found for a talk on the second point: that the idea of a “public school” is irrelevant in the absence of the idea of a public; that is, Americans are now so different from each other, have so many diverse points of view, and such special group grievances that there can be no common vision or unifying principles. On the last point, while writing this book, I have steadfastly refused to reread or even refer to one of my earlier books in which I claimed that childhood is disappearing. I proceeded as if this were not so. But I could not prevent myself from being exposed to other gloomy news, mostly the handwriting on the wall. Can it be true, as I read in The New York Times, that every day 130,000 children bring deadly weapons to school, and not only in New York, Chicago, and Detroit but in many venues thought to provide our young with a more settled and humane environment in which to grow? Can it be true, as some sociologists claim, that by the start of the twenty-first century, close to 60 percent of our children will be raised in single-parent homes? Can it be true that sexual activity (and sexual diseases) among the young has increased by 300 percent in the last twenty years? It is probably not necessary for me to go on with the “can it be true’s?.” Everyone agrees and all signs point to the fact that American culture is not presently organized to promote the idea of childhood; and without that idea schooling loses much of its point.
These are realistic worries and must raise serious doubts for anyone who wishes to say something about schooling. Nonetheless, I offer this book in good faith, if not as much confidence as one would wish. My faith is that school will endure since no one has invented a better way to introduce the young to the world of learning; that the public school will endure since no one has invented a better way to create a public; and that childhood will survive because without it we must lose our sense of what it means to be an adult.
Notes
Chapter 1 The Necessity of Gods
1. Eric Hoffer, The Ordeal of Change (New York: Harper & Row), 62.
2. Quoted in Rollo May, The Cry for Myth (New York: Norton), 57.
3. Quoted in “The West’s Deepening Culture Crisis,” The Futurist, November-December 1993, 12.
4. Quoted in Shlain Leonard, Art & Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time and Light. (New York: William Morrow), 430.
5. Gary Krist, “Tragedyland,” New York Times, November 27, 1993, 19.
6. See the February 18 and 25, 1915, issues of The Nation. The articles were written by Horace Kallen.
Chapter 2 Some Gods That Fail
1. Quoted in Prognosis 16, no. 3 (August 6, 1993): 4.
2. John T. Bruer, “The Mind’s Journey from Novice to Expert,” American Educator, Summer 1993, 6–7.
3. Theodore Roszak, The Cult of Information: The Folklore of Computers and the True Art of Thinking (New York: Pantheon), 62–63.
4. For a full analysis of this point, see the work of Henry Levin of Stanford University.
5. See Robert J. Samuelson, “The Useless ‘Jobs Summit,’ ” Newsweek, March 14, 1994, 50.
6. New York Times, February 23, 1994, B7.
7. “Tying Education to the Economy.” New York Times, February 20, 1994, 21.
Chapter 3 Some New Gods That Fail
1. Although I find myself reluctant to accept such studies, there are three or four that claim that when hospitalized patients are prayed for (without their knowledge or the knowledge of their physicians), they tend to improve at a greater rate than those who are not prayed for. See Healing Words by Larry Dossey, M.D. (HarperCollins, 1993).
2. Diane Ravitch, “When School Comes to You,” The Economist, September 11, 1993, 45–46.
3. Hugh McIntosh, National Research Council News Report, Summer 1993, 2.
4. Theodore Roszak, The Cult of Information: The Folklore of Computers and the True Art of Thinking (New York: Pantheon), x.
5. Ravitch, The Economist, 46.
6. See Robert Fulghum, All I Ever Really Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten (New York: Villard).
7. New York Times, April 12, 1994, A13.
8. H. L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy (Philadelphia: The Franklin Library), 334.
9. Quoted in Larry Cuban, Teachers and Machines: The Classroom Use of Technology Since 1920 (New York: Teachers College Press), 5.
10. Warren Crichlow et al., “Multicultural Ways of Knowing: Implications for Practice,” Journal of Education, 172, no. 2 (1990): 102.
11. Lévi-Strauss, Claude, “The Structure of Myth,” in The Structural Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 119.
12. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The Disuniting of America (New York: Norton), 29–30.
13. Ibid., 94.
Chapter 4 Gods That May Serve
1. Much of this conversation has been printed in German in Über Morgen: Das Magazin Für Reise in Die Zukunft, Summer 1994, 12–14.
2. Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man (Boston: Little, Brown), 374.
3. Cornel West, Race Matters (New York: Vintage), 159.
4. See Susanne Langer in Feeling and Form (New York: Scribner’s).
Chapter 5 The Spaceship Earth
1. See Harvey Kantor, “Managing the Transition from School to Work: The False Promise of Youth Apprenticeship,” Teachers College Record, 95, no. 1 (Summer 1994): 442–461.
2. Both quotes are found in James Reston, Jr., Galileo: A Life (New York: HarperCollins), 136, 142.
3. Quoted in Jacques Barzun, The Culture of Desire (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press), 110.
Chapter 7 The American Experiment
1. Washington Post, July 29, 1994, B3, col. 1.
Chapter 9 The Word Weavers/The World Makers
1. See Eva Berger, “Metaphor, Mind & Machine: An Assessment of the Sources of Metaphors of Mind in the Works of Selected Education Theorists” (Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1991).
2. I. A. Richards, Interpretation in Teaching (New York: Harcourt Brace), 384.
BOOKS BY NEIL POSTMAN
“No contemporary essayist writing about American pop culture is more fun to read and more on target.”—Los Angeles Times
CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTIONS
Stirring Up Trouble About Language,
Technology, and Education
In this series of feisty and ultimately hopeful essays, readers will find themselves rethinking many of their bedrock assumptions: Should education transmit culture or defend us against it? Is technological innovation progress or a peculiarly American addiction?
Current Affairs/Science/Education/0-679-73421-X
THE DISAPPEARANCE OF CHILDHOOD
From the vogue for nubile models to the explosion in the juvenile crime rate, this modern classic of social history and media traces the precipitous decline of childhood in America today—and the corresponding threat to the notion of adulthood.
Media/Current Affairs/0-679-75166-1
THE END OF EDUCATION
Redefining the Value of School
In this provocative analysis, Neil Postman suggests that the current crisis in America’s educational system derives from its failure to supply students with a unifying “narrative” like those that inspired earlier generations. Instead, today’s schools promote the false “gods” of consumerism, technology, and ethnic separatism.
Education/0-679-75031-2
TECHNOPOLY
The Surrender of Culture to Technology
Postman launches a trenchant warning against the tyranny of machines over man in the late twentieth century. Technopoly chronicles our transformation from a society that uses technology to one that is shaped by it, as it also traces its effects upon what we mean by politics, religion, int
ellect, history—even privacy and truth.
Current Affairs/Sociology/0-679-74540-8
Available at your local bookstore, or call toll-free to order:
1-800-793-2665 (credit cards only).
