This blog has been sharing an overview of American
history to provide a summary account of how the US has become a nation of
people disposed to deviant behavior.
Starting with the posting, “Early On,”[1]
that account has reviewed those aspects of America’s past that have encouraged
too many Americans to deviate from laws or norms. The focus of this review has been the
nation’s culture.
It began by describing how in its origin, the
nation struggled through the clash between Calvinism and
transcendentalism. It then described how
the individualism of transcendentalism was reinforced by pragmatism as the
basic ideas of William James were reviewed.
That posting, “Representations of Reality,”[2]
left readers with an indication that the advent of television solidified a
self-centered sense of reality among the American people. Interested readers are encouraged to read
those two prior postings if they have not done so.
On the topic of TV, this blog counts on the
work of the late Neil Postman. “I
believe the epistemology created by television not only is inferior to a print-based
epistemology but is dangerous and absurdist,”[3]
wrote Postman. Written exposition, which
was the major method of communication coming into the mid-twentieth century,
demands analysis and inferential thinking skills. By way of a historical note, Postman claimed
that the beginning of the end for exposition began with the invention of the
photograph but surely was accomplished with the effects of TV.
By what means?
The image media of television demands passivity as the viewer is presented
with a discontinuous, trivial reality. This
is highly congruent with the philosophical disposition left from the nation’s
historical development. America was
ready for the worst effects of this newer media.
One can compare that to a previous time when
information was expressed through written words; this previous state demands a
culture which promotes a reflective and useful presentation of information in
its discourse of reality. Postman related
how America was different in the nineteenth century despite its transcendental
biases. In fact, America was a book and
pamphlet reading nation.
Public business was channeled into and
expressed through print, which became the model, the metaphor and the measure
of all discourse. The resonances
[defined as the power of influencing thought and action] of the lineal,
analytical structure of print, and in particular, of expository prose, could be
felt everywhere.[4]
As opposed to that level of reflection, the
television culture is bombarded with a constant stream of useless, disconnected
information. This “peek-a-boo” form of messaging
or discourse is ubiquitous with “only one pervasive voice – the voice of
entertainment.”[5] It also seems alive and well in the age of
the cell phone. While Postman gave in his cited book many examples of the pervasiveness
of this entertainment outlook, the example most relevant here is in the chapter
entitled, “Teaching as an Amusing Activity.”
As elsewhere, the character of the media in
classrooms determines the character of the activity. In terms of schooling, that is, the activity
is formulating the curriculum. What is
most frightening about Postman’s argument is that the cited dangers seem to be
accepted as innovative education. He
argued that educational television follows TV’s commandments: no prerequisites, no perplexity, and
avoidance of exposition.
More generally, within that media, this approach
renders it impossible for any instructional messaging to look at any issue
responsibly either within classrooms, or at home. There are the cable channel news networks,
such as Fox, CNN, and MSNBC, but their viewership is best measured in the
hundreds of thousands of viewers (Fox leads with over 2 million), [6]
a fraction of the adult population.
To the argument that TV allows educators the
ability to present studied materials dramatically, Postman cited research that questions
the notion of that advantage – that is that learning takes place when material
is presented in dramatic style. He summed
up the effect of curriculum based on TV as follows:
And, in the end, what will the students have
learned? They will … have learned
something about [the subject matter].
Mainly, they will have learned that learning is a form of entertainment
or, more precisely, that anything worth learning can take the form of an
entertainment, and ought to.[7]
This blogger can only add that during the
course of his career (1972-2007), his experience demonstrated an ever-shorter tolerance
among students to engage with plain verbal communication. And in addition, the prevailing disposition
that students expressed seemed to be, as they walked into the classroom,
“entertain me or what you have to do or say is illegitimate.”
By illegitimate this blogger does not mean only
boring, but that the experience is an unjustified waste of their time. And of course, the relevant standard of
entertainment is defined by the prevailing media forms, such as TV, which are multi-million-dollar
media productions.
At best, only a relative handful of individual
teachers, in the multitude of classrooms across the nation, can compete with
that level of entertainment. And that is
to say nothing about whether those teachers who can are actually teaching
anything of worth. One can suppose the
answer is no, given the general estimation as to how effective American schools
are – mediocre at best.[8]
But TV is not the only agent legitimizing this
dysfunctional cultural bias. Educators
themselves have adopted certain concepts and paradigms that further complicate
the situation and compound the prevailing individualism, anti-intellectualism,
and temporal view of the American people.
Educators have not been immune from the above-described historical
forces. And to boot, these forces met
their “scientific” foundation in perceptual/humanistic psychology, a turn which this
blog will next address.
[1] Robert Gutierrez, “Early On,” Gravitas: A Voice for Civics, February 13, 2024,
accessed February 15, 2024, URL: https://gravitascivics.blogspot.com/.
[2] Robert Gutierrez, “Representations of Reality,” Gravitas: A Voice for Civics, February 16, 2024,
accessed February 17, 2024, URL: https://gravitascivics.blogspot.com/.
[3] Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (New
York, NY: Penguin Books, 1985), 27.
[4] Ibid., 41.
[5] Ibid., 80.
[6] “Dominick Mastrangelo, “Fox News Top-Rated Cable
Channel for Eighth Straight Year,” The Hill, December 14, 2023, accessed
February 17, 2024, URL: https://thehill.com/homenews/media/4360708-fox-news-top-rated-cable-news-channel/#:~:text=Fox%20News%20took%20the%20crown,to%20Nielsen%20Media%20Research%20data.
[7] Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, 154. Emphasis added.
[8] Julia Ryan, “American Schools vs. the World: Expensive, Unequal, Bad at Math,” The
Atlantic, December 3, 2013, accessed February 19, 2024, https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/12/american-schools-vs-the-world-expensive-unequal-bad-at-math/281983/.
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