The Disappearance of Childhood

by Neil Postman

From the vogue for nubile models to the explosion in the juvenile crime rate, this modern classic of social history and media traces the precipitous decline of childhood in America today-and the corresponding threat to the notion of adulthood. Deftly marshaling a vast array of historical and demographic research, Neil Postman suggests that childhood is a relatively recent invention, which came into being as the new medium of print imposed divisions between children and adults. But now these divisions are eroding under the barrage of television, which turns the adult secrets of sex and violence into popular entertainment and pitches both news and advertising at the intellectual level of ten-year olds.

Genres: Nonfiction, Education, Sociology, Parenting, History, Psychology, Philosophy

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1982

About the author

Neil Postman, an important American educator, media theorist and cultural critic was probably best known for his popular 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death. For more than four decades he was associated with New York University, where he created and led the Media Ecology program.

He is the author of more than thirty significant books on education, media criticism, and cultural change including Teaching as a Subversive Activity, The Disappearance of Childhood, Technopoly, and Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century.

Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), a historical narrative which warns of a decline in the ability of our mass communications media to share serious ideas. Since television images replace the written word, Postman argues that television confounds serious issues by demeaning and undermining political discourse and by turning real, complex issues into superficial images, less about ideas and thoughts and more about entertainment. He also argues that television is not an effective way of providing education, as it provides only top-down information transfer, rather than the interaction that he believes is necessary to maximize learning. He refers to the relationship between information and human response as the Information-action ratio.

Reviews

[Katie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting, and not terribly encouraging. I wish there were a 21st-century update. Writing in the early 80's (updated in 1993), Postman observes that children are being treated like little adults, and adults are beginning to act like children. Pubescent girls are held up as sex symbols in advertising; children's games (hide and seek, hopscotch) are disappearing and being replaced by professionally organized sports leagues; grownups wear jeans and sneakers to the office and pepper their speech with teenage slang.

To explore this, he traces childhood as a social phenomenon beginning with the invention of the printing press in the 15th century and the rise of widespread literacy, which created a world of adult "secrets" contained in books, to which children could be initiated only slowly as they learned to read. Literacy is not natural to humans, Postman argues; it takes self-discipline, the ability to sit still for long periods and concentrate and practice. Before moveable type, almost no one could read well, and knowledge was oral. After moveable type, fluent reading became an adult skill, and the world of adults became separate, while the world of children developed its own culture, language, and style. Children became seen as a special group requiring protection, and that protection included special clothing, special places (schools), and sheltering from certain kinds of knowledge (such as particular words and sexual knowledge).

The breakdown began with electronic communication, which made knowledge transmission more rapid, and Postman sees it as complete with television, where images entirely replace the need for literacy. Watching TV requires no skill nor even a decent attention span. (And this was 25 years ago.) A child watching TV can know everything about the world that an adult knows--sex, violence, commercialism, dirty words.

Postman saw a possible hope in computers, which, he noted, took skill and a kind of language to program. This was before Windows and the World Wide Web. I wonder what he would say now? It seems to me that everything he observed in 1981 has increased exponentially. Little girls are getting bikini waxes and 5-year-old boys go to soccer camp. More 18 to 35-year-olds watch the Cartoon Network than watch CNN, although one could argue that, these days, CNN is the Cartoon Network. There are kickball leagues for 40-year-olds, who apparently have nothing better to do. Is this disappearing childhood or flattening maturity?

If Postman is right about the reasons for disappearing childhood, then I think he may be right that it is inevitable. The question is, is there a way to protect children? We know what the medievals did not--that the minds and brains of humans between the ages of 7 and the mid-twenties are vulnerable; that they need certain kinds of nurturing; that they are not ready for adult decision-making or emotional independence. And yet we are asking them to take on just that kind of responsibility.

[Frieda Vizel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thoughts, so many thoughts.

1. Neil Postman is my foremost favorite cultural critic and Ideas Man. He is not a progressive and he is not a conservative; he is just a refreshing mix of big ideas that I don't hear anywhere else and could certainly not have thought up myself. I don't experience him as preaching from a place of dogma or some sinister self-serving agenda; he seems to have been a genuine humanist. What a loss that he isn't alive today to help us contextualize the hyper-connective age in a more historical context. I keep wishing he'd written about the internet before he died in 2003. I am a groupie of a dead man, what's to say. I'm looking for a rebbe who still breathes, but in the meantime, I am a Postmaner Hasid. If only I'd been there when he was alive... Honestly, I'd probably have dismissed all his analysis as Luddite old-fashioned pessimism. Now from the grave (or wherever he rests) cries a hoarse voice: I told you so!

2. Is childhood disappearing? The overall premise of the book makes Postman seem nostalgic, quaint, too narrowly focused. Yes, adults and children dress more similarly, adults wear sneakers and eat junk food and kids watch all sorts of TV, but the line between PG13 and R is very clear and children are much more protected than ever before. Courts deal with juveniles much more generously since this book was written and as a culture, we consider children to be mentally undeveloped. If anything, we are overly protective of the youth and do not allow them the kind of autonomy they once had. I'm not sure this very prediction was borne out. Not that I'd disagree that we've lost direction with what we want of our children, but it's not that we ask of them to be adults. One star off because I'm unconvinced.

3. Progress. Is developing technologically necessarily progressing? Or as Postman quotes Thoreau; an improved means to an unimproved end? This is something I've been thinking about a lot. Is our cultural myth that we are progressing actually merely a myth? If so - what are the implications of speeding ahead when it might not be in the direction of Eden? Some glimpses of the future offer hints; global warming, fragmented attentions, a growing population with more concentration at the 1%, and other grim possibilities that might really surprise us.

4. What has thou wrought, you graphics-based age? Postman complained thirty years ago that the image based media platform is reducing all serious conversations to entertainment. He was stunned that a Hollywood actor was in the White House. He was very troubled by how broken up media bits destroyed the opportunity for serious conversation and thinking. Who can disagree now with the reality TV star in the white house, and his dishonest spokesman getting a cozy bit at the Emmys? Clearly the medium of image-based news changed what we are hearing and how we think.

