the late 1980's, I can!
The Postman
Only Rings Once
John
Graves, CTM
SPEECH #10, June 10, 2004
Fellow Toastmasters and friends,
I have a proposition for you. (don’t point finger, use hand) And
you. And
you.
New is better. New
— is better! Right??
If one word, one phrase, sums up the essence of market capitalism,
perhaps that’s it. We all love shiny new cars, new computers, and
fresh
paint.
And yet — there was
one man who died last October (2003), a teacher, world-renowned social critic, and
author of some really fine books, who asked us to challenge our assumptions that new is better, and his name was Neil
Postman.
How many of you have heard of Neil Postman? (One person in 28
raised their hand.) I’d
like to introduce you, and through the miracle of television, a video clip from
the late 1980's, I can!
(PLAY 1 MINUTE TAPE FROM BILL MOYER'S "THE PUBLIC MIND", THEN FREEZE FRAME.)
Born in 1931 in New York, Postman was an English teacher who went
on to become the chairman of the department of culture and communications at
NYU. Noted for his humor and
penetrating satire, he appeared on the MacNeil Lehrer Newshour and spoke at
venues around the world.
Postman refused to be swept up in blind obedience to all that is
new. Even though he was a prolific writer who authored 30 books, he refused to
use a word processor and did not own a computer. He wrote all of his books with
yellow pad and a ball point pen.
He used to say that he was not a Luddite (Ludd-eye-t), but he did
not regard his association with Luddism (Ludd-ism) as being, in any way, a
disgrace. But who were the Luddites?
The Luddite movement flourished in England between 1811 and 1818 as
a response to the furious growth of machines and factories. The Luddites seemed
to be the only group in England who could foresee the catastrophic effects of the
factory system, especially on children.
In much the same way that outsourcing and the Free Trade Agreement
are perceived as today’s threat to a decent living wage, the Luddites saw the new weaving
machines and factories as a threat to their livelihood. They would go on night
raids to destroy textile machinery which threatened their jobs. 
While Postman did not encourage anybody to destroy anything, he
argued that, while technology brings many benefits, it is not an unmixed
blessing, and sometimes it has a considerable downside. Above all, he was an
independent thinker who consistently held himself to a very high standard.
Among his best known books were “Teaching as a Subversive
Activity”, “The End of Education”, and “Amusing Ourselves to Death”. As
an educator with a long historical perspective, Postman saw more clearly than
anyone that television and computers were not a boon to schools, but are, in fact, a
detriment to them.
Why?
To put it simply, our schools were founded as a consequence of
the printing press and books. Thus, if you ask whether it is better
for your children to learn with books or to learn with computers . . . . you
have asked the wrong question.
You must ask first how computers change our perception of reality,
how they change our families, social life, our symbols, the relationship between
individuals and institutions, and how we think.
It
was Postman's contention that computers are far more than tools. They are a
philosophy of knowledge that radically displaces every other philosophy of
knowledge that has come before.
You must first ask what is the very
purpose
of education? Is it
simply to gain access to ever greater quantities of information?
Or should it be instead, as Postman argued, to help control and manage the avalanche
of information we are faced with today? Brought to us courtesy of the internet
and 500 television channels?
Beyond dealing with the enormous amounts of irrelevant and
distracting information of the world we live in, one of the principal functions
of schools, Postman believed, is to teach children how to behave in groups. The
reason for this is you cannot have a democratic, civilized society unless people
learn how to participate in a disciplined way as part of a group.
These principles can be summed up by Robert Fulghum’s elegant
summary of what children are supposed to learn in kindergarten:
Share everything, play fair, don’t hit people, put things back
where you found them, clean up your own mess, wash your hands before you eat,
and of course, flush.
As a teacher, Postman was
keenly aware of the challenge that television presented to schools. He called
television “The First Curriculum”, because he realized that no matter how
hard any teacher tries to reach her students, television is always going to get
there first. Television: The first curriculum.
We live in a world in which verbal communication competes with books and magazines, which compete in turn with television which competes with the internet. Competition among media is so fierce, because surrounding every technology are institutions whose very reason for being reflects the world-view promoted by their technology. (Software companies, teachers, schools, TV networks, publishers, writer's unions...)
Toastmasters is one such institution. The purpose of Toastmasters
is to promote and focus on verbal communication, the oldest form of human
communication that we have, which is why we don’t generally trade our speeches
on paper, nor do we make television documentaries of our speeches.
Postman asked all sorts of intelligent questions about many things
we take for granted. He called them “invisible technologies.”
For example, to what extent has statistics been allowed entry to
places where it does not belong?
Postman tells us that some of the most abusive examples of the
misuse of statistics began with the work of Francis Galton, born in 1822. Galton
is also known as the founder of “Eugenics”, a term he coined, which means
the science of arranging marriage and family so as to produce the best possible
offspring based on the hereditary characteristics of the parents.
"The next time you watch a televised beauty contest in which the
women are ranked numerically, you should remember Francis Galton, whose
pathological romance with numbers originated this form of idiocy," says
Postman.
"But Galton’s main interest was in demonstrating,
statistically, the inheritance of 'intelligence'. He established a laboratory at the
International Exposition of 1884, where, for threepence, people could have their
skulls measured and receive Galton’s measurement of their intelligence.
Apparently, a visitor received no extra credit for demanding his or her money
back, which would surely have been a sign of intelligence."
Postman argued against the usefulness of intelligence tests
conducted even today... because they still measure a highly abstract and
prejudicial concept, and yet they somehow pretend to measure a supposedly
physical thing inside someone’s head.
Another example of a misuse of technology — of asking the wrong
questions and drawing the wrong conclusions, can be found in the field of public
polling and opinion research.
The problem with polls of public opinion is that, in America,
Postman believed, "public opinion" as seen in the media is too often a yes or no answer to an
unexamined question. Pollsters only report the results of opinion polls, with
very little focus on how or why or
what kinds of questions were asked to
achieve the results.
Slight changes in the structure of the questions asked can totally
alter the answers received. Thus, pollsters are in a better position to shape
public opinion than they are to actually survey it.
Postman reminded us that the problem to be solved in our
twenty-first century is not how to move information, nor is it the engineering
of information. Those problems have long since been solved. The problem is how
to transform information into knowledge, and how to transform knowledge into
wisdom.
If a shiny new information gadget comes into our lives, whether it
be a cell phone, a PDA, or any one of the dozens of new gizmos soon to be
marketed to the supposedly techno-savvy masses, the downside of how much these devices might change our lives is not
always immediately apparent. At first, only the benefits are promoted to engage
us in the technology.
But let us suppose, for example, that the government provided a
major incentive on our tax returns to allow Global Positioning Systems to
constantly monitor us on our cellphones or PDA’s, all in the interest of
making society more “efficient.” For say, improving the flow of city traffic,
or managing the consumption of energy, or monitoring rebellious individuals
called "terrorists". Would you allow yourself to be tracked if I gave you a 2000
dollar tax refund? How about a $4000 refund? Would you accept it? Postman argued
that we may be closer to Aldous Huxley’s vision of a Brave New World than we
yet realize.
The paradox of Postman's viewpoint is that while in the political spectrum he is generally pegged a "liberal", an advocate of the working class, his actual views are quite conservative. Someone who argues against "all that is new" is by nature conservative. But that's one of the problems with easy categorization of ideas and easy labels, which never tell the whole story.
There is a
danger in embracing all that is new without
careful, critical thinking, and this was the essence of Neil Postman’s
message, a message I believe that grows more important as the years roll by.
Madame Toastmaster??