Neil Postman, 1931 - 2003

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Neil Postman, a prolific and influential social critic and educator best known for his warning that an era of mass communications is stunting the minds of children — as well as adults — died on Sunday at a hospital in Flushing, Queens. He was 72 and lived in Flushing.



The cause was lung cancer, said a spokesman for New York University, where Dr. Postman taught for more than 40 years.



He held a chair in the field he called media ecology, and his career was a long-distance joust with what he saw as the polluting effects of television.



Dr. Postman's core message was that an immersion in a media environment shaped children's lives to their detriment, and society's.



He drew national attention with "The Disappearance of Childhood" (Delacorte, 1982), in which he asserted that television conflated what should be the separate worlds of children and adults. It did so, he contended, by steeping the minds of children in vast amounts of information once reserved for their elders and subjecting them to all the desires and conflicts of the adult world.



If all the secrets of adulthood, including sex, illness and death, are opened to children, he wrote, cynicism, apathy or arrogance replace curiosity for them, short-circuiting education and moral development.



Reviewing the book for The New York Times, Anatole Broyard characterized it as a "brilliant but rather too tidy polemic." (It remains in print through Vintage Books, 1994.)



In "Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business" (Viking, 1985; Penguin, 1986), he indicted the television industry on the charge of making entertainment out of the world's most serious problems. The book was translated into eight languages and sold 200,000 copies worldwide, according to N.Y.U.



Dr. Postman was particularly offended by the presentation of television news with all the trappings of entertainment programming, including theme music and "talking hairdos." Only in the printed word, he felt, could complicated truths be rationally conveyed.



Dr. Postman's "The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School" (Knopf, 1995, and Vintage, 1996) called for alternative curriculums to foster a healthy intellectual skepticism, a sense of global citizenship, respect for America's traditions and appreciation of its diversity.



Nicholas Lemann, reviewing the book in The Times, wrote that it presented "a good fit between the idea that people and machines are not natural allies and the idea that schools should teach thinking rather than specific skills."



"Mr. Postman's ideas about education are not the world's most practicable," he went on, "but they're appealingly fresh: he wants to abolish textbooks and elevate anthropology and linguistics to a primary position in the curriculum."



Dr. Postman wrote more than 200 magazine and newspaper articles and 20 books, starting in 1961 with "Television and the Teaching of English."



Other titles still in print are "Conscientious Objections: Stirring Up Trouble About Language, Technology and Education" (Knopf, 1988; McKay, 1992); "How to Watch TV News" (with Steve Powers; Penguin, 1992); "Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology" (Knopf, 1992; Vintage, 1993); and "Building a Bridge to the 18th Century: How the Past Can Improve Our Future" (Knopf, 1999; Vintage, 2000).

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New York Times