Teaching as a Conserving Activity by Neil Postman
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Overview: During the ’60s when Teaching as a Subversive Activity was being prepared, Postman saw society as rigid, non-innovative, and authoritarian. Thus, it became the function of the school to subvert the forces in that dominant society. In 1979 when this book was released, Postman saw the larger society as influenced in powerful and destructive ways by the omnipresent media, particularly television. Television, which he dubs the first curriculum, (school is the second) trades most effectively on nonsequential learning, discontinuous content, immediate gratification, present-centered learning, nonanalytical and non-judgemental acceptance of the learner.
The first curriculum, argues Postman, “unreadies” all youth for the second and thereby seriously endangers the formal school curriculum. It is the function of the schools always to offer the counter-argument. Education must try to conserve while the rest of society is being innovative; ergo, Teaching as a Conserving Activity.
In order to serve the thermostatic role, schools must get to the business of putting forward the case for what is not happening in the culture. In order to do this they need to abandon their utopian thesis which includes, as a partial list, teaching sex education and ethnic pride, trying to educate the whole child, providing motivation for learning, being concerned with any type of psychotherapy, and having prayers in the school.
What the school should teach at all levels, elementary through graduate school, is the philosophy of science, philosophy of history, philosophy of language, philosophy of religion, semantics, and media ecology. These subjects should be taught in a context of historical continuities in an environment that insists on formal language, a dress code, and manners of a high level.
This book is profound, lucid, and convincing, particularly as Postman analyzes the impact that television has had on the culture and in the schools.
Genre: Nonfiction | Education
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