5. I'm especially impressed by how Postman sees the "consumerist" and "capitalist" culture; mostly as a machine that operates on an irrational appeal to emotions. He argues that we have stopped being as rational and logic as we once were, and that we communicate now in emotional appeals. He calls this emotion over reason a religion. He uses the commercial for a cleaning product as an example. The commercial shows a couple out to dinner, embarrassed because the wife didn't clean the husband's shirt well enough and they are getting looks for the grotesque stain. We are all to feel bad for them (the emotional element). Cut to a new scene; voila; relief! There is some sort of household detergent! We watch with relief as the woman uses it, and by the next time the couple is out on the town, they hold their heads up high because all those stains are gone, thanks to said detergent, which you can buy in stores now. Postman asks; what arguments did this company make to prove that its product is superior to the one blamed for the shameful stain? Did they show their ingredients, bring some science, make a clear illustration that theirs is a better product? No; instead, they make an emotional appeal to our sympathies to the suffering of stubborn stains. The pitch follows the pattern of religious miracle making; first there is an emotional need, then there is a mysterious miracle (in this case, the detergent) and then voila; we are cured from the affliction! This analogy of consumerism to religion tickles me to no end, because I'm really not a fan of either, and I think they very much deserve each other.

6. We have lost our collective value system; something larger to aspire to, like a better country or to serve a deity. What do we now educate our kids for? Unlike in the past, when it would be for greater purpose of perhaps serving god or becoming a well prepared member of society, we have lost a purpose. To resort to saying education is for employment, is, according to Postman, the most uninspiring and unproductive of motivations. The result is that children are raised without strong value systems or purpose. Postman feels that children are losing something; this drove him to formulate the whole theory behind the book. We can disagree that childhood isn't disappearing, but we can't exactly say that modern society has any vision for its young, short of teaching it to participate in the dog-eats-dog world.

Hmmm. So many things to chew over. I once read on the blog of a Yiddish writing-Hasid, a comical description of how much Jews love questions, because to us, it's not the answer that counts; it's the asking questions. Nu, then this book has many, and they're good ones.

[booklady · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like Postman. I think I've read most of his books. I’ve learned that I frequently agree with what he writes. He is a critic and has won the National Council of Teachers of English George Orwell Award for Clarity in Language (1986). Okay, I know, awards don't always signify, but in this case, I have no doubt he earned it. He writes with a clarity and conciseness I struggle not to envy.

The theme of The Disappearance of Childhood is that our culture is hostile to childhood. I think Postman makes a good case for his position. Despite the seemingly negative title/subject, it’s far from a depressing book. For even while our culture might be hostile to childhood, as Postman writes tongue-in-cheek in his Introduction, ‘children are not’.

Thankfully, I read this book when my own children were still fairly young and it served as a warning to me of all I could do as a parent to guard and protect my children’s precious innocence for as long as possible. So in that respect, I consider this book a blessing...and not just this book, but his other books as well.

[Cara · Rating 2 out of 5]

In this book, Neil Postman argues that (a) childhood is a social construct, not a biological fact and (b) childhood is disappearing because of television and modernity in general. The former is debatable but defensible (his exclusive focus on Europe/America leaves significant holes in his argument), but the latter is just ridiculous. It has been 30 years since this book was originally published, and as someone who went through childhood in the period since, I feel pretty comfortable saying that Neil Postman's alarmism was misplaced. The problem, I think, is his very definition of childhood. He defines childhood as a period in a person's life when they do not have adult knowledge. If adults cease to prevent children from accessing adult knowledge, by for instance letting them watch adult-oriented TV shows or learning about sex, then they are by (his) definition not children anymore. Honestly, this just doesn't make any sense. I have to wonder if Neil Postman ever actually met any real children. If he had, I think he would have had a different definition for childhood. I understand his point was to criticize TV, but to say it has made childhood disappear is just ridiculous.

[Stephen Heiner · Rating 4 out of 5]

As usual, Professor Postman makes some solid points, way ahead of his time. However, this work falls a bit short of his previous works in losing his arguments through extended ranting. It's a short read, though, and worth the fewer than 150 pages it is.

"If one cannot say anything about how we may prevent a social disaster, perhaps one may also serve by trying to understand why it is occurring." (p. xiii)

"To use White's metaphor, the printing press opened a door upon which European culture had been anxiously knocking. And when it was finally opened, the entire culture went flying through." (p. 25)

"But with the printed book another tradition began: the isolated reader and his private eye...Reading is, in a phrase, an antisocial act." (p. 27)

"...shame is an essential element in the civilizing process. It is the price we pay for our triumphs over our nature." (p. 48)

"Pictures do not show concepts; they show things. It cannot be said often enough that, unlike sentences, a picture is irrefutable. It does not put forward a proposition, it implies no opposite or negation of itself, there are no rules of evidence or logic to which it must conform." (p. 73)

"The printed word requires of a reader an aggressive response to its "truth content." One may not always be in a position to make that assessment, but, in theory, the assessment can be made - if only one had enough knowledge or experience. But pictures require of the observer an aesthetic response. They call upon our emotions, not our reason. They ask us to feel, not to think." (p. 73)

"The literate person must learn to be reflective and analytical, patient and assertive, always poised, after due consideration, to say no to a text." (p. 77)

"Watching television is like attending a party populated by people whom you do not know." (p. 83)

"Civilization cannot exist without the control of impulses, particularly the impulse toward aggression and immediate gratification." (p. 85)

"To put it bluntly, as far as TV is concerned, in the United States there is not one sixty-year-old woman capable of being a newsreader. Viewers, it would appear, are not captivated by their faces. It is the teller, not what is told, that matters here." (p. 104)

"The point is, of course, that all events on TV come completely devoid of historical continuity or any other context, and in such fragmented and rapid succession that they wash over our minds in an undifferentiated stream." (p. 105)

"...television commercials are a form of religious literature." (p. 108)

"Print means a slowed-down mind. Electronics means the speeded-up mind." (p. 116)

"Felix Unger of The Odd Couple, who is depicted as having an adult's appetite for serious music and whose language suggests that he has, at one time in his life, actually read a book. Indeed, it is quite noticeable that the majority of adults on TV shows are depicted as functionally illiterate, not only in the sense that the content of book learning is absent from what they appear to know but also because of the absence of even the faintest signs of a contemplative habit of mind." (p. 127)

"Why submit children to the rigors of professional-style training, concentration, tension, media hype?...What we have here is the emergence of the idea that play is not to be done for the sake of doing it but for some external purpose, such as renown, money, physical conditioning, upward mobility, national pride." (p. 131)

"The strongest argument against divorce has always been its psychological effect on children. It is now clear that more adults than ever do not regard this argument to be as compelling as their own need for psychological well-being." (p. 138)

"But it cannot be denied that as women find their place in business, in the arts, in industry, and in the professions, there must be a serious decline in the strength and meaning of traditional patterns of child care. (p. 151)

[Vivian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Whether the reader agrees with the author or not, this is a compelling examination of the history of what western civilization thinks of as "childhood", its present and future trajectory and why we should care. My five stars indicates that I feel this should be a MUST READ for all.

