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:
“... many of the things which we deplore, the prevalence of tuberculosis, the mounting record of crime in certain sections of the country, are not due just to lack of education and to physical differences, but are due in great part to the basic fact of segregation which we have set up in this country and which warps and twists the lives not only of our Negro population, but sometimes of foreign born or even of religious groups.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962)
“Casting an eye on the education of children, from whence I can make a judgment of my own, I observe they are instructed in religious matters before they can reason about them, and consequently that all such instruction is nothing else but filling the tender mind of a child with prejudices.”
—George Berkeley (1685–1753)