Teaching as a subversive activity [by] Neil Postman [and] Charles Weingartner

by Neil Postman

A no-holds-barred assault on outdated teaching methods--with dramatic & practical proposals on how education can be made relevant to today's world.
Introduction
Crap detecting
The medium is the message, of course
The inquiry method
Pursuing relevance
What's worth knowing?
Meaning making
Languaging
New teachers
City schools
New languages: the media-
Two alternatives
So what do you do now?
Strategies for survival

Genres: Education, Nonfiction, Teaching, Philosophy, Politics, Sociology, Psychology

Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 1969

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

[Trevor · Rating 5 out of 5]

In a sense this book is getting quite old – you know, late 1960s and all that. And so many of the examples given are from people you may never have heard of or to events like the Vietnam War which are not quite as eternally present now as they were then. For example, at least three times ‘future shock’ is mentioned as having just entered the vernacular, which is used to explain how the concept has become basically a universal concern, but if anything this proved to be a kind of revolving door – I can’t remember the last time I heard anyone mention ‘future shock’ or even anything remotely like the concept, if not the phrase. And that is despite the fact that it would seem much more relevant today if, I guess, we hadn’t been shocked into a kind of bland acceptance of just about anything.

Why ‘subversive’? There is a sense in which I think teaching that is worth the name really does need to be subversive – but we will get to that.

Let’s start at the beginning. What is teaching? Surely, teaching has to have something in common with learning. There was a line of Patrick White that began a chapter of my high school Chemistry text book that went something like, “I don’t remember what I was taught, only what I learnt” which nicely points to the paradoxical relationship with teaching and learning. A teacher’s job is often seen as in providing the stuffing to be used I filling the heads of students. Teachers need to be ‘content experts’. Students can be assumed to be essentially empty vessels, into which the teachers can expertly pour their carefully selected content. However, while the teacher can be expected to take all due care in performing this filling action we call teaching, the teacher cannot be expected to take responsibility for what is learnt by the student. The teacher is responsible for teaching, the learner for learning.

The problem is that students tend not to be all that ‘empty’. In fact, they know an awful lot more than we often give them credit for. Some people say that the students already know up to half of everything that is said in a classroom. And what is said, is said by the teacher most of the time, as the role students are most likely to play is that of an audience in the classroom – well, audience or ventriloquist’s dummy for the teacher.

There are so many problems with this sort of ‘standard’ model of teaching it is hard to know where to begin. Firstly, people don’t really learn very well when they are bored out of their minds. This goes for children as much as it does for adults. Rather people learn when what they are being taught is just that bit beyond what they can currently do. This is why computer games are so addictive. If you are playing one there is always a new skill to learn – something the you can’t already do (like kill the badass behind the green door on the second floor while swinging from a rope avoiding spinning blades). But once you learn how to do this, you immediately need to learn how to kill an alien that is coming at you with a rocket launcher while all you have to defend yourself with is a toothpick. Everything is always ‘just’ beyond your current capabilities, but still solvable because not so far beyond them for you to just give up. You can see that you will be able to kill the alien by getting the toothpick into their air vent, you just need to work out how, and because you trust the programmer of the game not to be perverse (something that is not always the case with a student’s beliefs about their teachers) you trust that there is a solution you can learn and so the process continues.

In this model – the computer game model – you are learning through interest, engagement and by being challenged but not defeated by the clear difficulty of the problem. This helps to explain why a lot of education is so boring for kids. What is presented to them has been ‘pre-digested’ – all of the challenge (and therefore interest) has been carefully removed by the teacher. This means all teachers need to do is open up the lid on the top of their student’s head and let this pre-digested sludge be poured in.

Don’t get me wrong, it is not that this never works – we are basically learning machines, you have to go out of your way to prepare a lesson where nothing at all is learnt. It is just this is close to the most inefficient way of teaching.

Also, it unintentionally teaches things we may not actually have wanted students to learn. That learning is boring is one of these things, but also that knowledge is something that exists completely independently of students. That is, completely independent in all senses – they already know it is very unlikely they will ever again need to know Boyle’s Law after leaving school, or the names of the different parts of a human cell or even Pythagoras’s Theorem. In fact, they don’t have to wait till they leave school to forget this stuff, they can forget it five minutes after the test – once the test is over they will have moved onto something completely unconnected to whatever they previously learnt, and so the cycle of trivia continues.

They are also taught to shut up, to sit still and to pay attention to the teacher. As is said here, when did you ever see a student take down a note from anything another student in their class was saying? Want to know the quickest way to have your students switch off? Tell them that what you are going to say over the next five minutes won’t be on the test. We train people according to how we organise the institutions they are required to fit within – and if even part of the reason for having schools is to provide our society with citizens capable of acting in an active democracy, someone really does need to explain how this will be achieved from over a decade in such an autocratic environment.

Postman sits within a tradition that has at various times been called ‘progressive education’. I suspect progressive education will always be the ‘education of the future’ as so much of current education is really about control and performance measurement – and these are the opposite of what progressive education asserts. Starting with Rousseau and heading through Dewey and Vygotski, over to Freire and Postman, the primary assumptions of such educational progressives have been that kids simply aren’t empty containers that need to be filled, but rather individuals with already existing knowledge and ways of understanding. What we need to do, if we are going to teach them, is to learn where they are at – in much the same way as the computer game quickly finds out what you can and can’t do and then ‘builds you skills’ according to that – so that you always remain like Tantalus, being provided with challenges that always leaves the goal just out of reach ensuring that you are forever hungry and prepared to just keep trying.

