尼尔·波兹曼

尼尔·波兹曼（英语：Neil Postman，1931年3月8日—2003年10月5日），是美国作家、批评家、教育家。他在纽约大学任教超过四十年时间，研究方向是文化传播和媒体理论，并开创了名为“媒体生态学”的新领域。他最为人熟知的作品是1982出版的《童年的消逝》、1985年的《娱乐至死》和1992年的《技术垄断》。2003年，他因肺癌去世。

Neil Postman (March 8, 1931 – October 5, 2003) was an American author, educator, media theorist, and cultural critic who eschewed digital technology, including personal computers and mobile devices, and was critical of the use of personal computers in schools. He is best known for 20 books about technology and education, including Teaching as a Subversive Activity (1970), The Disappearance of Childhood (1982), Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), Conscientious Objections (1988), Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (1992) and The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School (1995).

Early life and education

Postman was born to a Jewish family in New York City, where he spent most of his life. In 1953, he graduated from the State University of New York at Fredonia and enlisted in the military but was released less than five months later. At Teachers College, Columbia University, he was awarded a master's degree in 1955 and an Ed.D. (Doctor of Education) in 1958.

Career

Postman took a position with San Francisco State University's English Department in 1958. In 1959, he began teaching at New York University (NYU).

In 1971, at NYU's Steinhardt School of Education, Postman founded a graduate program in media ecology. He became the School of Education's only University Professor in 1993, and chaired the Department of Culture and Communication until 2002.

Postman received an honorary doctorate from Brigham Young University in 2000.

Personal life

On October 5, 2003, Postman died from lung cancer at a hospital in Flushing, Queens. He was 72. He had been married to Shelley Ross Postman for 48 years. They had three children and were longtime residents of Flushing.

Works

Postman wrote 20 books and more than 200 articles in academic and popular publications, including The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's Magazine, Time, Saturday Review, Harvard Educational Review, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Stern, and Le Monde. He was the editor of the quarterly journal ETC: A Review of General Semantics from 1976 to 1986. In 1976, Postman taught a course at NYU on CBS-TV's Sunrise Semester called "Communication: the Invisible Environment". He was also a contributing editor at The Nation. Several of his articles were reprinted after his death in ETC: A Review of General Semantics as part of a 75th anniversary edition in October 2013.

On education

In 1969 and 1970, Postman collaborated with the New Rochelle educator Alan Shapiro on developing a model school based on the principles expressed in Teaching as a Subversive Activity. In that book, Postman and co-author Charles Weingartner suggest that many schools have curricula that are trivial and irrelevant to students' lives. The result of their critique was the "Program for Inquiry, Involvement, and Independent Study" at New Rochelle High School. This "open school" experiment lasted 15 years, and many programs following these principles were developed at U.S. high schools, such as Walter Koral's language class at the Village School in Great Neck, New York.

In his 1973 address "The Ecology of Learning" at the Conference on English Education, Postman proposed seven changes for schools that build on the critique expressed in Teaching as a Subversive Activity. First, he proposed that schools be "convivial communities" for learning rather than places that try to control students through judgment and punishment. Second, he suggested that schools should either discard or dramatically change grading practices that lead to competition in school rather than an attitude of learning. He also proposed getting rid of homogeneous groupings of students that reinforce social and economic inequalities, standardized tests that promote competition and permanent records used to punish and control students. Proactively, he suggested that industries and professional schools, rather than K-12 schools, develop criteria for selecting students and that schools should focus on civic education that teaches students their rights as citizens.