Neil Postman

been accused of corrupting the youth of my city by teaching them to ask questions. In Teaching as a Subversive Activity, educator Neil Postman (1969) pointed out the root of education, educe, means a drawing out of one’s potential. By asking open ended question and challenging ideas, I attempt to draw out the potential in my students, my children, and myself. The best questions generate more questions. As a teacher of rhetoric, I owe homage to Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian for making logic, rhetoric, and grammar part of the trivium of the liberal arts. Aristotle posited the classical arrangement of argument—introduction, narration, confirmation, refutation and concession, and summation. These are skills I taught just today Cicero’s five canons of rhetoric—inventio, dispositio, eluctio, memoria, and actio—are still taught in rhetoric courses today as invention, arrangement, memory, and delivery (or style).…

schooling system. Also, the more effect technology has on our education system and on our everyday lives, the more there’ll be critics that will bash the system we have today and try to bring out every negative impact it has on us. I am very opposed to those types of people such as Ken Robinson and his talk “Changing Education Paradigms,” Neil Postman and his “Of Luddites, Learning, and Life,” and Annie Lowrey’s “The Gap between schooling and education.” I think technology has had mostly…

In this essay, Neil Postman talks about television news and how the language of pictures differs a lot between the oral and written language of news. He also talks about its impact on the way it draws us in. Postman disapproves of the content of television and the news itself. He finds that television news is not taken seriously anymore and has become solely for entertainment purposes. News broadcasts have dramatic music and images to show that a dramatic event has occurred. This lures us in.…

by Neil Postman Professor and writer, Neil Postman, in his story, “The Judgment of Thamus” claims that today’s technology has both positive and negative effects on society and the world as a whole. Postman starts out writing about the positives and negatives of technology but slowly drifts towards the negative side, attempting to persuade the audience into thinking that technology is harmful to society. Postman’s claim that technology has a multitude of negative effects on society is an…

In the article titled amusing ourselves to death it does state and show the credentials of the author Neil Postman. At the beginning of the article it states that, “Neil Postman was educated at the State University of New York in Fredonia and Columbia University. In 1971, he founded a graduate program in media ecology at NYU and eventually chaired the Department of Culture and Communication. Postman was a prolific and sometimes controversial writer in the fields of language and media theory.” To…

Problems in the world are presented through television. Before the invention of newspapers and other media, information was spread through the word of mouth and later in written forms. When television was invented, communication became visible and information was being spread instantaneously. However, electronic media is reshaping the culture in which we live today by televising serious issues into a form of entertainment. Neil Postman, the author of his 1985 Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public…

The End of Education - Neil Postman "When am I ever going to use this?" Every student reaches a point in school where they ask that. Right about the time calculus and Shakespeare are introduced schoolchildren stop paying attention and start asking the much bigger questions. How would you answer the question? Everyone has their own answer; that's the problem. Postman writes that modern education is flawed because we don't all have a common answer, or narrative. During the Space Race in America…

During the eighteenth and nineteenth century, the foundation of a mass education system and intellectual freedom was born. America was the envy of the world. Neil Postman’s essay “Future Shlock”, brings attention to the downfall of intelligence in the 1980’s during a time when America's president was a former actor. He believed displacement of serious discourse came about due to the popularity of show business. According to Postman; politics, history, education, and religion became intermingled…

Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman discusses “the news of the day”(7), and his opinion on it. Had it not been for the mediums that we get our information from, we would not pay attention to certain stories. He states that the news of the day is simply “a figment of our technological imagination” (8) and without the platform to display it, “the news of the day does not exist” (8). I agree with Postman's view because in my everyday life I choose to get information from not only the people around me,…

I agree with Neil Postman, the author of Amusing Ourselves to Death, where he states that ''... author assumed a connection between forms of human communication and the quality of a culture''. I agree with this because every form of communication can portray what someone wants to say. Some ways of communication do have a better way of showing the significance of what we are trying to say, but each form of communication brings the same point. Amusing Ourselves to Death is a book written by Neil…