This sort of education is about presenting children with problems, rather than solutions, and not just problems that are basically solutions anyway – that is, problems that only have one answer and that is what is already in the head of the teacher – but ‘real’ problems. In this case a teacher doesn’t stuff ideas into children’s heads, but rather provides them with useful ways of tackling problems. It isn’t about the answers, but about finding ways of asking the right questions that will help to frame the problem in a new way that might make it more able to give up its answer.

So, why is this subversive? Well, for all of the obvious reasons, I guess. This is the very opposite of the grossly overcrowded curriculum that most education is currently structured around. Also, as Postman repeatedly says, because the intent of such an inquiry based education is to give kids a fully operational ‘crap detector’.

Why is this necessary? Well, because unlike at any other time in history, we live at a time when we really can’t rely on the knowledge that existed in the past to solve our problems for us. That doesn’t mean past knowledge is useless, but what it does mean is that we need to be able to adapt much more quickly now than ever before – and so providing kids with knowledge that, by definition, is always backwards looking is really quite dangerous. New problems require innovative, creative solutions. They require ‘new thinking’ – and so they require people who know how to learn, not just regurgitate facts like parrots. Knowing how to learn starts with knowing how to ask questions that will direct that learning. Many of our current teaching methods, which are obsessed with stuffing answers into heads, are exactly the problem.

If our kids are to tackle the problems of the 21st century, the only way possible is for them to be able to subvert our old ways of doing things, of fixing things – students need to be rewarded for thinking outside of conventional thinking. But our schools too often find ways to punish those who do exactly that. Students are seen as passive receivers, not the creators of knowledge. That needs to change – and it won’t change by giving them more standardized tests or more ‘content’. They need practice in thinking, not in trivia. They need practice in problem solving, not in regurgitation.

There is a lovely joke here about a teacher asking a young Black student how many legs a grasshopper has and the student replying, ‘man, I wish I had your problems’.

Any learning that is learning replaces or completes or changes that which we already know – so, by definition it is subversive.

Like I said at the beginning of this review, this book was written a long time ago, and it is hard to read it and not notice the sideburns and round sunglasses – but this is also essentially a modern book, right up to the minute.

[Mark Osborne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Perhaps one of the most depressing aspects of Postman and Weingartner’s book (written some 45 years ago) is how much of it still applies. Many of the criticisms that he levels at schools of their day are at least as valid now, if not more so.
Some (extremely distilled) points:
- One of a school’s primary functions is to equip students with ‘crap detectors’ so that they may successfully spot time when people are attempting to manipulate them.
- School should be about ‘inquiry’ not about the transmission of knowledge from one generation to another.
- Learning should start with what is within students, not what is missing from them.

Two gems from the book:
- A perceptive scripted discussion between doctors which can easily be translated to education: one doctor performing four pilonidal-cyst excisions (regardless of whether the patients needed them or not) simply because the doctor is ‘fond’ of them; doctors avoiding blame for the death of patients (‘bad patients, son, bad patients’); and the administering of penicillin regardless of the illness (‘good for its own sake’). It’s not hard to see that this conversation is not about medicine at all.

- The 16 points to lay the groundwork of a new education:

1. Declare a five year moratorium on the use of all textbooks.
2. Have English teachers ‘teach’ math, math teachers ‘teach’ English Social science teachers teach science, Science teachers teach art and so on.
3. Transfer all elementary teachers to high school and vice versa.
4. Require each teacher who thinks they know their subject well to write a book on it (that way they will be relieved of the necessity of inflicting ‘their’ knowledge on other people.)
5. Dissolve all ‘subjects’, ‘courses’ and ‘course requirements’
6. Limit each teacher to three declarative statements per class, and 15 interrogative statements.
7. Prohibit teachers from asking questions they know the answer to.
8. Declare a moratorium on all tests and grades.
9. Require all teachers to undergo some form of psycho-therapy as part of their in-service training (to give teachers an opportunity to gain insights into themselves, particularly why they became teachers).
10. Classify teachers according to ability and make the lists public.
11. Require all teachers to take a test prepared by students on what students know.
12. Make every class an elective and withhold a teacher’s monthly cheque if their students show no interest in going to next month’s classes.
13. Require all teacher to take a one year leave of absence in every fourth year to work in some ‘field’ other than teaching.
14. Require all teachers to provide some form of evidence that he or she has been in some form of loving relationship with another human being.
15. Require that all graffiti accumulated in the school be reproduced in large pieces of paper and hung in the school halls.
16. There should be a general prohibition on the use of the following words and phrases: teach, syllabus, covering ground, IQ, makeup, test, disadvantaged, gifted, accelerated, enhancement, course, grade, score, human nature, dumb, college material and administrative necessity.

Postman and Weingartner’s passion spans generations and because of the soundness of the logic upon which their argument is based, their criticism of what schools subject students to is no less withering 45 years after initial publication. These guys, like Dewey, will continue to speak across the ages.

