Neil Postman Quotes

When a child is watching television, he or she is not involved in play, not socializing with other individuals, and most importantly, not receiving feedback as to the actions or consequences of his or her behavior.

Do some research on the effects of television and your brain, and I promise you you'll have a decision to make when it comes to television, especially with what you watch.

It’s not whether children learn from television, it’s what children learn from television... because everything that children see on television is teaching them something.

Today's children have very short attention spans because they are being reared on dreadful television programmes which are flickering away in the corner.

If you watch kids looking at something on television, even something that's produced for them and is supposed to be funny, what you'll notice is that they don't laugh.

The imagination of our children is blunted on television, and their thinking is done for them.

I, perhaps wrongly, assume that people actually read articles that interest them rather than just headlines.

A modern audience is capable of processing just so much information because they're used to visual media that's on overload.

The questions that our society must ask revolve around whether the time-consuming demands of the deep-reading processes will be lost in a culture whose principal mediums advantage speed, multitasking, and processing the next and the next piece of information.

People think I watch TV too much, but they are wrong. There is a huge difference between merely "watching" TV and learning to respond aggressively to it. The difference, for most people, is the difference between the living and dying of their own brains.

To develop thinking as a skill, it should be deliberate, focused, confident, and enjoyable.

I don't want to succumb to the idea that for the generation, or generations, raised on television, the text is irrelevant or so intimidating that they won't deal with it. If you teach, you see this is not true. It may be that newer generations do not worship the text as some of their elders do.

The center line of science literacy - which not many people tell you, but I feel this strongly, and I will go to my grave making this point - is how you think.

Most TV shows don't reward you for paying attention.

There are not the same factual shows anymore - children's TV has become much more trivial.

Attention for children is so much about input, and the brain can only filter so much - I don't know how many millions of messages that come through the brain, and we can only filter so much through it.

Encourage your children to read more and watch television less.

I read Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Reader's Digest... I read some responsible journalism, and from that, I form my own opinions. I also happen to be intelligent, and I question everything.

It is commonly agreed that children spend more hours per year watching television than in the classroom, and far less in actual conversation with their parents.

There are plenty of skills I've learned from playing video games. It's more interactive than watching TV, because there are problems to solve as you're using your brain.

Today, because knowledge is available on every Internet-connected device, what you know matters far less than what you can do with what you know. The capacity to innovate — the ability to solve problems creatively or bring new possibilities to life — and skills like critical thinking, communication and collaboration are far more important than academic knowledge.

Talent is a by-product of education; the quality of a country's human capital depends on it.

One of the things I try to do - and I always regret when I'm not doing it - is I try to read as much as possible as I'm consuming news.

Commercial television has underestimated the intelligence of the public.

We know television should educate and inform, and I believe it should entertain.