“Children come to school having been deeply conditioned by the biases of television.”

— Neil Postman

Technopoly: the Surrender of Culture to Technology (1992)
Context: In the United States, we can see such collisions everywhere... but... most clearly in the schools, where two great technologies confront each other in uncompromising aspect for the control of students' minds. On the one hand, there is the world of the printed word with its emphasis on logic, sequence, history, exposition, objectivity, detachment, and discipline. On the other there is the world of television with its emphasis on imagery, narrative, presentness, simultaneity, intimacy, immediate gratification, and quick emotional response. Children come to school having been deeply conditioned by the biases of television.... children who cannot organize their thought into logical structure even in a simple paragraph, children who cannot attend to lectures or oral explanations for more than a few minutes at a time... They are failures because there is a media war going on, and they are on the wrong side — at least for the moment.

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Neil Postman 106

American writer and academic 1931–2003

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