[Amy · Rating 2 out of 5]

I used the beginning of this book to help me write my Masters Thesis. It was extremely helpful and relevant to my topic and my role as a teacher in my own classroom. I felt after a while, Postman turned a bit too extreme for my taste. (Let me interject that I am a big Postman fan and have really enjoyed reading him throughout my grad classes.) Although I appreciated what he had to say, he was so radical he makes it hard not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

It came to a point where he convicts schools for not doing their job and proposes they could and should be the panacea for all their community's problems. Is your school in an urban area with many students dropping out? Then infiltrate the community with student-operated bakeries, gardens, and jewelry shops. I hate to be cynical, but do I really think this will be what turns that drug dealer into an A-student, probably not. He seemed to place virtually no responsibility on students or parents.

He blames administration for basically being "the man" and he suggests we move toward student-created policies/repercussions. I fear for the school that lets its teenagers create all of its policies and is forced to self-regulate. I do agree that students can and should have more of a part in the life of the school, but on a subtler level.

He proposes we throw out all curricula and texts; why not let the students decide the direction of class? Although this can be done to a certain extent, learning through inquiry/discovery only takes them so far and assumes a basis of knowledge. Some teaching needs to take place, there is no way students can inquire their way to facts of history or math theorems. We cannot run schools on a "have it your way" approach. It is completely valid to let students have time to ask and answer their own questions, but to run a class this way the majority of the time seems a bit ridiculous.

I know to a certain extent, Postman was being radical for the sake of riling up the reader to make him think. I do agree that the school system needs shaking up; students need to take a bigger role in the everyday learning and meaning needs to come from what is taught. The fact of the matter is that for learning to occur, teaching needs to take place.

[Spencer B · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was written primarily as a manifesto for inquiry based learning. It is reasonably convincing as such, but has a major flaw. While discussing the problems brought about by the educational bureaucracy he fails to even consider the schooling model most suited to an inquiry based learning environment, homeschooling. Not only are parents not included as potential teacher or implementers of his strategies he fails to consider them even as parents or the impact that parents have either as agents of change or as sources of educational inertia. Teaching certainly becomes subversive when you take children away from their parents and then "educate" them ignoring the feedback of your paying customers (namely the children's parents).

This flaw disappears if you start with the assumption that the book is written for parents as teachers. I liked many of the ideas in the book and have already started using them with my children.

[Beth · Rating 5 out of 5]

I pulled this book off my dad's shelves when I had dropped out of architecture school and was trying to figure out what to do with my life.

Twenty years later, let me tell you that this was a major turning point in my decision to become a teacher. It was also a philosophy that kept me bordering on mutiny most of my teaching career...

Every education student should read this book -- agree with it or not.

Thank you, Neil Postman!

[Chrisl · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of two books that have remained with me conceptually from my days in the 'school of education.'
Liked Postman's perspective.
(The other Illich ...
Deschooling Society

[Julianne · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the very best books on education I’ve ever read. Although published in 1969, I find myself wishing that everyone everywhere would pick it up and read it. Though it’s a bit long on references to Vietnam and rather out of date in some of its neuroscience (see Ch. 7: Languaging), it still has extremely important things to say to both teachers and students. (Sorry, administrators, you don’t even make the list, seeing as how you are unnecessary and in many cases counterproductive to the learning process.)

Postman and Weingartner make many points, not the least of which is that there exists in the public educational system of the modern United States a pretty sharp demarcation between school and real life, a demarcation that results from using outdated methods to inculcate irrelevant information, and which serves to discourage real learning and real learners. They trace student cheating, conformity, cynicism, behavioral problems, emotional problems, and high dropout rates (among other problems) to this needless demarcation between “real” and “school,” and advocate, among other things, a questions-based curriculum as a way to close the gap.

Imagine how school would change if every classroom were “To Sir, With Love.” If textbooks took a backseat to students’ own questions. If teachers drilled students on the art of asking and answering questions instead of the art of 18th-century Polynesia. Maybe students would find their questions leading them to 18th-century Polynesian art anyway. Maybe not. But Postman/Weingartner’s point is that if they don’t, don’t try to teach them Polynesian art. It may be irrelevant, or worse, counterproductive to students’ survival, both intellectual and otherwise.

I opened up the paper today to find that one of the worst teachers I ever had in high school is now an administrator and making in excess of $107,000 a year. Although I was generally a good and compliant student in high school, graduating with a weighted GPA of 4.102 (I think), I didn’t take notes in that teacher’s class; I wrote them. And then passed them on down the row. —Every student there was just as bored as I was. (I still have those notes, actually, and unlike the teaching, they’re funny, wise, and wildly entertaining.) Thanks to better teachers in math, I can calculate that since the state allocated about $5,800 per pupil in its education budget when I was in high school, the $107,000 that teacher made last year could instead have been spent better educating something in excess of 18 pupils per year for the last ten years. To detractors of Postman and Weingartner who call their suggestions unworkable: You don’t think I re-evaluated, if only for a moment, the workability of Post/gartner’s suggestion to drastically cut if not eliminate administrative staff in the schools when I opened my paper this morning?

Despite superficial gains (as measured by such spurious tools as standardized test scores and graduation rates), I do not believe the state of public education is better now than in 1969. Since 1969, arts budgets have decreased, standardized testing has ballooned to take over more of the curriculum than ever before, and the grade the public would give to the public schools in the nation at large hovers around a C (and has actually decreased between 1974 and 2008—see http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d0...). Not to mention that since 1969, the number of school shootings in the United States has increased exponentially. Which means that what we’ve tried hasn’t worked, and what we’re trying isn’t working. However, to my knowledge, no program anywhere has yet “declared a five-year moratorium on the use of all textbooks” or “transferred all the elementary-school teachers to high school and vice versa,” and I’m open to new ideas. In the meantime, I think I’ll keep on reading everything that Neil Postman has ever written.

