Postman's general philosophy, which was general education, also known as the great-books approach, was made known to me shortly after I enrolled in a graduate program under his chairmanship in 1980. I was there to study the media, and he was at that time a professor of media ecology (a name for his anti-discipline). As he explained to me: "We're just trying to give people a good liberal arts education." Which, he further argued, and easily demonstrated himself, was exactly the tool needed to understand the gathering beast: the Media. In an age of specialization, this is not how academic life works. But his did.
Postman, one should remember, was originally an English teacher. He entered the university in a time of expansion and optimism in public schooling. We were building lots of schools and creating big public universities then. His degree was in English education, from Teachers College at Columbia. From 1959 on, his home was the School of Education at NYU. His original and core readership remained schoolteachers, and I witnessed the same ritual numerous times: A woman in her 40s or 50s would approach after a speech. "Professor Postman, I just want to tell you, I read your book, 'Teaching as a Subversive Activity' ... That book changed my life." Often she would have the book with her, and he would sign it ... with a felt-tip pen. This made an impression on me. A stray sentence lifted from that book:
"We must emphasize that the concept, 'that we must unlearn dead concepts' is itself new, and so rather incongenial to most who confront it the first time."
If Postman was an English teacher, he realized very early that a bigger, brighter and more compelling classroom existed out there, and it would teach your kids no matter how good you were at reaching them. Today this is a commonplace: They get it from television! But in the 1950s, when Postman began serious study, it was a far more original thought: We're being outtaught by the media. For this he later found a brilliant description. Television, he said, is the first curriculum. School is second.
There's no accounting for what you absorb from such a man. For he knew the two secrets of all great teachers, things no teachers college can teach: First, you don't put knowledge into people, you draw it out. (Which is why personality was his one and only classroom "method.") Second, if you can manage to conceal, artfully, some crucial part of what you are saying, then young people who are listening really, really hard will make it their business to find you out. And that's when you can really teach them. I must have heard it a thousand times. "It's not that simple," the student says to Postman. Oh? And right there, the drawing out begins.
There's no point, he felt, in being an English teacher today -- armed with literature and its human testimony -- if the conditions for successful teaching are all around us being "disappeared." (A favorite construction of his.) That's why he became a media critic. And that is the master image, if there is one, in all of Neil Postman's writings: either a disappearing we should regret, or a forgetting we have failed to do.
The greatest sentence he wrote will, I am sure, give comfort at some time in the future. It's the first sentence in "The Disappearance of Childhood." "Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see."
About the writer
Jay Rosen is chairman of the Journalism Department at New York University and author of "What Are Journalists For?" (1999, Yale University Press). This originally appeared on his weblog, PressThink.
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