Neil Postman quotes - page 4

We have largely trapped ourselves in our schools into expending almost all of our energies and resources in the direction of preserving patterns and procedures that make no sense even in their own terms. They simply do not produce the results that are claimed as their justification in the first place - quite the contrary. (Neil Postman)
Words vary in the degree to which they correspond to verifiable referents. View quote
Neil Postman
Since there is no such thing as complete knowledge of a subject, one is always working to improve one's reading, writing, etc., of a subject. View quote
Neil Postman
If you eliminate all the words of a subject, you have eliminated the subject. View quote
Neil Postman
Out of the maelstrom of happenings we abstract certain bits to attend to. We snapshot these bits by naming them. Then we begin responding to the names as if they are the bits that we have named, thus obscuring the effects of change. View quote
Neil Postman
The BASIC FUNCTION of all education, even in the most traditional sense, is to increase the survival prospects of the group. View quote
Neil Postman
The idea of "full time administrators" is palpably a bad one - especially in schools - and we say to hell with it. Most of the "administration" of the school should be a student responsibility. View quote
Neil Postman
We have framed... some questions which in our judgement, are responsive to the actual and immediate as against the fancied and future needs of learners in the world as it is (not as it was). View quote
Neil Postman
The new education is a process and will not suffer from the applied imaginations of all who wish to be a part of it. View quote
Neil Postman
The "requirements," indeed, force the teacher - and administrator - into the role of an authoritarian functionary whose primary task becomes that of enforcing the requirements rather than helping the learner to learn. View quote
Neil Postman
Scientific language, which Korzybski used as his model of sane language, is almost exclusively extensional and denotative, or at least tries to be. (Neil Postman)
The elimination of conventional tests... is necessary because, as soon as they are used as judgement-making instruments, the whole process of schooling shifts from education to training intended to produce passing grades on tests. View quote
Neil Postman
The computer argues, to put it baldly, that the most serious problems confronting us at both personal and professional levels require technical solutions through fast access to information otherwise unavailable. ...this is... nonsense. View quote
Neil Postman
Technopoly is a state of culture... state of mind... the deification of technology, which means that the culture seeks its authorization in technology... its satisfactions... its orders... View quote
Neil Postman
Our set of questions is best regarded as a metaphor of our sense of relevance. View quote
Neil Postman
The word "educate" is closely related to the word "educe." In the oldest pedagogic sense of the term, this meant a drawing out of a person something potential or latent. View quote
Neil Postman
Technological competition ignites total war, which means it is not possible to contain the effects of a new technology to a limited sphere of human activity... View quote
Neil Postman
The book, by isolating the reader and his responses, tended to separate him from the powerful oral influences of his family, teacher, and priest. Print thus created a new conception of self as well as of self-interest. View quote
Neil Postman
People and things are processes. Judgements convert them into fixed states. View quote
Neil Postman
The meaning I have given here to "language education" represents it as a form of metaeducation. That is, one learns a subject and, at the same time, learns what the subject is made of. View quote
Neil Postman
All of these concepts constitute the dynamics of the quest-questioning, meaning-making process that can be called "learning how to learn." (Neil Postman)
One of the insidious facts about totalitarianism is its seeming "efficiency." ...Democracy - with all of its inefficiency - is still the best system we have so far for enhancing the prospects of our mutual survival. The schools should begin to act as if this were so. View quote
Neil Postman
In schools, adminstrators commonly become myopic as a result of confronting all of the problems the "requirements" generate. Thus they cannot see (or hear) the constituents the system ostensibly exists to serve - the students. View quote
Neil Postman
In the development of intelligence nothing can be more "basic" than learning how to ask productive questions. View quote
Neil Postman
Imagine what might be accomplished if this talent and energy were turned to philosophy, to theology, to the arts, to imaginative literature or to education? View quote
Neil Postman