[Josiah DeGraaf · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm not quite sure what to do with this book.

The first two chapters were incredible and thought-provoking as Postman & Weingartner applied the "medium is the message" paradigm to the classroom. These chapters along were worth the time spent reading the book and were jam-packed with useful observations.

But once the authors got into their proposal for revolutionizing the education system...it was very hard for me to take them seriously. It wasn't just because of the moral relativism underpinning all of their recommendations. Or because they believe that teachers should be discussion facilitators more than subject matter experts. I don't agree with either of those positions. Yet I do have some sympathies to the discussion facilitator camp, and took some cues from them during my days as an English teacher.

The problem is that the specifics of the authors' proposals were, for lack of a better word, ludicrous.

Here's a few of their recommendations, in their own words:

"Transfer all the elementary-school teachers to high school and vice versa."

"Require every teacher who thinks he knows his subject well to write a book on it. In this way, he will be relieved of the necessity of inflicting his knowledge on other people, particularly his students."

"Classify teachers according to their ability and make the lists public. There would be a smart group, an average group, and a dumb group."

"Require that all the graffiti accumulated in the school toilets be reproduced on large paper and be hung in the school halls."

At first, I laughed at these recommendations since they were pretty good satire. But then the authors went on to explain that they were dead serious in their belief that all these recommendations would make the schools a better place. And I was left pretty speechless.

In some ways, those quotes are probably a pretty good litmus test. If you think those ideas are worthy of serious discussion, you'll probably like this book. If you don't, while I'll still stand behind the first two chapters, the rest of the book isn't worth your time.

Rating: 1.5-2 Stars (Inconsistent).

[Rob Baker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Decades ago I went through a glorious phase of reading some works of R. Buckminster Fuller, most memorably "Critical Path" and "Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth". Many of Fuller’s ideas have stuck with me over the years and have profoundly influenced my thinking. One of these was the concept that there is always a time lag between what experts in various fields have developed the ability to do and the integration of their new ideas into general practice. For example, I seem to recall that in architecture, Fuller said there was a 75-year time lag between what was currently possible and what was commonly being done.

Such a time lag , I suspect, also exists for education theory vs. practice. Having just finished "Teaching as a Subversive Activity", published fifty-one years ago, I wonder if five decades isn’t a possible lag period in this field.

While some of the authors’ ideas may never be generally accepted --or at least will require a much longer lag period-- (eg., “Have English teachers ‘teach’ Math (and) Social Studies teachers ‘teach' Science” or “transfer all elementary-school teachers to high school and vice versa”)-- many of their proposals have been wending their way into education discussions and practices in recent years (e.g., using inquiry methods to initiate real learning and to make it relevant and personalized for students).

"Teaching as a Subversive Activity" is a book anyone involved with education-- teacher, administrator, or board of education member -- will benefit from reading as long as they feel inspired rather than threatened by suggestions such as eliminating grades, syllabi, subjects, and administrators or such as taking the spotlight off the teacher/the system and putting it on the student where it belongs.

[Katy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must-read for anyone with interest in a new vision for education. Although written nearly 50 years ago, the vast majority of this text is still vital to our visioning––perhaps even more so. Postman and Weingartner address education both philosophically and practically, with suggestions for how we might immediately change our approach to education as well as long-term questions to consider in the way we imagine learning.

Sadly, unlike anything I had to read in my teacher education program, but what I feel should be required reading of every future teacher (at least in part), even if just for a historical understanding of the education reform movement. I hope, rather, and find more likely, that this book could further its readers' critical examination of the purpose of American education.

[N · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's utterly distressing how relevant this book remains 49 years after it was published. Learning isn't about preparing for trivial standardized tests or trying to win your teacher's approval - it's about learning to question and learn from the world around you. My dad always gave me one piece of advice when going to school - "Ask hard questions." We're still in a place where students aren't always encouraged to do that.

[Emma · Rating 4 out of 5]

Probably the only useful thing that's come out of the university based portion of my teaching course so far. Postman advocates for large-scale change to the school system which would move the child back to the centre instead of the focus being on teaching. I can't say anything about anywhere else but I can see how elements of his ideas have been incorperated in the UK, with the idea of student-focused lessons and moving away from transmission-learning, but at the end of the day it's all the same. We call it something else but the aim in my lesson is still to take what's in my head and put it into the heads of students. It's still about right answers and the kids guessing what I know as truth rather then exploring what's true to them. I think that within science there is a place for some transmission learning but I think also that Postman has a lot to make us think about how we teach and why.

I think, ultimatley, to reach Postman's vision we will have to entirely eliminate assesment and testing, at least as we know it. There's so much here I'd like to put into parctice but, at the end of the day, while the kids may learn more if they don't learn the answers I have to teach them to pass the tests that are the only things their future educators and employers will value I'm doing good for no-one. Imagine a world without tests. Imagine if instead of being judged on a number you produced in a test you were instead, maybe, judged on a portfolio of projects and questions that showed your thinking and doing and were realy relevant and personal to you. Things you'd explored and thuoght about and cared about, not done becasue the teacher had told you to.

Though most of his ideas simple won't work within assesment and curriculum structures and require more radical, higher level change then I can effect in my clasroom he does, to be fair, give small ideas you can introduce into normal classroom teaching. And he makes you think.

