Peter > Peter's Quotes

“But the poor person does not exist as an inescapable fact of destiny. His or her existence is not politically neutral, and it is not ethically innocent. The poor are a by-product of the system in which we live and for which we are responsible. They are marginalized by our social and cultural world. They are the oppressed, exploited proletariat, robbed of the fruit of their labor and despoiled of their humanity. Hence the poverty of the poor is not a call to generous relief action, but a demand that we go and build a different social order.”
― Gustavo Gutiérrez

“At its best, schooling can be about how to make a life, which is quite different from how to make a living.”
― Neil Postman, The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School

“One way of looking at the history of the human group is that it has been a continuing struggle against the veneration of "crap.”
― Neil Postman

“If man--if each one of us--abdicates his responsibilities with regard to values; if each one of us limits himself to leading a trivial existence in a technological civilization, with greater adaptation and increasing success as his sole objectives; if we do not even consider the possibility of making a stand against these determinants, then everything will happen as I have described it, and the determinates will be transformed into inevitabilities.”
― Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society

“Reality never changes. It is our attitudes about reality that change.”
― Peter K. Fallon

“But what has changed? The truth is that nothing changes...It is we who have changed, we who are beguiled by technological change, we who have ceased to believe that a certain situation exists while beginning to believe a new one has replaced it. We still love and hate, suffer and feel joy, resent and admire, covet and sacrifice. We still allow some with power to exploit and marginalize others without power, and we still look on quietly, feeling bad about it all but doing nothing. Nothing at all changes when new technologies are introduced into a culture. Nothing changes but our attitudes about what is and is not “real,” what is and is not “important,” what is and is not worth knowing. And we change because we choose to change, because media, as McLuhan tells us, are nothing more than extensions of us.”
― Peter K. Fallon

“What makes a good teacher today is what has always made a good teacher: command of a subject, a critical mind, a demanding nature, and an ability to inspire students to pursue knowledge for some end beyond mere financial rewards. A good teacher might be entertaining and funny, but shouldn’t set out to be. A good teacher may have broad experience with and skills using technology, but the mere possession of such experience and skills doesn’t make one a good teacher.”
― Peter K. Fallon

“My advice to people who want to teach is pretty simple and very likely to be ridiculed: don’t believe the bullshit. You’re not there to help students get skills for a workplace. You’re not there to make them more marketable. You’re not there to provide them with answers to petty, superficial questions. You’re not there to impress them – or yourself – with the latest technological wonder that promises to make something “better” but will probably only shorten some algorithmic process and benefit an employer. You’re not there to mass produce replaceable parts for the machinery of the global economy. You’re there for one reason and one reason only: to make them better people than they were when they came in.”
― Peter K. Fallon

“I see no real evolution in media ecology beyond the “shape shifting” nature that seems to have been deliberately embedded in its fabric. The one thing that must, I think, always define a study we recognize as media ecological is its acknowledgement of the interactions of cultures – and the people who constitute those cultures – and their technologies.”
― Peter K. Fallon

“It was only after oral tales became written orthodoxies that some people were labeled “pagans” and “heretics” and burned at the stake for unorthodox views. The greatest strength media ecology possesses is its ability to generate unorthodox views. Media ecology makes a better “Trojan horse” than a golden bull.”
― Peter K. Fallon

“Understanding media alone will not bring about a better world (the Kingdom of God?), but ought to be the foundation of good works that may bring it about: constructing an environment of truly free-flowing and uninhibited information, to be sure, but also reaffirming and supporting the structures of thought that allow us to identify error and falsehood, and empowering us to label bullshit as bullshit, as Harry Frankfurt suggests. The global village, with its “rich and creative mix” full of “creative diversity” can be the perfect venue to put bullshit on an equal footing with truth. I see nothing in this situation that is either constructive or Catholic.”
― Peter K. Fallon

“Media are epistemologies. Every medium implies a particular way of thinking about things, influences to great extent what things we will think about, and how we will think about them.”
― Peter K. Fallon

“The changeover from one medium to another presents both opportunities and challenges. New technologies empower us, to be sure; but never without some cost which we universally fail to anticipate. We must avoid celebrating the advantages too enthusiastically, lest we miss the meaning of the challenges. For once the changeover is complete, the opportunities and challenges fully assimilated, we will certainly be impotent to undo them.”
― Peter K. Fallon, Cultural Defiance, Cultural Deviance

“All that is really necessary to hate someone is not to give a shit about what happens to him. And when we don’t give a shit about what happens to a whole group of Americans because of the color of their skin, that is racism.”
― Peter K. Fallon, Cultural Defiance, Cultural Deviance

“None of this is ever going to change until each of us changes. The change has to come from us, and the object of that change is us. We have to change our hearts. And we have to change our minds. We have to stop thinking in terms of stereotypes and deal with people as people. We have to stop thinking in terms of narrow self-interest and begin to reclaim the idea of the common good.”
― Peter K. Fallon

“Trayvon Martin’s killing touches on something universal. His death ought to make us look at ourselves and be honest: we need to realize that no one in America is safe until everyone is safe, that no one in America is a success until everyone is a success, that there is no more central a self-interest than the interests of all.”
― Peter K. Fallon

“Gandhi once said, "I like your Christ. I don't like your Christians." Well, I love America. But there are too many hateful Americans.”
― Peter K. Fallon

“The way I see it, we're all either Trayvon Martin or we're George Zimmerman. The choice is ours. There's no in-between.”
― Peter K. Fallon

“Media are really nothing more than extensions of us. It is we, not the media, who are metaphysical. Metaphysics is part and parcel of an organ – the human brain – that processes information both propositionally and presentationally, in words and in images; in reason and in imagination. We believe and refuse to believe. We believe in things that have no physical nature, no material reality, and we refuse to believe in them. We believe in things that not only have a physical, material nature but are also empirically measurable, and we refuse to believe in them. And our media play a role in all of this.”
― Peter K. Fallon, Cultural Defiance, Cultural Deviance

“It is a truism today, in this highly technologically-developed
culture, that students need technical computer skills. Equally
truistic (and, not incidentally, true) is that the workplace has
become highly technological. Even more truistic – and far
more disturbing – are the shifts in education over the last two
decades as public elementary schools, public and private high
schools, and colleges and universities have invested scores
of billions of dollars on “digital infrastructure,” computers,
monitors and printers, “smart classrooms,” all to “meet the
demands” of this new technological workplace.

"We won’t dwell on the fact – an inconvenient truth? –
that those technological investments have coincided with a
decline in American reading behaviors, in reading and reading
comprehension scores, in overall academic achievement, in the
phenomenon – all too familiar to us in academia – of “grade
inflation,” in an alarming collapse of our students’ understanding
of their own history (to say nothing of the history of the rest of the world), rising ignorance of world and American geography, with an abandonment of the idea of objectivity, and with an
increasingly subjective, even solipsistic, emphasis on personal
experience. Ignore all this. Or, if we find it impossible to ignore,
then let’s blame the teachers...”
― Peter K. Fallon, Cultural Defiance, Cultural Deviance

“Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence—those are the three pillars of Western prosperity. If war, waste, and moneylenders were abolished, you'd collapse. And while you people are overconsuming the rest of the world sinks more and more deeply into chronic disaster.”
― Aldous Huxley, Island

“Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“Postmodernism: The cultural condition marked by the absolute gratification of human desires and the absolute neglect of human needs.”
― Peter K. Fallon

“Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see.”
― Neil Postman