Building a Bridge to the 18th Century: How the Past Can Improve Our Future

by Neil Postman

In any case, early American literature is distinguished more by pamphlets and newspapers than by books.

But from the seventeenth century to the late nineteenth century, printed matter was virtually all that was available. There were no movies to see, radio to hear, photographic displays to look at, CDs to play.

What I am driving at is that the modern conception of democracy was tied inseparably to the printed word. All the Enlightenment political philosophers—none more explicitly than Locke, Madison, and Jefferson—assumed that political life would be conducted through print.

Nothing is unchangeable,” he wrote, “but the inherent and unalienable rights of man.”

Jefferson, in other words, would not be as impressed by the availability of information as he was by one’s competence to understand and give coherent expression to political and social ideas.

the new media help to create what Alexander Hamilton might call “mobocracy”?

Democracy depends on public discourse, and therefore the kind and quality of the discourse is of singular importance.

Though one may accomplish it from time to time, it is very hard to say nothing when employing a written sentence.

reading is by its nature a serious business. It is also, of course, an essentially rational activity.

almost every scholar who has grappled with the question of what reading does to one’s habits of mind has concluded that the process encourages rationality;

That is why a good reader does not cheer an apt sentence or pause to applaud even an inspired paragraph. Analytic thought is too busy for that, and too detached.

In a culture dominated by print, public discourse tends to be characterized by a coherent, orderly arrangement of facts and ideas.

is no accident that the Age of Reason was coexistent with the growth of a print culture, first in Europe and then in America.

Is it possible that as print loses its dominance, the underpinnings of a democratic polity crumble?

egoism is individualism writ large and ugly, so that feelings of and for community life are alien, if not incomprehensible. He suggests that individualism is a problem for democracy but that democracy can survive it. Egoism is another matter.

We know of the role played by the printing press with movable type in promoting individualism. It greatly amplified, for example, the quest for fame and individual achievement.

the possibility of having one’s words and work fixed forever created a new and pervasive idea of selfhood. The printing press is nothing less than a time-machine, easily as potent and as curious as any one of H. G. Wells’s contraptions.

With the printing press, forever may be addressed by the voice of an individual, not a social aggregate.

The scribal culture,” Eisenstein remarks, “held narcissism in check. Printing released it.”)

Do the new media of communication help or hinder in the development of shared dreams of democracy? Do our movies, TV shows, and songs bind us or loosen us?

Here I raise the point that the fantasies and dreams of what we have come to call “democracy” were created by masters of the printed word. What new dreams will be created by masters of digital communication?

What is the principal mind-set associated with the Enlightenment?, the answer would certainly be—skepticism.

democratic society must take the risk, that such a society will be improved by citizens of a critical mind, and that the best way for citizens to protect their liberty is for them to be encouraged to be skeptical, to be suspicious of authority, and to be prepared (and unafraid) to resist propaganda.

I remarked earlier, skepticism is the principal legacy of the Enlightenment. There is nothing more profound to do than to carry that legacy forward by making an effort at conveying it to our young.

refer to the possibility that we would actually teach children something about the art and science of asking questions.

The president, the secretary of education, a school superintendent? They want our students to be answer-givers, not question-askers.

know that educational research is not always useful, and sometimes absurd, but for what it may be worth, a clear and positive relationship between the study of semantics and critical thinking is well established in the research literature.

This is not the place to provide details as to how education can help the young defend themselves against propaganda in all its seductive varieties, but a serious attempt at language study is, I believe, the key.

This is why in discussing what words we shall use in describing an event, we are not engaging in “mere semantics.” We are engaged in trying to control the perceptions and responses of others (as well as ourselves) to the character of the event itself.

Good science has nothing to fear from bad science, and by our putting one next to the other, the education of our youth would be served exceedingly well. I would propose that evolution and creation science be presented in schools as alternative theories.

The dispute between evolutionists and creation scientists offers textbook writers and teachers a wonderful opportunity to provide students with insights into the philosophy and methods of science.

what students really need to know is not whether this or that theory is to be believed, but how scientists judge the merit of a theory.

Real science education would ask students to consider with an open mind the Ptolemaic and Copernican world-views, array the arguments for and against each, and then explain why they think one is to be preferred over the other.

Ptolemaic astronomy may be a refuted scientific theory but, for that very reason, it is useful in helping students to see that knowledge is a quest, not a commodity; that what we think we know comes out of what we once thought we knew; and that what we will know in the future may make hash of what we now believe.

what they will not know, as none of us did about everything from automobiles to movies to television, is what are the psychological, social, and political effects of new technologies. And that is a subject that ought to be central in schools.

books. My point is that, if we are going to make technology education part of the curriculum, its goal must be to teach students to use technology rather than to be used by

It is, therefore, quite impossible (impossible by definition) for anyone to claim to be educated who has no knowledge of the role played by religion in the formation of culture.

I therefore propose that, beginning sometime in late elementary school and proceeding with focused detail in high school and beyond, we provide our young with opportunities to study comparative religion.

I regard history as the single most important idea for our youth to take with them into the future. I call it an idea rather than a subject because every subject has a history, and its history is an integral part of the subject.