The copy I read was from the library. Now I must get my own copy and mark it throughout.

As a personal post script, upon reflection I think the main difference in the way my husband and I were raised is that he had a television in his home and I did not. Because my home lacked a television it was rich in reading, conversations, and imaginative play. I think the effect its absence had on my parents was even more significant to the home atmosphere. My father introduced to us music from many cultures, art games, and topics to discuss. His mind was ever alive with thoughts and he was always looking for ways to engage us in the world which was beyond our horizon.

The author builds much of his case around what television does to erase the boundaries of childhood, which is why I mention this at all.

I can also now say I am grateful that there were more years without television than with it as my husband and I raised our children. He had worked in a television news room before we met and during our early marriage and had himself become jaded about newscasts in particular and television programming in general. I had never established a habit of television viewing during and after my college years. After reading Postman's book I can see in retrospect that our family life and now my children's adult life is markedly different from many of their peers, and in a good way.

[Петър Стойков · Rating 3 out of 5]

Малко е тъпо да питаме какво е детство и от кога го има нали? Та нали всички сме били деца? Да, ама не съвсем, поне според автора на "Изчезващото детство".

Нийл Постман се опитва да докаже, че през по-голямата част от историята на човечеството идеята за "детство" не е съществувала така, както я възприемаме сега, че на децата е гледано като на дребни, глупави възрастни и че чак последните 200-300 години появата на печатното слово в ежедневието разделя рязко човечеството на можещи и неможещи да четат, съответно да функционират пълноценно в модерния свят, да осмислят и обсъждат идеи, по-широки от непосредственото им обкръжение и т.н.

И, пак според автора, появата и широкото разпространение на "картинни" медии (телевизия) започва да подрива тази разлика, правейки децата по-еквивалентни на възрастните в разбирането и навигирането на света.

Докато идеите на книгата безспорно са интересни и заслужаващи замисляне, авторът определено, поне според мен, изпитва трудности да ги докаже. Никак не помага фактът, че той разглежда като "човешка история и съвремие" само западноевропейската цивилизация и не включва в разсъжденията си нито човека преди "цивилизационния" период (откриване на земеделието преди десетина хиляди години), нито коя да е друга култура.

От гледна точка на масовото разпространение на електронните медии (след написването на книгата) сами можем да си правим изводите дали детството изчезва, дали възрастните стават по-инфантилни или децата по-оправни, дали се засилва или намалява разделението между субкултурите и обществата на децата и тези на възрастните.

[J. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I gave this book 4 stars because even though I disagree with how Mr. Postman came to many of his viewpoints, I agree with many of his conclusions. His position on how the media of today has destroyed the family and childhood was fascinating.

[Minotaur Mangum · Rating 4 out of 5]

Postman considered this his most important work, and I am inclined to agree. I prefer it to his much more well-known Amusing Ourselves to Death, which I found somewhat underwhelming (whaddya gonna do if you've already read Huxley/McLuhan/Ellul/Kaczynzki?). The Disappearance of Childhood is prescient, and even more urgent today.

The thesis is a direct moral application (as all of Postman's work is) of Marshall McLuhan's idea that "the medium is the message." That is to say, it is the material-phenomenological nature of communications media that determine the psycho-social effects on humanity, and not their content, or what they are "about."

Postman's thesis is, simply, that print media created "childhood" as an identity category, and electronic media--& above all, television--is in the process of taking it away. Because I said "identity category," you might think it's just a matter of moving conceptual sets around to reclassify things, while the underlying social phenomena underneath ("human nature") remains more or less the same.

But that's not how human culture works.

You could debate whether modernity "invented" or "discovered" childhood all the livelong day. You could also try and figure out whether Wittgenstein's (actually Jastrow's) famous rabbit-duck is a rabbit or duck, if you want to.

Modernity "discovented" childhood. Or it "incovered" it.

As he admits, Postman's book could with as much justice have been called The Disappearance of Adulthood. In the Middle Ages, there was a much greater continuity--or indifference--between the two. Children were little adults, and adults were big children. Once literacy began to spread, reading ability became the dividing line between them, generating a world of adult mysteries on the one hand and a world of childhood innocence on the other. (The peak of this mentality is perhaps William Blake's poetic sequences "Songs of Innocence" and "Songs of Experience.") One former meaning of "child" is "adult illiterate." Print culture also created the public school system, crucial in the formation of the child identity.

In contrast to the years of drilling in sequential, linear thinking that literacy requires, television can be assimilated almost immediately by humans of almost any age. If the medium is the message, then the effect of a television program is the same no matter what stage of mental development you're at. TV induces the same mental habits in old and young.

What's more, it profanes the adult mysteries. Postman's examples are plentiful & convincing, if dated. It helps that the situation is even more advanced now. For my money, far more disturbing than exposing kids to "adult situations" is how Postman notes the increasing disappearance of children qua children from television and film. Remember, this is 1982. It's gotten so much worse. (The show that came to my mind immediately is one I actually like watching with my own family: Bob's Burgers. The three children in that family are all voiced by adults--as most kid's characters are--but more importantly, are essentially shrunk-down adults in personality.)

It's not just child precociousness. It's child crime. And it's not just adult childishness. It's perversion and corruption.

Postman briefly looks at the "youth rights movement," which he claims has two conflicting elements: one that wants more state intervention to protect children from the failing institution of the family, and one that seeks to "liberate" children from the oppressive force of all institutions. The latter actually openly challenges the idea of the "child," as a person incapable of autonomy, and Postman believes that this view is simply an acceleration (as so many forms of political radicalism now are) of the already-dominant tendency in the culture that television has made.

In my opinion--both sides are. The former at its worst is an arrogantly intrusive bureaucracy which only increases capitalist alienation. (For an analysis of this dynamic & its roots, see Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism.) The latter at its worst is, quite frankly, a trojan horse for pedophilia. (The latest attack on children's identity comes from the trans rights movement. Just the other day, I heard some activist on NPR talk about what a stumbling block it is to accepting the idea of "trans kids" that we tend to view children as essentially different from adults mentally, unable to determine their own identity. I'm not against trans people by any means, but I see how their cause can be weaponized, possibly for something sinister. It's just a short step from saying that a child has full understanding of their sexual and gender identity to saying that they can consent to sexual acts.) In reality, the two sides may well converge--into an arrogantly intrusive and alienating bureaucracy that is a trojan horse for pedophilia.