[Kevin Fulton · Rating 1 out of 5]

I read it so you don’t have to. The whole book is Postman preaching to his choir.
He proves well adept at slaying various strawmen and traditional boogeymen while hiding behind “questions.”
That said, there are occasional gems, but you need to dig through a lot of muck in order to find them. Basically, yes, education should be more than memorizing trivia facts and the child who is learning matters.
You can find more insightful ways to do help value the whole child in numerous other books. You could even start with John Dewey, an author Postman cites favorably.

[Laurence · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mr. Postman's initiative is commendable. Up until the 50% mark, where he mainly criticises the system in place, I was on board. Unfortunately, the measures he recommends to implement his "new education" are sometimes unjustifiably extreme.

Lessons are 100% steered by students' questions and discussions. Do away with school administration and bureaucracy and let students manage the school like a democracy.

Used parsimoniously, this would be great. But to suddenly have whole lessons rely on students' interactions is idealistic at best. Even in Mr. Postman's lesson transcriptions (which I can't help but feel come from Imagination High, La La Land) the students already have massive previous knowledge that must have been taught at some point. You can't have a discussion without any raw materials to fuel your arguments and interrogations. This measure also makes the bold assumption that students are all willing to participate and behave in a mature way. Same remark applies to letting students handle school adminitration. Parts of it, gradually, sure. All of it? That's a stretch.

To master a discipline you only need to master its language, in fact the language is the discipline.

I agree that learning the lingo of a discipline is a big part of mastering it, but what about problem-solving skills in IT? Empathy in nursing? Creativity in graphic design? Spacial perception in architecture?

No textbook at all. Teachers must teach a subject they know nothing about. Teachers can say 3 affirmations and 15 interrogations maximum by lesson.

I understand the intention behind these measures but it's simply unrealistic. And if you can only teach something you don't know, you only get one run teaching a subject and then must switch to another, since teaching it made you know about it.

Mr. Postman puts the blame and responsibility for the current system entirely on teachers and administrators, governments and parents are never mentioned. He doesn't include the parents nor the students in the guilt-list of the current lack of teacher-pupil communication either, its only entry are teachers. In fact, Mr. Postman doesn't seem to like teachers much. Which is amusing given that he says we must assume the best out of students and hold off our judgment of them. I guess teachers don't deserve that luxury. But let me quote him directly so you can be the judge.

"Require every teacher who thinks he knows his subject well to write a book on it. In this way, he will be relieved of the necessity of inflicting his knowledge on other people, particularly his students."

I thought Mr. Postman said teachers should teach something they don't know... And isn't one of the main points of teaching to literally transfer (or "inflict", if you will) knowledge?

"Classify teachers according to their ability and make the lists public. There would be a 'smart' group (the Bluebirds), an 'average' group (the Robins), and a 'dumb' group (the Sandpipers). The lists would be published each year in the community paper. The IQ and reading scores of teachers would also be published, as well as the list of those who are 'advantaged' and 'disadvantaged' by virtue of what they know in relation to what their students know."

This one Mr. Postman doesn't even attempt to justify. He also previously said that grading students is to be prohibited because it's not productive and prevents learning. Why apply it to teachers then?

"Require each teacher to provide some sort of evidence that he or she has had a loving relationship with at least one other human being. If the teacher can get someone to say, 'I love her (or him)' she should be retained. If she can get two people to say it, she should get a raise. Spouses need not be excluded from testifying."

You're a great teacher but you've got emotional difficulties or are socially isolated for whatever reason? Too bad for you.

Fortunately, there are a few good ideas thrown in as well.

"Require all teachers to undergo some form of psychotherapy as part of their in-service training. This need not be psychoanalysis; some form of group therapy or psychological counseling will do. Its purpose: to give teachers an opportunity to gain insight into themselves, particularly into the reasons they are teachers."

This one is great.

"There should be a general prohibition against the use of the following words and phrases: teach, syllabus, covering ground, IQ, makeup test, disadvantaged, gifted, accelerated, enhancement, course, grade, score, human nature, dumb, college material and administrative necessity."

Can't agree more. (Except the "human nature" one, what's that doing there?)

"Require every teacher to take a one-year leave of absence every fourth year to work in some field other than education."

Brilliant as well, but would open questions such as who will hire someone who hasn't worked in the field in four years and will only stay one year. Mr Postman says teachers must work either as bartender, cab driver, garment worker or waiter. All positions are available at entry-level jobs, so it could work, sure. But why not have them work in their own field? Wouldn't that put them in contact with reality while also contributing to the upkeep of their knowledge? But I guess that wouldn't be as "humbling"...

And if teachers get paid according to student's interest, like Mr Postman says they should, the very successful teachers won't be likely to give up a fat paycheck to work minimum wage for a year. Why not just have them teach part-time and let them have a job in their industry the rest of the time? Or have the school send them to a partner company one day per week?

I've got a problem with Teaching as a Subversive Activity not only on the substance level but on the form level as well. Basically, Mr. Postman says: "Here are my solutions, they're quite conservative given the task at hand, if you think they're impractical it's because you're one of those stubborn, incompetent teachers we don't want for our new education".

Which is—correct me if I'm wrong—the well-spoken equivalent of "if you disagree with me it's because you're dumb".

I can't tell if the author goes overboard to trigger a reaction, asks for an arm to at least secure a finger or is just taking the piss. Some of this book sounds more like passive-aggressive snark than a real, well thought-out solution. And there's that veiled obsession with humiliating those pompous, useless teachers... which one of them hurt you, Mr. Postman?

