The reader must come armed , in a serious state of intellectual readiness. This is not easy because he comes to the text alone. In reading, one's responses are isolated, one'sintellect thrown back on its own resourses. To be confronted by the cold abstractions of printed sentences is to look upon language bare, without the assistance of either beauty or community. Thus, reading is by its nature a serious business. It is also, of course, an essentially rational activity.
Interpretation
Reading requires serious intellectual engagement and solitude, challenging the reader to rely on their own understanding.
This quote by Neil Postman emphasizes the importance of intellectual preparedness when it comes to reading. The act of engaging with text is depicted as a solitary and rigorous endeavor that demands personal introspection and rational thought, stripping away external influences such as beauty or community. Postman suggests that reading is a serious business that necessitates a focus on the content and an active engagement of the mind.
In practice
In a workshop about critical thinking, this quote can highlight the individual effort needed to process complex information.
Television is a non graded curriculum and excludes no viewer for any reason, at any time. In other words, in doing away wtih the idea of sequenece and continuity in education, television undermines the idea that sequence and continuity have anything to do with thought itself.
Television is altering the meaning of 'being informed' by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation. Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information - misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information - information that creates the illusion of knowing something, but which in fact leads one away from knowing.
Children enter school as question marks and leave as periods.
When two human beings get together, they're co-present, there is built into it a certain responsibility we have for each other, and when people are co-present in family relationships and other relationships, that responsibility is there. You can't just turn off a person. On the Internet, you can.
A book is an attempt to make through permanent and to contribute to the great conversation conducted by authors of the past. […] The telegraph is suited only to the flashing of messages, each to be quickly replaced by a more up-to-date message. Facts push other facts into and then out of consciousness at speeds that neither permit nor require evaluation. (70)
Everything in our background has prepared us to know and resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us . . . But what if there are no cries of anguish to be heard? Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles? What is the antidote to a culture's being drained by laughter?
It is easy to get used to the morning news, habituated. But don't. The morning news is yours to alter.
Experience by itself teaches nothing... Without theory, experience has no meaning. Without theory, one has no questions to ask. Hence, without theory, there is no learning.
I've noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my twenty-five years of teaching - that schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders.
Genius without education is like silver in the mine.
Mom was an academic, so the riches that she had to bestow were of the mind.
If you only think of me during Black History Month, I must be failing as an educator and as an astrophysicist.
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