Postman shows that the medieval nonrecognition of the child as a category often extended to "play" with the "privy parts" of young people. He also shows how we are coming full circle to the medieval view (or lack thereof).

Criticism (perhaps a limitation of McLuhanism in general): there ought to be an examination of other factors in the total social environment, rather than just one medium. For instance, it's still not clear to me why literacy by itself should be responsible for the occultation of sex. I forget the source, but I recall reading somewhere about how most non-elite children until the modern era had of necessity to sleep in the same room as their parents. Certainly most would have spent their days with animals of various kinds, who are at all times less discreet than their human counterparts. So it stands to reason that urbanization and the growth of middle-class housing arrangements had at least as much an influence in this aspect of childhood. And these in turn are owed to the same general economic trends that gave us the printing press.

Is this where McLuhan shades into Marx?

He also makes a misstep--although he admits this is speculative--in imagining that computer technology might reintroduce the division between adults and children because of technical demands for their use. But, first of all, that's not how computer literacy works. You don't have to master or even learn basic coding skills in order to use social media or shop online, and thus be schooled by internet media. Second, to the extent that special skills are required, they are the exact inverse of print media in that they favor the younger generations over the older.

Perhaps this will the vehicle of the vaunted "child liberation." (Though not the historical child analyzed by Postman. Perhaps he erred in avoiding discussion of a later-developing identity category: the adolescent or teen.) Perhaps Aleister Crowley was correct--having done his uttermost to help bring it about--that the new Aeon will be that of the "crowned and conquering child."

[Stephen Langtry · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was on a good reading streak this year when I picked up Postman's book. For someone who is very critical of TV, Postman must have spent a lot of time watching TV in order to reach some of his conclusions. The book is very dry; while very thin, it is not fun to read and it took me a long time to get through it. There are some ideas and historical data, which are interesting, but at times Postman sounds like that uncle who one struggles to get away from; the one who complains about how children are not children any more. Of course, that complaint is at least 2,000 years old - some of it appears in the Bible. The fact that he relies entirely on American and European data for his thesis doesn't help. Overall, I found this book disappointing considering the hype. I am glad that I read it 30 years after it was published so that I wasn't swept along with the alarmism that runs through it.

[Vel Veeter]

This book spends its time talking about the rise and creation of the concept of childhood, and then about it’s slow dissolution, all as a concept.

So childhood as concept doesn’t really develop until the 1800s, and Postman ties it to the rise of literacy, the rise of education, the flattening of mortality rates, and through the stabilizing of life to the point that children take on specific and precious roles in the lives of adults.

So the dissolution of childhood is where this book gets hazy. I don’t disagree that childhood is a weirdly fragile part of life, and Postman’s definitions of that preciousness and fragility is not at issue. But he reaches some faulty and flawed conclusions from this analysis based in a kind of cultural conservatism that he says he doesn’t agree with, but defends. To be clear, when he says that the moral majority has defined and worked toward the preservation of the innocence of children, he’s so wrong, he can’t even begin to understand it. They don’t care; they are control freaks and fascists, not concerned citizens. But more than this, he never quite defines the “harm” of the problem in so many of the “secrets” of adult life that he discusses are being the defining difference between adult life and childhood.

[Al · Rating 5 out of 5]

I rediscovered and reread this little gem of a book in going through my shelves attempting to bring some order to them. I read it when it was originally published in 1982, at a time when our three children were respectively 12, 8 and 4, and its message seemed especially important and relevant. Mr. Postman advances the idea that the existence of a true childhood was not possible in medieval times and before, and only became possible and important with the invention of the printing press and the acceptance of the need for universal education. Further, he argues persuasively that the invention of telecommunication in all its forms (and this was even before personal computers and iphones!) has brought on the degradation and loss of childhood as a separate and formative time of life. The evidence he introduces amply supports his view.
One need not have children to read and learn from this dispassionate and devastating analysis. Nothing has happened since 1982 that would allay Mr. Postman's fears. This book is as timely now as when it was written. Highly recommended.

[Andrew]

In a book riddled with ridiculous arguments, one stands out in particular: the idea that while the gays should face no repercussions or stigma for being the gays, please, not in front of the kids. This is an exemplar line, pretty much summing up Postman’s scoundrel position – he doesn’t want to be lumped in with the social conservatives, whom he correctly regards as a bunch of glazed-over freaks, but his conclusions are more or less inseparable from theirs. Much like, say, David Brooks, he tries to find the intellectual scaffolding for his vibes and icks, tries his best, and falls flat on his face. I tried to give Postman his due, and I had hopes here – I agree with the basic premises of the social construction for starters. And I’m pretty revolted by the way our society puts the demands of adulthood on children and the way it infantilizes its adults (the first time I saw a “barcade” I nearly committed arson, and the less said about tech bros in cargo shorts the better). However, I can’t handle any more of this shit.

[Brandon · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book focuses on the unintentional disappearance of childhood due to a major shift from a typographic dominate culture, to a pictographic dominate culture. Postman’s objective evaluation on this major cultural shift is fascinating. His ability to forgo opinion and present facts is admirable. Although this book is not totally void of Postman’s opinion, he offers a rational, objective, and unique perspective on the negative affects of our current, “image driven,” society.

He spends the first 1/3 of the book detailing the rise and decline of childhood; how to define childhood and why it came to be.

I did walk away from this book confident that teaching my children to read and process information through written code (letters) is of invaluable importance. Literacy is one of the great accomplishments in our society.

[Mehrsa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think Postman is a modern prophet. This book was wonderful, but not quite as good as his other books. I think this book is less about childhood than it is about technology and TV, which he covers more fully elsewhere.

[Mehmet C. · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Kültürümüzün çocuklara ihtiyaç duyduğunu unutmak anlaşılır bir şey değildir. Fakat çocukluğa gereksinimi olduğunu unutmaya yönelik olan yolun daha yarısındayız. Anımsatmada israrlı olanlar, soylu bir görevi yerine getireceklerdir."

[Chrisanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good Heavens! It's been almost 30 years since the last edition and we have unprecedented amounts of child abuse, the graphic novel is the current thing, and the state of our education system ... varies, to say the least. Welcome to the new middle ages/dark ages/pre-enlightenment era.

[Danielle · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The traditional assumptions about the uniqueness of children are fast fading - For adults, play is serious business. As childhood disappears, so does the child's view of play."

