Neil Postman’s Vision of Humane Education

Josh Pauling at The Imaginative Conservative.

"Postman’s technological skepticism led him to conclude that true education is ultimately a very low-tech endeavor, a journey of dialogue, where one person leads another. This can be seen in the Latin roots of the English word education, educere, which means to lead out—as in leading one out of the limiting shadows of Plato’s cave into the liberating experience of reality. The teacher’s aspiration is leading students into further experience of the real—into the world of embodied meaning—not keeping them in the cave of digital shadows. Postman proposed several ideas that still hold promising potential to address our current educational moment."

See Informing Ourselves to Death, a speech by Neil Postman at a meeting of the German Informatics Society (Gesellschaft fuer Informatik) on October 11, 1990 in Stuttgart, sponsored by IBM-Germany.