Finding enough persons able to carry out this new education as Mr Postman prescribes it would be immensely difficult so I don't see it gaining mainstream popularity anytime soon, just like it hasn't in the 50+ years since this book has been published. Its saving grace are the last two chapters, where he gives concrete steps to ease teachers into it. Otherwise, it completely dismisses the benefits of having at least a bit of structure and consistency on one's well-being and development, especially at school age.

In short: most of Mr. Postman's good points are borrowed from other authors so might as well read them directly. Their prose is probably more pleasant to wade through as well.

[Jolene · Rating 4 out of 5]

What am I going to have my students do today?
What's it good for?
How do I know? (193)

It's insane that this book, literally written in the 60s, still holds so much relevance to today's education system slash world. I mean, this: "[Censorship] is easy to do ... when the loudspeakers are owned and operated by mammoth corporations with enormous investments in their proprietorship. What we get is an entirely new politics, including the possibility that a major requirement for the holding of political office be prior success as a show-business personality" (9). YUP.

I reference ideas from this book all the time -- in PD conversations, in evaluation paperwork, in my own pedagogy book, Choice & Voice (2020). The way a teacher runs a classroom is a matter of equity since, as Postman and Weingartner note, the medium is the message. If a teacher stands in front of the room and tells students what to think about a book, she is tacitly insisting that authority figures have all the answers, that there is one right way to problem solve, and that students cannot find useful ideas in themselves or in their experiences. In short, students learn that their teacher's ideas and values matter more than their own.

This is why it's crucial that students are in the center of pedagogy. English class needs to be ABOUT something; you can teach reading, writing, speaking, listening, and critical thinking with any subject matter. So is that subject matter Jane Eyre or something else? Postman and Weingartner argue that "the 'subject,' of course, [is] them [the students]: that is, it concern[s] their perceptions of the world, and their attempts to communicate with that world" (178). I love that. Just like students don't become better readers if they're not reading, they're not becoming better thinkers if they're not thinking. And they're not thinking if you're doing all the thinking for them.

There is so much more to say about this book. The copy my partner and I share is so dog-eared and marked up that it doesn't even help us find the quotes we're looking for. It's a classic that feels groundbreaking.

(Full disclosure: The chapter about "City Schools" ...does not hold up. Skip that one.)

[Masha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some things I disagree with, but in many other ways it's incisive and illuminating, real shit

[Vel Veeter]

It's always a little frustrating to read what Neil Postman says, and even more so to read what he has to say about teaching. I think he generally dislikes teachers. In some of his other books, he basically reveals that not only does he not actually know what the lived reality of teachers are in the act of teaching, but that he premises his opinions of them based on what either was once true pre-1968 or so or based on the image he created of them at some point.

For the most part, this book is sorely outdated. That's not to say that it's wrong in all it says; in fact most of it is right. But the issue does not lie in the power of in the act of individual teachers to simply change their way of teaching then voila. For one, standardized testing has broken teaching. So where this book seems to indicate a model of teaching that is much more importantly and brilliantly realized in Paolo Friere's Pedgogy of the Oppressed (a book that came out in about the same moment as this book), the enthusiasm and fixes are better too.

Parts of this book are hilariously embarrassing too. Any dialog that Postman creates as a model is awful, truly. And while, again, he's right about plenty, the issue remains that there's few teachers I know that don't already believe this, don't already try this different stuff out, would get fired if we actually did some of the structural things he's talking about, or have huge institutional walls blocking them.

My issue is not what he's saying, but who he's telling it to.

[Roger · Rating 5 out of 5]

Written at the end of the decade of the 1960s, the ideas contained in this book are as relevant today as they were then. Clearly, we have not heeded Postman's and Weingartner's advice.

And what's that advice?

In one sentence? Make education student-centered by teaching them to ask good questions, not to know a predetermined set of trivia answers. This, almost on its own, would better prepare the next generation to adapt to the social and technological changes inherent in our society.

Another point, close to my own heart as an interdisciplinary scholar, is disregarding the division of disciplines in favor of a more unified, inquiry-based curriculum.

Postman never disappoints, and he and his co-author certainly did not in this work.

[Joel Sanford · Rating 5 out of 5]

Overall, I found Teaching as a Subversive Activity to be engaging, insightful, and entertaining. The central arguments are clearly stated within the first three chapters, and the authors provide numerous examples and illustrations to reinforce them throughout the rest of the book. These arguments are certainly bold, and the writing style matches this boldness, to the point of being deliberately provocative at times – especially, I imagine, for readers with a strong commitment to traditional forms of schooling. But then, such provocation seems unavoidable considering the authors are calling for nothing short of a fundamental restructuring of the traditional system. For anyone involved in public education, whether they end up agreeing with everything or not, this book poses some important questions to consider.

While the authors are proposing systemic changes across the board, their discussion isn’t limited to the big picture or the theoretical level. Rather, there are numerous very specific examples and practical suggestions throughout the latter half of the book, including actual transcripts from lessons taught using the inquiry method. One of the most helpful sections along these lines is a chapter toward the end that offers steps that can be taken immediately by those who wish to create a more subversive learning environment in their classrooms.

