19 Facts About Neil Postman

Neil Postman was an American author, educator, media theorist and cultural critic, who eschewed digital technology, including personal computers, mobile devices, and cruise control in cars, and was critical of uses of technology, such as personal computers in school.

Neil Postman is best known for twenty books regarding technology and education, including Amusing Ourselves to Death, Conscientious Objections, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, The Disappearance of Childhood and The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School.

Neil Postman took a position with San Francisco State University's English Department in 1958.

Neil Postman became the School of Education's only University Professor in 1993, and was chairman of the Department of Culture and Communication until 2002.

Neil Postman died at age 72 of lung cancer at a hospital in Flushing, Queens, on October 5,2003.

Neil Postman wrote 20 books and more than 200 magazine and newspaper articles in, for example, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's Magazine, Time, Saturday Review, Harvard Educational Review, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Stern and Le Monde.

Neil Postman was the editor of the quarterly journal ETC: A Review of General Semantics from 1976 to 1986.

In 1976, Neil Postman taught a course for NYU credit on CBS-TV's Sunrise Semester called "Communication: the Invisible Environment".

In 1969 and 1970, Neil Postman collaborated with the New Rochelle educator Alan Shapiro on the development of a model school based on the principles expressed in Teaching as a Subversive Activity.

Neil Postman proposed getting rid of homogeneous groupings of students that reinforce social and economic inequalities, standardized tests that promote competition and permanently kept student records that are used to punish and control students.

Later in his career, Neil Postman moved away from his work in Teaching as a Subversive Activity with the publication of Teaching as a Conserving Activity.

Neil Postman argued for the need of teachers to separate themselves from students in dress and speech, offering an alternative role model for children.

Neil Postman was concerned with the degradation of the culture caused by technology and saw education as a means of conserving important cultural ideas.

Neil Postman felt that school was a place to learn together as a cohesive group and that it should not be used for individualized learning.

Neil Postman argued that television is destroying the "serious and rational public conversation" that was sustained for centuries by the printing press.

Neil Postman argued that the United States is the only country to have developed into a technopoly.

Neil Postman claimed that the US has been inundated with technophiles who do not see the downside of technology.

However, according to Neil Postman, it is impossible for a technological innovation to have only a one-sided effect.

In Technopoly, Neil Postman discusses Luddism, explaining that being a Luddite often is associated with a naive opposition to technology.