Postman undertakes an impressively extensive research into the creation, the peak and the disappearance of childhood. The concept of childhood has changed in meaning over the years, as modern inventions drastically changed our way of life. Postman points to the rise of widespread literacy, technology and the new social values in our modern society as the culprits for this change. Childhood has lost its identity in a world where there are increasingly fewer ways of keeping the secrets of adulthood hidden from children. Postman looks into the definition and evolvement of childhood and ends with some provocative questions about his finds.

This is a little different from his other works that I have read so far. No less enjoyable and incredibly well-written. In The End of Education and Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman has a clear opinion that is woven through his work and he also presents plenty of options on how to fight, for example, the rise of the entertainment value in education or the loss of teaching critical thinking. At the start of this book, he confesses to not have any answers on how to fight this disappearance and at the very end, he even says he isn't sure whether that it is in our best interest. He has managed to map out the history of childhood in a very impressive way. It is odd to read how we are exposing our children to such different things now, like TV. It has become rather normal but I had never considered what kind of psychological effect TV-shows and the depiction of children on TV could have...

Postman put forward many patterns that brought about the current predicament that I could never have identified myself. He says himself that though he has no solutions to offer, he finds it important to write it down so perhaps someone else can be inspired by his work and come up with something. As always, Postman manages to point at the double-sidedness of progress and technological development in a way that makes the flipside look downright horrifying. This book leaves me with plenty of food for thought. I am once again impressed and, upon finishing this book, immediately ordered another one of his works.

[Amelia · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was a great pairing with his other more well-known book, "Technopoly." My biggest criticism is that it felt longer than it needed to be, and he really pontificated on the printing press being the reason that women in the present-day wear mini-skirts. I actually understand where he was coming from but it was a bit of a stretch. Also, I wish he would have elaborated more throughout on his initial point regarding literacy among adults and children.

I also wasn't entirely certain that I understood the biological argument regarding how in the present-day, girls get their periods at 12 and not 14 as they used to. In one moment, he argues that childhood is primarily sociological. In the next moment, he is saying that girls becoming women has to do with the average family size increasing. He never really concludes this point.

This might seem like a very critical take, but I truly enjoyed this book and felt that it expanded my preexisting opinions on the infantilization of adults and erasure of childhood in TV, news, and media as a whole.

[Stephen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Television is killing your children -- conceptually. In 1985, Neil Postman penned Amusing Ourselves to Death, in which he, building off of the lesson in Technopoly that technology changes our culture without our knowledge, examined television’s malevolent effects on political, civic, and religious discourse. The Disappearance of Childhood, published in 1982, is an earlier form of this argument, and one which focuses only on the effects of television on childhood. In it, he asserts that childhood is a social construct, not a biological fact; that it sprang into being with the advent of the printing press and the need to instill widespread literacy; and that the rise of easy-accessible information through the television (and by extension for modern readers, the internet) has killed the innocence of youth. Although its historic claim about childhood is dubious, concerns about the diminishment of modern childhood remain valid, and the connection between the two, the idea that technology is not value-free, but in fact shapes us as we use it, is as fascinating as ever.

Postman's initial bold claim that childhood is an invention of the middle ages is staggering in its audacity. With hundreds of thousands of years of history behind us as a species, we cover the globe in a seemingly infinite mosaic of sharply different cultures. Yet for all this diversity, there is not one semblance of childhood as special outside of medieval Europe and the cultures it influenced? To be sure, there are avenues of thought that make the thought understandable: modern children have far easier lives than their predecessors of any age. The demands placed on children in earlier epochs meant they had to participate in the life of their household, on the farm or at work, early on. But does this translate to nothing about children being regarded as special at all? The claim is simply too broad to go down easily.

That a side, this preview of Amusing Ourselves to Death, which casts childhood as the first victim of the communications revolution that later claimed public discourse, education, and our peace of mind, remains noteworthy. That revolution, writes Postman, spelled an end of childhood as a special time in which children are protected from the burdens and full knowledge of the world, allowed to frolic in leisure outside the schoolroom, while inside it being good students learning to navigate their literary world. Before widespread literacy, writes Postman, knowledge was primarily transmitted orally, and children learned the secrets of the world fairly easily. After the printing press made written communication the primary means of cultural transmission, however, not only did the knowledge being transmitted become 'secret' in that one had to learn to read to take part in it, but literary culture so broadened the intellectual capacity of the human race that the ideas being discussed became far more complex. To learn the world meant committing to a course of training and study, and that meant school. School was the potter's house in which young clay was molded into tall, strong vessels of knowledge. and ready for the responsibilities of adulthood.

The coming of mass communication, especially the television, ruined all that. While once courses of study were designed so that people -- children -- were gradually introduced to adult ideas as they grew older, the nightly news now exposes children to the adult world all at once. Within twenty minutes, young minds can witness the horror of war, be subjected to lessons about how buying things leads to happiness (and how being ignorant of the right shampoo will mean being forever alone because women recoil from dandruff), and learn a host of interesting words like 'incest' and 'erectile dysfunction' to ask mom and dad about. Because television requires virtually no prior knowledge, no training, no work to be entertaining or 'enlightening', adults who spend much of their leisure time basking in its blue glow will be rendered infantile, easily manipulated and incapable of sustaining their attention in anything worthwhile. Although most of the book is a serious treatment of technology and society, toward the end Postman sounds a teeny bit crotchety.

Although The Disappearance of Childhood has a questionable start and loses focus toward the end, the pages between raise a question worth considering for modern parents. Regardless of Postman's historic claims, both parents and child psychologists entertain worries today about 'age compression' or 'kids getting older younger'. Though Postman muses in 1982 that computers might be a saving grace for literacy, if they continue to require programming language to set up and use (thus requiring another kind of focused education) a recent article by The Atlantic wondering if it's unhealthy for toddlers to spend so much time on smartphone applications indicates that such hope is absurd. Although Postman was primarily concerned with television, the internet makes TV look innocent. There's virtually no knowledge concealed from a child with a search engine and a curious mind, and the knowledge revealed won't just be a line of text: might well constitute a graphic video. Knowledge is a powerful asset, and the danger that today's children are being exposed to too much, too soon, warrants attention.

[Ryan Rench · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting, but much more forgettable than his other work, IMO. This was again a diagnosis but had little practical application to me, although that's not the intention of the book. I DO appreciate anyone who can do cultural big-picture diagnoses, but this was not super interesting to me. I'd forgotten to review it until I stumbled across it and remembered finishing it in 2024.

