Neil Postman Quotes

Without a purpose, schools are houses of detention, not attention

A metaphor is not an ornament. It is an organ of perception. Through metaphors, we see the world as ...

..all subjects are forms of discourse and that, therefore, almost all education is a form of languag...

Poverty is a great educator. Having no boundaries and refusing to be ignored, it mostly teaches hope...

In tracking what people have to say about schooling, I notice that most of the conversation is about...

Watch a man--say, a politician--being interviewed on television, an you are observing a demonstratio...

It is naive to suppose that something that has been expressed in one form can be expressed in anothe...

...people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities t...

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

Television screens saturated with commercials promote the utopian and childish idea that all problem...

If students get a sound education in the history, social effects and psychological biases of technol...

Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial...

Every television program must be a complete package in itself. No previous knowledge is to be requir...

Of course, in television's presentation of the "news of the day," we may see the Now...this" mode of...

In America, everyone is entitled to an opinion, and it is certainly useful to have a few when a poll...

It is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and narcotized by ...

In every tool we create, an idea is embedded that goes beyond the function of the thing itself.

Marx understood well that the press was not merely a machine but a structure for discourse, which bo...

The television commercial has mounted the most serious assault on capitalist ideology since the publ...

We may say then that the contribution of the telegraph to public discourse was to dignify irrelevanc...

It is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and narcoticized b...

Exposition is a mode of thought, a method of learning, and a means of expression. Almost all of the ...

Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas, they ...

Everything in our background has prepared us to know and resist a prison when the gates begin to clo...

The clearest way to see through a culture is to attend to its tools for conversation.

With television, we vault ourselves into a continuous, incoherent present.

Prior to the age of telegraphy, the information-action ratio was sufficiently close so that most peo...

The point is that television does not reveal who the best man is. In fact, television makes impossib...

For no medium is excessively dangerous if its users understand what its dangers are. It is not impor...

Think of Richard Nixon or Jimmy Carter or Billy Graham, or even Albert Einstein, and what will come ...

Moreover, we have seen enough by now to know that technological changes in our modes of communicatio...

I should go so far as to say that embedded in the surrealistic frame of a television news show is a ...

How often does it occur that information provided you on morning radio or television, or in the morn...

Typography fostered the modern idea of individuality, but it destroyed the medieval sense of communi...

Voting, we might even say, is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent. The last refuge i...

The opposite of a correct statement is an incorrect statement. The opposite of a profound truth is a...

What’s wrong with turning back the clock if the clock is wrong? We need not be slaves to our technol...

There is no way to help a learner to be disciplined, active, and thoroughly engaged unless he percei...

Language has an ideological agenda that is apt to be hidden from view.

In saying no one knew about the ideas implicit in the telegraph, I am not quite accurate. Thoreau kn...

Thomas Jefferson. . . knew what schools were for--to ensure that citizens would know when and how to...

Public education does not serve a public. It creates a public. And in creating the right kind of pub...

Educators may bring upon themselves unnecessary travail by taking a tactless and unjustifiable posit...

The scientific method," Thomas Henry Huxley once wrote, "is nothing but the normal working of the hu...

The question is not, Does or doesn't public schooling create a public? The question is, What kind of...