In evaluating the central thesis of the book, it seems to me helpful to view it as three connected claims:
1) That there are numerous difficult problems facing modern America and the world
2) That these problems are not adequately addressed by the current public education system
3) That a change in the focus and structure of the system toward the cultivation of critical thinking and free inquiry would better address these problems

For my own part, I am convinced that all three of the above are well-founded, though the final claim begs some important questions. Claim 1 – that there are numerous problems facing us today – seems to me to be fairly self-evident to anybody following politics or world news. As for claim 2 – that society’s problems are not adequately addressed by the public education system – I think Postman and Weingartner make an excellent case that schools tend to function as bureaucracies, committed to traditional standards and methods of instruction that often have very little to do with the complex and varied realities faced by those graduating from the system, much less with the large-scale problems faced by all of us collectively. As I have outlined it here, claim 3 follows somewhat naturally from the first two, such that if you are convinced by the first two, you are likely to be convinced by the third – that what we need is a shift toward a less bureaucratic educational system, one that encourages critical thinking and free inquiry so as to better handle the rapid change and instability of present reality. As previously mentioned, however, I do think there are some important questions to be raised regarding this claim.

Most of my questions have to do with what might be termed the “student-centered” aspects of the new education" proposed by the authors. For example, if students are to be largely responsible for defining their own curriculum, what will ensure that this curriculum will remain oriented toward what is in their best interest rather than veering toward the latest fads or trivia? Or again, if students are being encouraged to freely question authority, won't this undermine somewhat the ability of educators to maintain an orderly and productive learning environment? These questions are not so much arguments against the subversive teaching strategies outlined by Postman and Weingartner as reservations about how they might be taken too far or otherwise implemented poorly. In the end, I think public education should change, and it should change in the direction in which the authors suggest. That many questions and concerns accompany such a major shift in both theory and practice should probably come as no surprise, and one can't in fairness blame the authors for failing to address them all in this book.

The Bottom Line

If you are an educator at any level or otherwise have a stake in public education, I highly recommend Teaching as a Subversive Activity. Whether or not you end up agreeing with the conclusions drawn by the authors, the questions they raise about the structure of the public education system and the place of such a system in society are of great importance, especially for those who are an integral part of that system.

If you do not currently have a stake in public education, there is still much in this book that may be of interest. Since all of us, as members of the public, must deal in one way or another with the effects of the public education system, we all share an interest in understanding those effects better. However, education is just one of many influences on society, and if your interest is in understanding contemporary society/culture more generally, there are probably better places to start. Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business is one such place, as is any work that takes a broad critical approach to the history or sociology of the modern period.

For an extended synopsis and review:
http://allthingsmatter.net/review-teaching-as-a-subversive-activity-by-neil-postman-and-charles-weingartner/

[William · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am a one man Postman reading machine.

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

Soooooo gooood. All educators should read this.

[Sophie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this for one of my classes but was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. It’s a super dense read, jam-packed with information but it’s all interesting.

[Chrisanne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Postman takes aim at education, proving that education has been terrible since the 60s and, from my experience, has possibly gotten worse. I wish I was still teaching so that I could implement his theories. Though the administrative authorities and boards would dislike it because it might make their jobs irrelevant.

[John Mihelic · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had read this for a class, and as I read Postman & Weingartner’s Teaching as a Subversive Activity, I was not reading as a believer. I kept arguing with the book as I read, and I really could not explain just why it was. I had to set back and really think about the larger cultural context this book was written in. The expansion of public education at the tertiary level from the GI bill was petering out, it had been a decade since the Sputnik moment so that there was more investment in what we would call STEM classes now. It was also the late sixties and a visible part the boomer generation was questioning everything about the order of the system, Concurrently, we were seeing the rise of postmodernism and post-structuralism where the idea of any sole source of capital T “Truth” was in question.

That is the environment that was birthing the critical educational theorists with Freire and Postman & Weingartner that we have read for this course and I’m sure there are more whom I have not engaged with as I have not taken any pedagogy courses. Understanding the context better does not necessarily mean that I am in full support of the program.

I still have several key critiques of the question-posing methodology. My main issue is that it torpedoes any sense of expertise. You as a professor have studied a topic and thought about it deeply and engaged with texts and the other experts in the field and have a baseline of knowledge in whatever subject it is that you are teaching. You might not know everything, in fact you know that you do not know everything and are aware of your limitations, but you know the process of coming to knowledge about the things that you do not know. I kept thinking about Socrates as a progenitor of this process as exemplified in the Platonic dialogs, in which we see the students in the agora coming to knowledge through an early version of the question posing form of teaching. In this, I am firmly in the camp with Aristotle in that we need some sort of empiricism as that baseline – what is it that we know and what is knowable, though that second part of epistemology does lend itself to the strategic process.

The other part that kept rubbing me the wrong way is that even though the goal of Postman & Weingartner is to allow student to become peers with their teachers in terms of taking ownership of their own education, the student is not centered in the text. We mostly see the authors focusing on the teachers and their role, but in a process like they are speaking about, it would seem to me that the students are the more important part. All the talk of teaching as a subversive activity should be overshadowed by the fact that learning is a subversive activity.

So how does one help make teaching a subversive activity? The authors share a list of eighteen suggestions in chapter eight, “New Teachers” that they state will seem “thoroughly impractical” (137). And this is where I think my frustration with the text came to a head. They start with a suggestion that we stop using textbooks for five years, then go on to having teachers teach outside of their areas of expertise, to dissolving all thoughts of a subject at all. They even have what feels like a Maoist suggestion to have teachers take a leave of absence every fourth year to do something else (139). Their list got increasingly absurd, and I did agree that it seemed impractical. I have to admit to being a bit conservative in making radical changes of this sort. Taking great risks can have great positive consequences, but I would rather make small incremental improvements than risk the huge downside risks that could come from failure.

