There are two levels of knowing a subject. There is the student who knows what the definition of a noun or a gene or a molecule is; then there is the… - Neil Postman

" "

There are two levels of knowing a subject. There is the student who knows what the definition of a noun or a gene or a molecule is; then there is the student... who also knows how the definition was arrived at. There is the student who can answer a question; then there is the student who also knows what are the biases of the question. There is the student who can give you the facts; then there is the student who also knows what is meant by a fact. I am maintaining that, in all cases, it is the latter who has a "basic" education ; the former, a frivolous one.

English
Collect this quote

About Neil Postman

Neil Postman (8 March 1931 - 5 October 2003) was an American author, educator, media theorist and cultural critic, who eschewed technology, including personal computers in school and cruise control in cars, and is best known for twenty books regarding technology and education and his association with New York University for more than forty years.

Biography information from Wikiquote

Limited Time Offer

Premium members can get their quote collection automatically imported into their Quotewise collections.

Related quotes. More quotes will automatically load as you scroll down, or you can use the load more buttons.

Additional quotes by Neil Postman

The question, "How well does one read?" is a bad question... essentially unanswerable. A more proper question is "How well does one read poetry, or history, or science, or religion?" No one I have ever known is so brilliant as to have learned the languages of all fields of knowledge equally well. Most of us do not learn some of them at all.

Indeed, I hope to persuade you that the decline of a print-based epistemology and the accompanying rise of a television-based epistemology has had grave consequences for public life, that we are getting sillier by the minute.

Go Premium

Support Quotewise while enjoying an ad-free experience and premium features.

View Plans
What causes us the most misery and pain... has nothing to do with the sort of information made accessible by computers. The computer and its information cannot answer any of the fundamental questions we need to address to make our lives more meaningful and humane. The computer cannot provide an organizing moral framework. It cannot tell us what questions are worth asking. It cannot provide a means of understanding why we are here or why we fight each other or why decency eludes us so often, especially when we need it the most. The computer is... a magnificent toy that distracts us from facing what we most need to confront — spiritual emptiness, knowledge of ourselves, usable conceptions of the past and future.

Loading...