Neil Postman Quotes

We all learned how to walk and talk by interacting with our environment, with real goals and rewards.

One of the best ways of understanding human nature is to study children. After all, if we want understand who we are, we should find out how we got to be that way.

Lot of things depend on the up bringing of a child.

I started reading when I was about three, a little over three.

Education happens to be something that all people, all cultures, need to embrace. Math, science, the words of the world. To be able to speak and be able to have clarity and to be able to think. Those are the greatest of gifts.

Lie detection is like language; there is a learning window. Telling whoppers to small children seems to be a family tradition in many families.

When I was four or five, I would organise my cars and my action figures. I needed some kind of structure, I think.

The mind of the polyglot is a very particular thing, and scientists are only beginning to look closely at how acquiring a second language influences learning, behavior and the very structure of the brain itself.

If you just casually look at a baby, it doesn't look like there's very much going on there, but they know more and learn more than we would ever have thought. Every single minute is incredibly full of thought and novelty. It's easy as adults to take for granted everything it took to arrive at the state where we are.

One of the most distinctive evolutionary features of human beings is our unusually long, protected childhood.

The underlying message of the Lancet article is that if you want to understand aggressive behaviour in children, look to the social and emotional environment in which they are growing up, and the values they bring to the viewing experience.

From an evolutionary perspective children are, literally, designed to learn. Childhood is a special period of protected immaturity. It gives the young breathing time to master the things they will need to know in order to survive as adults.

Children frequently sing meaningful phrases to themselves over and over again before they learn to make a distinction between singing and saying.

I was raised by television. It was my first cultural window. It was a constant companion.

I don't think children themselves have changed that much. It's the world that has changed.

It's hard to think of a 16-month child being anything other than a delight to be around.

I am seriously interested in the psychology of childhood. And I've given a lot of my life to trying to see questions of personal development, as well as the great issues of the day, from a child's point of view.

I think much of what you learn as a kid comes before age seven.

We've got to understand that the ages of zero to three are the most formative years of a person's life, the time they learn the concept of reward and punishment and develop a conscience, and that 50 percent of all learned human response is learned in the first year of life.

When I was little, seven or eight years old, in third and fourth grade, I would always try to use long words and stuff.

I suppose my ideal brain food is learning languages.

Good theories of the mind must span at least three different scales of time: slow, for the billions of years in which our brains have survivied; fast, for the fleeting weeks and months of childhood; and in between, the centuries of growth of our ideas through history.

The way in which each human infant is transformed into the finished adult, into the complicated individual version of his city and his century is one of the most fascinating studies open to the curious minded.

Children learn to speak Male or Female the way they learn to speak English or French.

A large part of our attitude toward things is conditioned by opinions and emotions which we unconsciously absorb as children from our environment. In other words, it is tradition—besides inherited aptitudes and qualities—which makes us what we are. We but rarely reflect how relatively small as compared with the powerful influence of tradition is the influence of our conscious thought upon our conduct and convictions.