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Neil Postman
(8 Mar 1931 - 5 Oct 2003)
American educator and author who teamed with Charles Weingartner during the 1960s and 1970s as vocal advocates of radical education reform and together wrote five books. Postman subsequently wrote about the damaging role of the media on youth. Though a only small part of the larger subject he wrote about, remarkably, he objected to the children's program Sesame Street because it cast education into the role of entertainment, which would become their expectation for school. He was also concerned about the use of language.
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Science Quotes by Neil Postman (4 quotes)
Educators may bring upon themselves unnecessary travail by taking a tactless and unjustifiable position about the relation between scientific and religious narratives. … The point is that profound but contradictory ideas may exist side by side, if they are constructed from different materials and methods and have different purposes. Each tells us something important about where we stand in the universe, and it is foolish to insist that they must despise each other.
— Neil Postman
In The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School (1995), 107.
In 1925 [state legislators] prohibited by law the teaching of evolution in Tennessee. … Anti-evolutionists feared that a scientific idea would undermine religious belief. In the present…, pro-evolutionists fear that a religious idea will undermine scientific belief. The former had insufficient confidence in religion; the latter, insufficient confidence in science.
— Neil Postman
In Building a Bridge to the 18th Century: How the Past Can Improve Our Future (1999), 167.
Once you have learned how to ask relevant and appropriate questions, you have learned how to learn and no one can keep you from learning whatever you want or need to know.
[Co-author with Charles Weingartner.]
[Co-author with Charles Weingartner.]
— Neil Postman
Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner, Teaching as a Subversive Activity (1971), 23.
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 … how scientists judge the merit of a theory. Suppose students were taught the criteria of scientific theory evaluation and then were asked to apply these criteria … to the two theories in question. Wouldn’t such a task qualify as authentic science education? … I suspect that when these two theories are put side by side, and students are given the freedom to judge their merit as science, creation theory will fail ignominiously (although natural selection is far from faultless). … It is not only bad science to allow disputes over theory to go unexamined, but also bad education.
— Neil Postman
In Building a Bridge to the 18th Century: How the Past Can Improve Our Future (1999), 168.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