[Renan]

Brief and not difficult to follow.
If the guy who clearly puts books above visual content can write books that are < 200 pages long, then why are there so many overly long non-fiction books?

I was half-expecting him to become the "old man yells at clouds" meme, but he was measured and wrote clearly. His idea is as follows:

Children are a group of people who do not know certain things that adults know. In the Middle Ages there were no children because there existed no means for adults to know exclusive information. In the Age of Gutenberg, such a means developed. In the Age of Television, it is dissolved.

One point I couldn't fully understand was this:
He argues that media (by the early 80s) had blurred the lined between the adult and the child.
In my own childhood (in the 90s, Brazil), with the exception of a few telenovelas and other abominable adult TV, I remember distinctly only watching (American/Japanese) cartoons.

He also criticizes TV shows for formulaic A/B stories with non-adult characters, so I wonder how he would've reacted to the reception of those 2000s TV shows have elevated the artform, like The Sopranos. Would he say it's a minor point?


-- QUOTES --

The Telegraph sounds like Social Media
The telegraph created an audience and a market not only for news but for fragmented, discontinuous, and essentially irrelevant news, which to this day is the main commodity of the news industry.

A New Intelligence
Indeed, it is stretching the point only a little to say that the telegraph helped to create a new definition of intelligence, for as the world became flooded with information, the question of how much one knew assumed more importance than the question of what uses one made of what one did know.

A Bit Overstated?
In the first place, because mature reading is an act of immediate recognition, that is, an unconscious reflex, the habit of reading must be formed in that period when one is still in the process of acquiring oral language. People who try to learn how to read after their oral language is completed rarely, if ever, become fluent readers.



Printing Press and the Ego
There are at least seven cities that claim to be the birthplace of the printing press, each of them designating a different man as the inventor. Such a dispute, all by itself, provides us with an example of one of the most astonishing effects of the printing press: It greatly amplified the quest for fame and individual achievement. “It is no accident”, Elizabeth Eisenstein remarks in The Printing Press As an Agent of Change, “…that printing is the first ‘invention’ which became entangled in a priority struggle and rival national claims”.[1] Why no accident? Because, she suggests, the possibility of having one’s words and work fixed forever created a new and pervasive idea of selfhood. The printing press is nothing less than a time-machine, easily as potent and as curious as any one of Mr. H. G. Wells’s contraptions. (...) Printing links the present with forever. It carries personal identity into realms unknown. With the printing press, forever may be addressed by the voice of an individual, not a social aggregate.

Printing Press and the Self
“the prevailing philosophy of human nature since the Renaissance has been based on the conception of each individual as a deviant case whose existence consists very largely in his efforts to assert his personality against the restrictive and levelling claims of society”

Printing Press and the National God
Through print, God became an Englishman, or a German, or a Frenchman, depending on the vernacular in which His words were revealed. The effect of this was to strengthen the cause of nationalism while weakening the sacred nature of scripture. The eventual replacement of love of God with love of Country, from the eighteenth century to the present, may well be one of the consequences of printing. For the past two centuries, for example, Christians have been inspired to make war almost exclusively in the interests of nationhood; God has been left to fend for Himself.



TV erodes childhood
We may conclude, then, that television erodes the dividing line between childhood and adulthood in three ways, all having to do with its undifferentiated accessibility: first, because it requires no instruction to grasp its form; second, because it does not make complex demands on either mind or behavior; and third, because it does not segregate its audience. With the assistance of other electric, nonprint media, television recreates the conditions of communication that existed in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Biologically we are all equipped to see and interpret images and to hear such language as may be necessary to provide a context for most of these images. The new media environment that is emerging provides everyone, simultaneously, with the same information. Given the conditions I have described, electric media find it impossible to withhold any secrets. Without secrets, of course, there can be no such thing as childhood.

Kids
Ariès remarks, and just as in the nineteenth century, adolescence became defined by conscription, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, childhood became defined by school attendance. The word schoolboy became synonymous with the word child.

Kids Books
Lagging somewhat behind other developments, children’s literature began to appear in 1744, when John Newbery, a London publisher, printed the story of Jack the Giant Killer.

Stolen Kids
Somewhat earlier, in 1814, legislation had been introduced that made stealing a child an indictable offense for the first time in English history. While it had been against the law to strip a stolen child of its clothes, there was no legal retribution for the act of actually stealing a child or for selling the child to beggars.

Abandoned Kids
But Rousseau’s power as a writer and his charismatic personality were so great that most of his followers even refused to believe, as Voltaire and other of his enemies revealed, that Rousseau had abandoned his own children to orphanages.


Childhood as seen in Culture (Europe)
Rousseau’s obsession with a state of nature and his corresponding contempt for “civilized values” brought to the world’s attention, as no one had done before him, the childhood virtues of spontaneity, purity, strength, and joy, all of which came to be seen as features to nurture and celebrate. And the great artists of the Romantic movement did not fail to take up the “joie de vivre” of childhood as a theme. Wordsworth’s poetry in particular depicts adults as “fallen children” and celebrates childhood innocence and naturalness. Wagner’s Siegfried is often cited (for example, by Ariès) as the most powerful expression of the virtues of adolescence. [10] And it is in the eighteenth century, we should remember, that Gainsborough painted the most romantic and charming picture of adolescence that has ever been done, his “Blue Boy”.




Childhood as seen in Culture (America)
In America, of course, the Protestant view dominated throughout much of the nineteenth century, although the Romantic view was never completely absent. Indeed, we might say that America’s greatest book, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, published in 1884, presents the case for the Romantic view, in spite of the book’s somewhat ambiguous ending. Certainly Twain attacked the presumption that children are, in any but the most superficial sense, unformed. And he mocked the claim that their character may be vastly improved by society’s “values”. Huck’s innate sense of fairness and dignity, his resourcefulness and psychological strength, his sheer interest in life —all of this struck a blow for the Romantic vision of childhood and was part of a general trend, beginning around the Civil War, toward a reassessment of the nature of childhood.

