Reforming Students

I’m reading Neil Postman this week, in the following order:

The Disappearance of Childhood

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology

The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School

Teaching as a Subversive Activity

I have really enjoyed Postman’s historical insight in The Disappearance of Childhood, and am impressed with the precise accuracy with which he predicted the state of Childhood back in 1982. 26 years later, Postman’s hypothesis is unfolding flawlessly… unfortunately. Most interesting to me has been his evaluation of the effects that television on childhood:

“People watch television. They do not read it. Nor do they much listen to it. They watch it. This is true of adults and children, intellectuals and laborers, fools and wise men. And what they watch are dynamic, constantly changing images, as many as 1,200 different ones each hour… it is well to remember that the average length of a shot on a network television program is somewhere between three and four seconds, the average length of a shot on a commercial, between two and three seconds. This means that watching television requires instantaneous pattern-recognition, not delayed analytic decoding. It requires perception, not conception… watching television not only requires no skills but develops no skills. As Damerall points out, “No child or adult becomes better at watching television by doing more of it. What skills are required are so elemental that we have yet to hear of a television viewing disability” (79, emphasis mine).

“The six-year-old and the sixty-year-old are equally qualified to experience what television has to offer. Television, in this sense, is the consummate egalitarian medium of communication, surpassing oral language iteself. For in speaking, we may always whisper so that the children will not hear. Or we may use words they may not understand. But television cannot whisper, and its pictures are both concrete and self-explanatory. The children see everything in shows” (84).

“[in] most instances social role is formed by the conditions of a particular information environment, an this is most certainly the case with the social category of childhood. Children are a group of people who do not know certain things that adults know. In the Middle Ages there were no children because there existed no means for adults to know exclusive information. In the Age of Gutenberg, such a means developed. In the Age of Television, it is dissolved” (85).