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Rating:  -
So perhaps you hate to read, maybe someone has recommended this, or your professor is forcing you to read Postman, prepare yourself, your way of looking at the world we live in (modern media world) is about to change. Postman transforms everything you take for granted (television news for example) and stands it on its ear, forcing you to admit that you never really knew what you were looking at. Postman's books are for any citizen of the modern world who worries that information, and education have fat and junk food qualities that need to be curbed - indeed cut out.
Educators and parents especially should pay attention. Postman shakes your world.
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Postman has an uncanny ability to make everyone (no matter your background or philosophy) think about what he's saying. His writing works whether you are an academic, a student or just interested in the educational crisis. Teachers, business people, moms and dads and students should read this book. Take a minute and step outside of your preconceived ideas of what education should be and find out what it could be. Postman tells us how to make it happen. Now, let's do it.
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So there's a lot to worry about these days. With so much that overwhelms us, it's good we have such an insightful and enjoyable commentator to articulate our anomie.
I learned a long time ago to disregard any considerations of subject matter before reading any of Postman's work. I didn't consider myself particularly interested in education, but Postman never fails to turn me into a raving zealot, far more rabid and unreasonable than even Postman himself, whether it be about how we speak and write, television, childhood, or technology. (This latter viewpoint puts me in a rather difficult position because I work in computers)
And here, Postman doesn't disappoint either. In the field of education, there are more ardent reformers than you could fit in a football stadium. But what do we want to reform, and how to go about it. Everybody has a different idea about it. (Compare Sizer to Hirsch to A. Bloom, for example)
Postman I think makes a good case for what has been wrong with education (too much emphasis on facts rather than narrative or epistemology, creeping cultural sensitivity, and inculcating consumerism).
Still, this books ends up, for me, becoming more a defense of the status quo rather than a polemic for radical change. We risk, in our dissatisfaction with the current system, throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Education is best when it socializes children into the obligations of a citizen, and immunizes us against the snake-oil seductions of consumerism. Postman believes the seeds to our salvation, to harnessing the prodigious energies and good will of the young, are in finding powerful narratives that give meaning and direction to their lives. And I wholeheartedly agree that teaching this has nothing at all to do with whether our children learn that via multimedia Pentium machines, traditional pencil and paper, or even clay slates, for that matter.
The book's title, Postman tells us, is a deliberately ambiguous prophecy, meant to make us question why we have public education, as well as warn us that it may be on its way out. But along the way, Postman always lays out his arguments with entertaining examples, and an irrestistably dry wit which almost, I hope he pardons my using the term, amuses me to death.
I think our culture is richer because of Postman; I just wish more people paid attention to him. As for me, I can't wait for what else he has in store
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