However, the authors have a point in noting that change is needed (141), and that change is a key component of the world, but it does not feel as if it was fully embraced by educators (xiii). I think my own conservative nature regarding education is in part from the fact that the education process worked well for me. So, what I do is reflect on the classes I had and when I step into a classroom, I try to recreate the best of what I saw as a student but flip that to doing the same thing as a teacher. We see though, through years of evidence, that this does not work for all students. There are many who are disengaged for whatever reason, who resist the current paradigm, and thus “fail” in terms of how success in the system is measured.

To make this change from the lessons of Postman & Weingartner, I need a reframing of the process from how I was initially reading it. On my first reading of the text, I really read what they were doing as a denigration of all forms of expertise. As someone who has spent a lot of time in school, I value the level of expertise I have. I know things and that is important to my conception of self. What we need to do is not see the call for student-centered teaching as a denigration of expertise, but what it is a call for humility. This humility is important because to break down the hierarchy inherent in the current paradigm, it takes a mental shift from the professor. You are no longer the expert in the room, the sage on the stage, but you are a facilitator or coach as the other people in the room come to knowledge. You may be a bit further on the path of formal learning than your new peers, but they are acknowledged experts in their own lives and experiences.

Thinking through this reframing and humility allows you to work through the process with your students. You can meld the process of learning with the thing that you are learning. You cannot be learning any particular “subject,” but instead be focusing on one small node in the larger web of everything that is possible to be learned and to be creating new threads in that web. We can talk about what it is that we know and how we know it and how it has effects on our life outside of the classroom. We can learn not just things but the questions that we ask to learn those things (23). You as a teacher can use this question posing, open-ended process in a generative way, and that is reflected toward the end of the book in Chapter 12 as the authors are looking at applications of the process. It is here they are humbler themselves than what we saw in the earlier chapter, knowing that there are larger structural limitations in place. One suggestion is to “Listen to your students” (194). Here is a radical idea, emphasizing that you need to be really listening as a psychologist and not just being reactive. This humanizes your students and helps level the playing field, ensuring that you can see your students as humans with their own agency. It is in this chapter that we see the cumulation of the critiques and suggestions in the book and allows everyone to see education as an ongoing process and not some predetermined endpoint (205).

[Linda DeYounge · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must-read for every pre-service and current teacher! I cannot sing the praises of this book long and loud enough. Not only does it focus education back on the student asking questions, creating curriculum, demanding relevance in their education, it also forces teachers to ask the same tough questions of the current systems.

This book will not ask you to think within the system. It will push you to question everything you know about education and what its purpose is. It will force you to confront your own assumptions. It will make you uncomfortable, especially if you have bought into the current system, or rather, been taught to buy in. But I think these questions are essential. They are maybe even the most essential part about being a teacher. Even though it was written in 1969, its words could not be truer today. They still resonate so fiercely that I wonder why so little progress has been made in the 40 years since Postman and Weingartner championed their subversive, inquiry-based methods.

The only thing left, as a pre-service teacher myself, is to navigate the current educational system (which creates generations of students who hate learning), and push back as much as possible. Ask questions. Ask hard questions. Stand firm. Humanize the students I will be teaching. Give them back the power of learning. And hopefully not get fired in the process.

[Erik Graff · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was my favorite book for the Educational Psychology course taken at Grinnell College in Iowa during a brief flirtation with the idea of becoming a high school teacher (I had so loved so many of mine) should the Revolution be accomplished or delayed.

While I remember many of the readings for this course, I don't recall the name of its instructor. This is dismaying as he was, like the readings, memorable in many respects. While he looked straight and wasn't one of the younger instructors, the fact that he had us read this and Summerhill in addition to more traditional texts showed that he'd adapted to his students and their concerns--not, I imagine, the easiest thing for college professors during the sixties.

As it turned out, I learned eventually that teacher certification requirements varied between the fifty states and that no one seemed to be on top of the differences. At that point I wasn't sure where I'd end up after college (as it happened, it was to be NYC for over four years) and, besides, I evolved into a such a serious student that I hardly gave any thought to career preparation, even when hopes of the Revolution had diminished substantially.

[Michelle · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had hoped the book would live up to its title - I love the title! - but I found it mostly disappointing. There was so much snark directed against teachers that you'd think it had been written during present times. I can appreciate the motives behind writing the book, the objective of making school/learning more meaningful for students, and several of the ideas. Towards the end, I made connections to some reading other reading I've done (such as Socrates Cafe). I really wanted to like the book, and I wonder how it might change if it were rewritten today (40 years later).

[Jen · Rating 2 out of 5]

His book was based on a very progressive philosophy of education which called into question the importance of facts. I do not believe that he discounts facts, but he does call into question what facts about our past we should know and seems to indicate that it is impossible for a fact to be objective. I would, in fact, have to disagree.

[Catherine · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was disappointing to read that the ideas my teachers' college has been presenting as "new" teaching "reform" have been around since before I was born. Will new ideas in education always take 40 years to percolate?

[Joe Matson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Generally provocative (even 45 years later!) but impractical. I like several of the ideas and plan to try them, but overthrowing education at large is probably out of the question and I'm not convinced we'd be better off anyway.