On Education
In 1969 and 1970 Postman collaborated with New Rochelle educator Alan Shapiro on the development of a model school based on the principles expressed in Teaching as a Subversive Activity. The result was the "Program for Inquiry, Involvement, and Independent Study" within New Rochelle High School. This "open school" experiment survived for 15 years. In subsequent years many programs following these principles were developed in American high schools, current survivors include the Village School in Great Neck, New York.
In a television interview conducted in 1995 on the MacNeil/Lehrer Hour Postman spoke about his opposition to the use of personal computers in schools. He felt that school was a place to learn together as a cohesive group and that it should not be used for individualized learning. Postman also worried that the personalized computer was going to take away from individuals socializing as citizens and human beings.
As an education theorist and writer, Postman is closely associated with other critics and commentators including John Holt, Ivan Illich, Paul Goodman, George Dennison, Jonathan Kozol, Herbert Kohl, James Herndon, Charles E. Silberman, John Taylor Gatto, and others.
Read more about this topic: Neil Postman
Famous quotes containing the word education:
“The proper aim of education is to promote significant learning. Significant learning entails development. Development means successively asking broader and deeper questions of the relationship between oneself and the world. This is as true for first graders as graduate students, for fledging artists as graying accountants.”
—Laurent A. Daloz (20th century)
“I note what you say of the late disturbances in your College. These dissensions are a great affliction on the American schools, and a principal impediment to education in this country.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)