Medieval Manners
And because children could no longer be expected to know the secrets of adult public behavior, books on manners became commonplace. Erasmus, again, led the field. In his De Civilitate Morium Puerilium, he set down for the edification of the young some rules on how to conduct oneself in public. “Turn away when spitting”, he says, “lest your saliva fall on someone. If anything purulent falls to the ground, it should be trodden upon, lest it nauseate someone. If you are not at liberty to do this, catch the sputum in a small cloth. It is unmannerly to suck back saliva, as equally are those whom we see spitting at every third word not from necessity but from habit”. As to blowing one’s nose, Erasmus insists that “to blow your nose on your hat or clothing is rustic… nor is it much more polite to use your hand.… It is proper to wipe the nostrils with a handkerchief, and to do this while turning away, if more honorable people are present [italics his]”. Erasmus was doing several things at once here. First of all, he was inducing a sense of shame in the young, without which they could not gain entry into adulthood. He was also assigning the young to the status of “barbarian”


Absolute Chaos
Each writer not only made mistakes in copying a text, but was free to add, subtract, clarify, update, or otherwise reconceive the text as he thought necessary. Even such a cherished document as the Magna Charta, which was read twice a year in every shire in England, was by 1237 the subject of some controversy over which of several versions was authentic.[3]

Becoming Obsolete
I want to note here that of all such evidence none is more suggestive than the fact that the history of childhood has now become a major industry among scholars. As if to confirm Marshall McLuhan’s observation that when a social artifact becomes obsolete, it is turned into an object of nostalgia and contemplation, historians and social critics have produced, within the past two decades, scores of major works on childhood’s history, whereas very few were written between, say, 1800 and 1960.

The Way We Read
With few exceptions, medieval readers, regardless of age, did not and could not read as we do. If such a person could have seen a modern reader whisk through a page, silently, eyes rapidly moving, lips in repose, he might have interpreted it as an act of magic. The typical medieval reader proceeded something like one of our own recalcitrant first graders: word by word, muttering to himself, pronouncing aloud, finger pointed at each word, hardly expecting any of it to make much sense.[15] And here I am referring to those who were scholars. Most people did not read at all.

[Master Chief · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very interesting and unique book. In short, the television, no matter what’s on it, is destroying the idea of childhood and therefore, what it means to be an adult. Will require much reflection.

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

A blog I frequently read on the intersection of faith and technology has made mention several times of Neil Postman, and I finally decided to check out one of his books. The thread running through most of his commentary is that technology is a Faustian bargain: it adds something to our lives, but always comes at a price. Sometimes that bargain is apparent from the outset, but most frequently the trade-off only becomes known years or generations later, and usually in ways the inventors never expected or anticipated.

In The Disappearance of Childhood, Postman looks at this hypothesis through the lens of our historical understanding of the idea of childhood. Up until the 16th century, childhood didn't really exist. It was only after the invention of the printing press that society began to see children as separate, distinct people with unique needs because for the first time information was unavailable to them, and only became available as they gradually learned how to access the information. Childhood then experienced a "golden age" from about 1850-1950, and then showed signs of fading, and continues to fade. Postman does an admirable job of tying this to the rise of television as the primary means of communication. He's not some anti-television crusader, but instead shows that the way a reading culture processes information and stratifies society is distinctly different from the way a television culture does. And in addition to a disappearing childhood, one also sees a disappearing adulthood as adults become "childified."

This was a fascinating read, and at about 150 pages a fast one, too. Postman is an engaging writer with some very intriguing ideas. My only quibble with the book is that I would have liked him to flesh out some of his arguments with more anecdotal stories and evidence. Many times he'd mention something and then move on when I would have liked to hear more support. Of course, this is also what kept the book short and readable.

Although this isn't really fair, I would have loved to have some sort of updated appendix from him. The book was written in 1980, and Postman died in 2003. It would have been so fascinating to hear what he thought about the rise of the internet, reality TV, the trend of adult bands making kids' music, hand-held phones with internet access in the hands of children, the rise in child crime, the obsession with "To Catch a Predator"....the list goes on and on and I found myself making mental notes as I read and wondering what he'd think.

In an age where technology is often seen to have an unending upside, it's both refreshing and troubling to read a reminder that it always comes at a cost.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating book making the claim that the distinction between child and adult has largely disappeared in our world of new media. Postman wrote this a generation ago of the emerging dominance of television and one wonders what he would make of today's internet and social media.

The cultural concept of childhood is, according to Postman, a consequence of literacy. Print media created a world of knowledge and communication acquired through education. Over time certain topics, language, and themes began to be classified as adult and therefore "not for children."

In today's world, television has largely democratized and universalized the world of knowledge and exposure, though inherently not with the depth of print media. So, we have the childification of adulthood hand in hand with the adultification of childhood.

I'd be curious for recommended reading that brings Postman's ideas forward into today's world of social and mobile media.

[May Borati · Rating 2 out of 5]

i was excited to read this book because i thought it would be an anthropological exploration on the culture of childhood and the role of the child in societies both ancient and modern. boy, was i wrong.

this more closely resembles the unhinged ramblings of a middle aged luddite who fears any sort of technological progress or social change. it lacks linearity, depth and frankly, research. i want to approach this with kindness as it’s a significantly dated book, but i can’t in good conscience disregard the blatant homophobia and strange misogyny Postman insists on displaying time and time again, as understanding as i might be of how different the world was forty-so years ago.

even if i chose to set aside my own personal feelings about Postman’s belief set, the content of the book is also not great - he frequently takes senseless detours, spends too much time on topics that add very little to the discussion and fails to deliver actual insight on anything.

[Ryan Berger · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thornier, more dogmatic (though emphatically not easily categorized or aligned with any one particular philosophy or "side"), more prone to wrong notes and detours in minorly relevant pet theories, messier and ultimately a more difficult text to love and accept than his magnificent Amusing Ourselves to Death. While not ideologically consistent (which is different from being ideologically muddy or incoherent), it inarguably skews much more conservative and willing to adopt some puritanical urgency and barbs of the so-called Moral Majority. He ascribes moral failure to many of the warts of our society, even more than other sacred texts of the Illuminated Scold Finger-Wagging canon like Boorstein's The Image or McLuhan's Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man and Postman's earlier contribution with AOtD. And yet-- put Postman in a box and you will find contradictions at every turn. I found this lumpy, chaotically mixed batter of different philosophies refreshing, if kind of exhausting to keep up with. For such a short book, it forced me to pause and individually appraise each idea more than books three times its length.

It is hard not to acknowledge that much of Postman's arguments live up to the gravity he awards them. The causality with which we get these societal problems, and to what extent he is willing to categorize something as a symptom of a sick culture vs a change in temperment is up for scrutiny. Though I hesitate to say much of what Postman says could be described as aging poorly. I deeply wish Postman was alive to see the Graphic Revolution's offspring in the Algorithmic revolution and age of social media, all things consistent with his theories of the complete destruction of the barrier between child knowledge and adult knowledge, where we have completely relinquished our desire to forage for knowledge or even entertainment and submit to the Feed. The most significant technological advancements of the last 20 years, all things Postman could not comment on, all align with his warnings. It is nothing short of prohpetic in this way.

