Neil Postman, 72, Mass Media Critic, Dies
9 October 2003
The New York
Times
Neil Postman, a prolific and influential social critic and educator
best known for his warning that an era of mass communications is stunting the
minds of children -- as well as adults -- died on Sunday at a hospital in
Flushing, Queens. He was 72 and lived in Flushing.
The cause was lung
cancer, said a spokesman for New York University, where Dr. Postman taught for
more than 40 years.
He held a chair in the field he called media ecology,
and his career was a long-distance joust with what he saw as the polluting
effects of television.
Dr. Postman's core message was that an
immersion in a media environment shaped children's lives to their
detriment, and society's.
He drew national attention with ''The
Disappearance of Childhood'' (Delacorte, 1982), in which he asserted that
television conflated what should be the separate worlds of children and adults.
It did so, he contended, by steeping the minds of children in vast amounts of
information once reserved for their elders and subjecting them to all the
desires and conflicts of the adult world.
If all the secrets of
adulthood, including sex, illness and death, are opened to children, he wrote,
cynicism, apathy or arrogance replace curiosity for them, short-circuiting
education and moral development.
Reviewing the book for The New
York Times, Anatole Broyard characterized it as a ''brilliant but rather too
tidy polemic.'' (It remains in print through Vintage Books, 1994.)
In
''Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business''
(Viking, 1985; Penguin, 1986), he indicted the television industry on the charge
of making entertainment out of the world's most serious problems. The book was
translated into eight languages and sold 200,000 copies worldwide, according to
N.Y.U.
Dr. Postman was particularly offended by the presentation of
television news with all the trappings of entertainment programming, including
theme music and ''talking hairdos.'' Only in the printed word, he felt, could
complicated truths be rationally conveyed.
Dr. Postman's ''The End of
Education: Redefining the Value of School'' (Knopf, 1995, and Vintage, 1996)
called for alternative curriculums to foster a healthy intellectual skepticism,
a sense of global citizenship, respect for America's traditions and appreciation
of its diversity.
Nicholas Lemann, reviewing the book in The Times, wrote that it presented ''a
good fit between the idea that people and machines are not natural allies and
the idea that schools should teach thinking rather than specific
skills.''
''Mr. Postman's ideas about education are not the world's most
practicable,'' he went on, ''but they're appealingly fresh: he wants to abolish
textbooks and elevate anthropology and linguistics to a primary position in the
curriculum.''
Dr. Postman wrote more than 200 magazine and newspaper
articles and 20 books, starting in 1961 with ''Television and the Teaching of
English.''
Other titles still in print are ''Conscientious Objections:
Stirring Up Trouble About Language, Technology and Education'' (Knopf, 1988;
McKay, 1992); ''How to Watch TV News'' (with Steve Powers; Penguin, 1992);
''Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology'' (Knopf, 1992; Vintage,
1993); and ''Building a Bridge to the 18th Century: How the Past Can Improve Our
Future'' (Knopf, 1999; Vintage, 2000).
Neil Postman, a native New Yorker,
graduated in 1953 from the State University of New York at Fredonia. He received
a master's degree in 1955 and a doctorate in education in 1958, both from the
Teachers College, Columbia, and started teaching at N.Y.U. in 1959.
Among
his early works of note were ''Teaching as a Subversive Activity'' (Delacorte,
1969), written with Charles Weingartner, a frequent collaborator, and ''Teaching
as a Conserving Activity'' (Delacorte, 1979).
In 1971, he founded the
program in media ecology at the Steinhardt School of Education of N.Y.U. Over
the years, he attracted a large audience for his lectures and writings. In 1993
he was appointed a University Professor, the only one in the School of
Education, and was chairman of the department of culture and communication until
last year.
For a decade, he also edited Et Cetera, a journal of
semantics.
Dr. Postman is survived by his wife of 48 years, Shelley Ross
Postman; two sons, Dr. Marc of Pikesville, Md., and Andrew of Brooklyn; a
daughter, Madeline Postman of Bayside, Queens; a brother, Jack, of Oceanside,
N.Y.; a sister, Ruth Steinberg, also of Oceanside; and four
grandchildren.
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