Neil Postman Analysis

The topics of education and technology have always been a center of debate all over the world. These might seem like two separate topics, but the more technology evolves and advances, the more of an impact it has on education, or to be precise the schooling system. Also, the more effect technology has on our education system and on our everyday lives, the more there’ll be critics that will bash the system we have today and try to bring out every negative impact it has on us. I am very opposed to those types of people such as Ken Robinson and his talk “Changing Education Paradigms,” Neil Postman and his “Of Luddites, Learning, and Life,” and Annie Lowrey’s “The Gap between schooling and education.” I think technology has had mostly positive …show more content…
According to these statements by Postman, had he wrote about technology today he would for sure be calling himself a Luddite instead of “I am not at all a Luddite” (Postman 26). Where almost every person today has a smartphone or a similar device that consumes a huge fraction of each person’s day. I feel that’s the only and main point where Postman nailed the negative effect of technology even before it was an actual problem. I’ve done my fair share of research and found that the only unarguable negative point of technology is its ability of easily distracting anyone and as Postman said it, “divert the intelligence and energy of talented people” (Postman 27). But even though this might seem like a huge problem, it all depends on the user. As Prince Ea says “Digital technology is the signature of humanity; it is our creation… We must maintain our place as consumers and not be consumed by it” (Ea …show more content…
It has been passed down from generation to generation for thousands of years. The way education is being delivered today is widely disputed and there are constant attempts at reforming it.. As Ken Robinson says in his talk “Changing Education Paradigms,” “Every country on earth, at the moment, is reforming public education” (Robinson 0:15). Robinson talks about where our education system originated from and how it should be changed. Yet he doesn’t give a single realistic solution to how the system should be reorganized. A lot of the educational reformists point out the negatives of our system, and don’t give a valid realistic solution. With over two billion students in the world today, education cannot be reformed to the needs of every student. In “The Gap between Schooling and Education,” Lowrey interviews a Harvard professor and when asked about the changes to be done to schools, he answered with “a reasonable performance-learning orientation” (Lowrey 39). This means less standardized testing and focusing on the students and how they perform based on what they want to learn. Again, this is not possible on the level of schooling we have throughout the world today. There must be a way, such as standardized testing, to be able to diminish between the intelligent and hard working student from the rest of students. Robinson Criticizes how “We still educate