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Childhood Is Analogous To Language Learning. It Has A Biological Basis But Cannot Be Realized Unless A Social Environment Triggers And Nurtures It, That Is, Has Need Of It. If A Culture Is Dominated By A Medium That Requires The Segregation Of The Young In Order That They Learn Unnatural, Specialized, And Complex Skills And Attitudes, Then Childhood, In One Form Or Another, Will Emerge, Articulate And Indispensable.

-Neil Postman

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Childhood Is Analogous To

Neil Postman

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Childhood Is Analogous To Language Learning. It Has A Biological Basis But Cannot Be Realized Unless A Social Environment Triggers And Nurtures It, That Is, Has Need Of It. If A Culture Is Dominated By A Medium That Requires The Segregation Of The Young In Order That They Learn Unnatural, Specialized, And Complex Skills And Attitudes, Then Childhood, In One Form Or Another, Will Emerge, Articulate And Indispensable.

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Television Watching

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But It Is Much Later In The Game Now, And Ignorance Of The Score Is Inexcusable. To Be Unaware That A Technology Comes Equipped With A Program For Social Change, To Maintain That Technology Is Neutral, To Make The Assumption That Technology Is Always A Friend To Culture Is, At This Late Hour, Stupidity Plain And Simple.

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...there Must Be A Sequence To Learning, That Perseverance And A Certain Measure Of Perspiration Are Indispensable, That Individual Pleasures Must Frequently Be Submerged In The Interests Of Group Cohesion, And That Learning To Be Critical And To Think Conceptually And Rigorously Do Not Come Easily To The Young But Are Hard-fought Victories.

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If We May Say That The Age Of Andrew Jackson Took Political Life Out Of The Hands Of Aristocrats And Turned It Over To The Masses, Then We May Say, With Equal Justification, That The Age Of Television Has Taken Politics Away From The Adult Mind Altogether.

The Point Is That Profound But Contradictory Ideas May Exist Side By Side, If They Are Constructed From Different Materials And Methods. And Have Different Purposes. Each Tells Us Something Important About Where We Stand In The Universe, And It Is Foolish To Insist That They Must Despise Each Other.

When A Population Becomes Distracted By Trivia, When Cultural Life Is Redefined As A Perpetual Round Of Entertainments, When Serious Public Conversation Becomes A Form Of Baby-talk, When, In Short, A People Become An Audience, And Their Public Business A Vaudeville Act, Then A Nation Finds Itself At Risk; Culture-death Is A Clear Possibility.

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

The Reader Must Come Armed , In A Serious State Of Intellectual Readiness. This Is Not Easy Because He Comes To The Text Alone. In Reading, One's Responses Are Isolated, One'sintellect Thrown Back On Its Own Resourses. To Be Confronted By The Cold Abstractions Of Printed Sentences Is To Look Upon Language Bare, Without The Assistance Of Either Beauty Or Community. Thus, Reading Is By Its Nature A Serious Business. It Is Also, Of Course, An Essentially Rational Activity.

But In The End, Science Does Not Provide The Answers Most Of Us Require. Its Story Of Our Origins And Of Our End Is, To Say The Least, Unsatisfactory. To The Question, "how Did It All Begin?", Science Answers, "probably By An Accident." To The Question, "how Will It All End?", Science Answers, "probably By An Accident." And To Many People, The Accidental Life Is Not Worth Living. Moreover, The Science-god Has No Answer To The Question, "why Are We Here?" And, To The Question, "what Moral Instructions Do You Give Us?", The Science-god Maintains Silence.

Certainty Abolishes Hope, And Robs Us Of Renewal.

We Do Not Measure A Culture By Its Output Of Undisguised Trivialities But By What It Claims As Significant.

The Price Of Maintaining Membership In The Establishment Is Unquestioning Acceptance Of Authority.

Anyone Who Has Studied The History Of Technology Knows That Technological Change Is Always A Faustian Bargain: Technology Giveth And Technology Taketh Away, And Not Always In Equal Measure. A New Technology Sometimes Creates More Than It Destroys. Sometimes, It Destroys More Than It Creates. But It Is Never One-sided. The Invention Of The Printing Press Is An Excellent Example. Printing Fostered The Modern Idea Of Individuality But It Destroyed The Medieval Sense Of Community And Social Integration.

Technological Change

When Media Make War Against Each Other, It Is A Case Of World-views In Collision.

Typography Fostered The Modern Idea Of Individuality, But It Destroyed The Medieval Sense Of Community And Integration.

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.

My Argument Is Limited To Saying That A Major New Medium Changes The Structure Of Discourse; It Does So By Encouraging Certain Uses Of The Intellect, By Favoring Certain Definitions Of Intelligence And Wisdom, And By Demanding A Certain Kind Of Content - In A Phrase, By Creating New Forms Of Truth-telling.

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.

I Mean To Suggest That Without A Transcendent And Honorable Purpose, Schooling Must Reach Its Finish, And The Sooner We Are Done With It, The Better.

Our Politics, Religion, News, Athletics, Education And Commerce Have Been Transformed Into Congenial Adjuncts Of Show Business, Largely Without Protest Or Even Much Popular Notice. The Result Is That We Are A People On The Verge Of Amusing Ourselves To Death.

A Metaphor Is Not An Ornament. It Is An Organ Of Perception. Through Metaphors, We See The World As One Thing Or Another.

America Was Founded By Intellectuals, A Rare Occurrence In The History Of Modern Nations We Might Even Say That America Was Founded By Intellectuals, From Which It Has Taken Us Two Centuries And A Communications Revolution To Recover.

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.

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

The Past Is Strapped To Our Backs. We Do Not Have To See It; We Can Always Feel It. People Gather Bundles Of Sticks To Build Bridges They Never Cross. People In Distress Will Sometimes Prefer A Problem That Is Familiar To A Solution That Is Not.

You Can Only Photograph A Fragment Of The Here And Now. The Photograph Presents The World As Object; Language, The World As Idea.

Television Screens Saturated With Commercials Promote The Utopian And Childish Idea That All Problems Have Fast, Simple, And Technological Solutions. You Must Banish From Your Mind The Naive But Commonplace Notion That Commercials Are About Products. They Are About Products In The Same Sense That The Story Of Jonah Is About The Anatomy Of Whales.

It Is Inescapable That Every Culture Must Negotiate With Technology, Whether It Does So Intelligently Or Not. A Bargain Is Struck In Which Technology Giveth And Technology Taketh Away.

Printing Links The Present With Forever. It Carries Personal Identity Into Realms Unknown.

The Idea Of Taking What People Call The 'entertainment Culture' As A Focus Of Study, Including Historical Perspective, Is Not A Bad Idea.

A Definition Is The Start Of An Argument, Not The End Of One.

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