What can sometimes hamstring the book, and indeed where it issues its most important challenges to be self-critical to its readers, are in the places where Postman plays cultural critic as opposed to a more physician's eye and demeanor as in AOtD. He does not pull his punches and is fully aware that some of his opinions come off as fire-and-brimstone moral panic, for which he will always take the time to distance himself from Christian Nationalists.

The fault line between childhood and adulthood is blurring, and Postman has no reservations about speaking about individuals caught in the blur as if they are sick (or victims of a sick system). His contempt for the organization and proliferation of formal youth-sports is equal to his dismissal of man-children (a term that does not exist in this book, amusingly) whose diet of entertainment skews more juvenile.

If Postman is not shouted out of the room by Steven Universe Adults by this point, he is likely to feel the heat from women in a particularly uncomfortable passage about women's style increasingly resembling that of children and little girls. It's a passage like this that I could easily see someone reading out of context and putting him in a box as some kind of conservative crank shaking his fist at the youths. To an extent, there is a lot I think Postman is blind to as somebody who does seem to skew Right aesthetically if not ideologically. But I also hesitate to throw the entire idea out in context with the rest of his argument. We are less than a year removed at time of writing this from Brat Summer, a thrum through the culture as massive as it was incoherent. Was it dumb fun or does the whole thing seem rediculous in the light of day now that a winter has come and gone?

To go this long into this review and not talk about The Kids, especially as an educator, I think fully illustrates the issues at hand. Childhood only exists inasmuch as the adult world will let it exist. Our cultural messaging about childhood as a sacred walled garden worthy of specialized rules and values , while our actions do absolutely nothing to reinforce, or even contradict these exact rules we set. We are a nation of hypocrites when it comes to childhood (I will keep it specific to America and other comparable cultures, as "childhood" and especially adolescence can vary wildly). We have lowered the bar and don't even enforce it. Postman is clear early on that fully unpacking the true causes for this degredation and de-valuing of childhood is impossible to prove. Some may find this intellectually cowardly, but I found it mature. Seeing how childhood has continued to shrink and devolve in the following decades, he could have claimed a more authoritative voice.

At the intersection of ideas that read the most conservative as well as the most interesting if we take them seriously, is that we have become a nation that no longer moves in the same direction towards a unified goal or value. That guiding principle used to be religion, specifically of Christian Nationalism-- and all would agree we are better off for having shed it (including Postman). But the vacuum is hard to ignore now that I've been made acutely aware of it. To say that our nation is divided goes without saying. But that it can't be said to believe in absolutely *anything* anymore has an enormous effect on our children, who we have been supposed to be rearing on values and principles and have for the last few 100 years. We are a poorer, less consistent country for not having something we can show children that is worth believing with our entire chest. The children suffer for it, and the bill always comes due.

[علی‌رضا میم · Rating 4 out of 5]

میگه کودک و بالغ قبلنا یه مرز مشخصی بینشون بوده، تا اون بچه یه سری چیزا رو کسب نمیکرده، به جمع بزرگترها راه پیدا نمیکرده، مثل سواد و ادب و یه سری چیزای دیگه.
اما تلویزیون اومده طبقه بندی مطالب رو عوض کرده. هرنوع مطلبی رو در هر موردی به زبان شفاهی درآورده و همه مخاطب اون هستند. همه چیز رو به شوخی و خوش گذشتن برگزار میکنه چون اگه برنامه اینطور نباشه کسی برنامه رو نگاه نمیکنه، و یه سری چیزهای دیگه.



کتاب قدیمی و در مورد جامعه ی امریکاست، یه جورایی الان ما میشه.
در باب شناخت بهتر از دوران ما و اینکه بیگ پیکچر رو به ما بده خیلیی خوب میتونه باشه:))

[Rafael Musni · Rating 3 out of 5]

Weaker than the previous two Postman books I reviewed. While the illustration of childhood as a construct arising from the needs of newly literate cultures following the printing press is fascinating, and while it seems true that childhood is changing as a result of our new media environment, it is often unclear which parts of childhood need saving (I really don't think adults eating "kids" snacks is that serious, bro)

[Henry · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book is divided into 2 parts:

In part 1, the author mainly discusses the relatively recent (the past few hundred years) development of "childhood". The author believes that the recent idea of "childhood" stems from the need for parents (largely from the upper class, then spread to middle class, eventually to the lower class) to teach their children how to cope with the wide-spread innovation of the printing press. That, to "read" is more than just about literacy. It requires other skills, such as delayed gratification, the ability to grasp abstract subjects (since reading is all about conjuring up ideas within one's head) and lastly, the ability to think.

Part 1 contains lots of historical information that is absolutely fascinating, especially about the development of the human race in terms of culture. For instance, the author noted that in the US, the society advocating for the humane treatment of animals was founded a full decade before the society that advocates for the humane treatment of human children. The reason being is that, for the bulk of history, society has an idea that human children are properties of their parents. It's only in recent centuries the idea has shifted. That the west has begun to believe that it's the states' responsibility, not parents', to safeguard the safety of children under the modern Western guideline of child safety.

Part 2 is where Postman's signature writing comes into play. In part 2, the author argues that in the post printing press era, with mass visual media taking shape, society is moving away from the "childhood" model and shifting towards a world occupied with "adult-children". The author believes that TV is a poor way to express complicated ideas. Instead, it levels the playing field between children and adults. Whereas in the past, adults required a mass amount of time to train their brain to be fit for understanding complicated print media. But in a visual world, children no longer need to do that. A person embedded oneself into the world of TV would simply grow up unchanged into an old child, since TV requires no additional training to master regardless if you're a 10 years old or a 80 years old.

While one could easily read this book in a pessimistic light. I personally believe the author is simply narrating the future as it is, absent of any emotions. Just like, as the author mentioned, childhood was (for a long time) an Upper-class and Middle-class creation, "invented" post industrial revolution with the newly minted middle-class secure about their new-found wealth. Today is no different. In today's society, with visual media even more intense, even more individually curated, we simply have a bigger divide with the "learnt-man" and "unlearnt-man". The very fact that websites like Goodreads are thriving shows that it's not the entire society that is seeing the disappearance of childhood, but rather a select group of people seeing that, and many select groups of people not seeing that.