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Because He Did Not Have Time To Read Every New Book In His Field, The Great Polish Anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski Used A Simple And Efficient Method Of Deciding Which Ones Were Worth His Attention: Upon Receiving A New Book, He Immediately Checked The Index To See If His Name Was Cited, And How Often. The More "malinowski" The More Compelling The Book. No "malinowski", And He Doubted The Subject Of The Book Was Anthropology At All.

-Neil Postman

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Because He Did Not

Neil Postman

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Because He Did Not Have Time To Read Every New Book In His Field, The Great Polish Anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski Used A Simple And Efficient Method Of Deciding Which Ones Were Worth His Attention: Upon Receiving A New Book, He Immediately Checked The Index To See If His Name Was Cited, And How Often. The More "malinowski" The More Compelling The Book. No "malinowski", And He Doubted The Subject Of The Book Was Anthropology At All.

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[m]ost Of Our Daily News Is Inert, Consisting Of Information That Gives Us Something To Talk About But Cannot Lead To Any Meaningful Action. (68).

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Public Schooling Does Not Serve A Public; It Creates A Pubic.

School Has Never Really Been About Individualized Learning, But About How To Be Socialized As A Citizen And As A Human Being, So That We, We Have Important Rules In School, Always Emphasizing The Fact That One Is Part Of A Group.

Make No Mistake About It: The Labeling Of Someone's Language As 'sexist' Involves A Political Judgment And Implies The Desirability Of A Particular Sociological Doctrine. One May Be In Favor Of That Doctrine (as I Believe I Am) But It Is Quite Another Matter To Force Writers By Edicts And Censorship Into Accepting It.

Cyberspace' Is A Metaphorical Idea Which Is Supposed To Be The Space Where Your Consciousness Is Located When You're Using Computer Technology On The Internet, For Example, And I'm Not Entirely Sure It's Such A Useful Term, But I Think That's What Most People Mean By It.

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Reading Is The Scourge Of Childhood Because, In A Sense, It Creates Adulthood.

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The Whole Problem With News On Television Comes Down To This: All The Words Uttered In An Hour Of News Coverage Could Be Printed On A Page Of A Newspaper. And The World Cannot Be Understood In One Page.

Voting Is The Next-to-last Refuge Of The Politically Impotent. The Last Refuge, Of Course, Is Giving Your Opinion To A Pollster.

If Parents Wish To Preserve Childhood For Their Own Children, They Must Conceive Of Parenting As An Act Of Rebellion Against Culture

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The Shock Of Twentieth-century Technology Numbed Our Brains And We Are Just Beginning To Notice The Spiritual And Social Debris That Our Technology Has Strewn About Us.

Voting, We Might Even Say, Is The Next To Last Refuge Of The Politically Impotent. The Last Refuge Is, Of Course, Giving Your Opinion To A Pollster, Who Will Get A Version Of It Through A Desiccated Question, And Then Will Submerge It In A Niagara Of Similar Opinions, And Convert Them Into--what Else?--another Piece Of News. Thus We Have Here A Great Loop Of Impotence: The News Elicits From You A Variety Of Opinions About Which You Can Do Nothing Except To Offer Them As More News, About Which You Can Do Nothing.

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An Educated Mind Is Practiced In The Uses Of Reason, Which Inevitably Leads To A Skeptical Outlook.

Americans No Longer Talk To Each Other, They Entertain Each Other. They Do Not Exchange Ideas, They Exchange Images. They Do Not Argue With Propositions; They Argue With Good Looks, Celebrities And Comercials.

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The Key To All Fanatical Beliefs Is That They Are Self-confirming....(some Beliefs Are) Fanatical Not Because They Are "false", But Because They Are Expressed In Such A Way That They Can Never Be Shown To Be False.

When Two Human Beings Get Together, They're Co-present, There Is Built Into It A Certain Responsibility We Have For Each Other, And When People Are Co-present In Family Relationships And Other Relationships, That Responsibility Is There. You Can't Just Turn Off A Person. On The Internet, You Can.

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