Post-Everything: My Blog Post about Post-Positivism, Post-Process, Post-structuralism, Post-postmodernism, and Neil Postman

Hello all,

Sorry that this post is so late...I thought that I'd posted it Friday morning before catching a flight to CT for a funeral, but apparently I just previewed it and didn't hit "publish." I realized this when I went to check feedback after teaching tonight. Luckily it was saved (or most of it was)....

So if you've read my reading selection for this week you're probably wondering if I accidentally set my Academic Search Complete search range from the dawn of time until 1969. I did not. (Though the fact that I am telling Academic Search Complete jokes signals that this quarter needs to wind down as quickly as possible). The truth is that until the last minute I was waffling between two selections: a chapter from one of Postman's last books The End of Education (1995) or a chapter from Conscientious Objections: Stirring Up Trouble About Language, Technology, and Education (1988). But for some reason this first chapter from Teaching as a Subversive Activity kept coming to mind as I was reading both the Lynch and Galagher articles. I have always been somewhat taken with the immediacy of the writing and the stakes that Postman and Weingartner set out for their project. Also, in terms of when this piece was written (at the height of post-positivist and post-structuralist thought), I thought it would be interesting to talk about this piece in terms of how it might be engaging with the theory of the time and how much has changed (theoretically, politically, epistemically, etc.) since Postman and Weingartner penned this in 1969.

In terms of an introduction or overview of Postman:

Postman is generally considered a media theorist, cultural critic, and humanist who taught for years at the Steinhardt School of Education at NYU (where he founded their graduate program in media ecology in 1971). He is probably best known for his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death in which he critiques the place of television (and entertainment technology generally) in our culture. Postman prefaces the book by introducing the two alternate visions of the future of Western culture prophesied by George Orwell (in 1984) and Aldous Huxley (Brave New World), and proposes that though Orwell's vision of an external oppression did not come to pass, Huxley's vision came pretty close.

Here is a bad video (not made by Postman...I'm sure he'd be mortified) of someone reading the preface of Amusing Ourselves to Death (excuse the intense music):

It is perhaps because of this book (and his preoccupation with the place of technology in culture) that Postman often gets labeled as a Luddite--an unfair assessment in my opinion, as I think Postman (even as early as 1969) is not "anti-technology" (which he would think to be an absurd position), but rather critical of technology's unquestioned place in our culture (and thus in our institutions of education). What Postman does in regard to technology is come up with a set of questions that emphasize the history, social effects, and psychological biases so that we may understand technology outside of the institutionalized paradigm that says technological progress equals human progress.

For more on some his views on this, here is an interesting interview where he touches on this subject and education in general (please excuse the interviewer's hair):

Teaching as a Subversive Activity was written in 1969 in collaboration with Charles Weingartner (who I was not able to find significant biographical info for). The book was essentially a distillation of theories surrounding what Postman and Weingartner called Inquiry Education--a student-centered method of teaching that focuses on encouraging students to ask questions which are meaningful to them. This process avoids position knowledge as static and encourages students to center their focus on the process of dynamic inquiry.

Postman, along with Alan Shapiro (an educator in New Rochelle, NY) collaborated to actually implement some of the ideas in Teaching as a Subversive Activity at New Rochelle High School in a the "Program for Inquiry, Involvement, and Independent Study." This program lasted for 15 years, the vestiges of which can still be traced in a number of high schools across the country.

Possible Questions:

In terms of just Postman:

To what extent are some of his ideas/views dated? To what extent do we still see iterations of them in contemporary scholarship/theory (e.g. Lynch)?

How would you position Postman's position in terms of critical/rhetorical theory?

Do more current innovations in technology complicate/refute Postman's claims for subversion (particularly with regard to media and top-down communication)?

One of the things that I hoped we could discuss with regards to how Postman, Lynch, and Gallagher might intersect, is how each of these authors seem to want to complicate and reposition notions of authority in the classroom.

Lynch contends, in his discussion of the possible place of metis in the composition classroom, that "This aspect of metis, in which the teacher conceives of his position as weaker than his students, is crucial to thermostatic thinking about the classroom" (738). Can we make a correlation between Lynch's conception of metis and Postman's position that teachers must not only be "subversive" in their teaching, but also advocate for subversion in their students? Does Postman's position on education lend itself to a kind of post-process approach to teaching writing in particular?

How might Gallagher's advocacy for an "engaged professionalism," or a reevaluation of our disciplines with regard to how they are steeped in managerial professionalism, be tied to Postman's concept of the "burgeoning bureaucracy?" Can "engaged professionalism" overcome the pitfalls of the managerial professionalism in operation on the administrative level? Does Postman's insistence that schools must serve as "anti-bureaucracy bureaucracies" speak to this idea? Can there really ever be such a thing as an "anti-bureaucracy bureaucracy?"  

These are just some questions to get us started, but I will have some more goodies in class.

Look forward to hearing your thoughts.

J


Gallagher, Chris. "We Compositionists: Toward an Engaged Professionalism." JAC 25.1 (2005): 75-99. Print.

Lynch, Paul. "Composition as a Thermostatic Activity." CCC 60.4 (June 2009): 728-45. Print.

Postman, Neil and Charles Weingartner. Teaching as a Subversive Activity. New York: Delta Books. 1969. Print.