Linguistics : A Revolution in Teaching

by Neil Postman, Charles Weingartner

Paperback. Text contains very minor underlining/marking. Covers show light edge wear and heavy rubbing. Previous owner's name on end paper. COVER MAY NOT MATCH THE PICTURE ON THIS SITE.

Genres: Linguistics

209 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1966

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

[Jeff Cliff · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been thinking as I'm reading this..."how the hell do I describe this book?". It's a bit a tour-de-force through linguistics, but it starts almost as if it's a book about books about linguistics(kind of similar to the book about the talmud) books rather than being a linguistics book itself. This, however, is a slight of hand (slight of mind?). It goes remarkably deep given its length, and covers everything from empirical studies of high school students to zen buddhism. Since this is the first serious, somewhat systematic work explicitly on linguistics that I remember going through I don't have much to compare it to but it seems you can do a lot worse from starting a journey into the field of linguistics by taking this thread of Ariadne and following where it goes. I suspect it would be a good book to read alongside Mindstorms, GEB, The Devil's Dictionary, and/or Brameld.

Like Mindstorms, it contains the seeds of a possible revolution within it, though the bigger question of 'how to actually carry through the revolution so it isn't quickly forgotten' is kind of a big deal here.

[William · Rating 4 out of 5]

pipsman wrote himself a fancy book on the subject of talking and writing and thinking and reading and about how we should be more precise in our word usings. read this dang book. precise enough mr. popsman?

[Colin]

“The history of science is a chronicle of the unhappy responses that have occurred when someone, somewhere, has pointed out that what everyone had been saying and believing up to that point is nonsense.”

[Jamie Barringer (Ravenmount) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty boring, but might be useful to some teachers.