Neil Postman & Charles Weingartner, 1969
In order to be a great writer a person must have a built-in, shockproof crap detector.β Ernest Hemingway
The book's central metaphor: intellectual progress is a history of "crap detecting" β identifying misconceptions, propaganda, and faulty assumptions. The most subversive skill: viewing your own culture as an anthropologist would.
None of us is free of prejudice, but it is the sign of a competent 'crap detector' that he is not completely captivated by the arbitrary abstractions of the community in which he happened to grow up.β Postman & Weingartner
The book catalogs what students actually do in traditional classrooms vs. inquiry classrooms. Since "we learn what we do" (Dewey), the medium IS the message. Click any behavior to see why it matters.
There can be no significant innovation in education that does not have at its center the attitudes of teachers, and it is an illusion to think otherwise.β Postman & Weingartner
Suppose all syllabi, curricula, textbooks, and standardized tests disappeared. What if the entire curriculum consisted of questions β questions worth seeking answers to from the students' point of view? "Children enter school as question marks and leave as periods."
Once you have learned how to ask questions β relevant and appropriate and substantial questions β you have learned how to learn and no one can keep you from learning whatever you want or need to know.β Postman & Weingartner
McLuhan's insight applied to education: the invention of a dichotomy between "content" and "method" is both naΓ―ve and dangerous. The critical content of any learning experience is the method through which learning occurs. Not what you say to people but what you have them DO.
Experience the same topic β "What is democracy?" β delivered two ways:
Democracy is a form of government in which power is vested in the people. The word derives from the Greek dΔmokratΓa, meaning "rule of the people." Key features include: (1) free and fair elections, (2) rule of law, (3) protection of individual rights, (4) separation of powers.
Please memorize these four features. They will be on the test Friday. The correct answer to "What is democracy?" is: "A form of government in which power is vested in the people through free elections, rule of law, individual rights, and separation of powers."
Chapter 7, pages 142-168. Minimum 500-word essay due Monday.
"The medium is the message" implies that the critical content of any learning experience is the method or process through which the learning occurs.β Postman & Weingartner, extending McLuhan
Click to reveal what students actually learn from classroom structureβ¦
These messages are learned not from what teachers say, but from what students are made to DO. The ostensible "content" is forgotten by the next quiz. The structural lessons last a lifetime.
Based on Sapir-Whorf, Korzybski, and Ames: language doesn't just express thought β it shapes perception. "Whatever we say something is, it is not." But also: "whatever we say something is, it IS β because we have said it." Click each pair to see the transformation.
Korzybski noted that "is" statements project our perceptions onto reality as if they were facts. Rewriting without "to be" forces us to reveal the perceiver.
How language selects what we "see" from the infinite complexity of reality.
We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language.β¦ We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significance as we do largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way.β Benjamin Lee Whorf
"Bizarre" proposals designed to make it impossible for teachers to function with old assumptions. Each one disrupts the perception that school-as-it-is is inevitable. Click to expand.
The trouble ain't that people are ignorant; it's that they 'know' so much that ain't so.β Josh Billings, quoted by P&W
A flamethrower disguised as an education book.
The book moves in three clean stages: diagnosis (schools are broken β they teach passivity, obedience, and crap-absorption in a world that demands active, critical, crap-detecting minds), theory (the inquiry method, meaning-making, languaging β how people actually learn when you stop interfering), and practice (what to actually do Monday morning, from the 16 proposals to the 11 survival strategies).
The diagnosis is ferocious and still accurate. The theory is deeply grounded β Korzybski, Sapir-Whorf, Ames' perception studies, Dewey's transactional psychology. The practice sections are uneven but contain genuine brilliance (the "Quo Vadimus High School" method, Miceli's reality curriculum, the question-based curriculum).
It's from 1969. Some examples are dated β Vietnam, the specific racial politics, the gendered language. But the core argument is MORE relevant now, not less. In a world of algorithmic feeds, AI-generated content, and institutional collapse, "crap detecting" has gone from important to existential.
Papert built on this foundation. Where P&W made the political/cultural argument for inquiry learning, Papert provided the technological instrument (Logo, the computer as "object to think with"). Mindstorms gestures at the subversive argument but never makes it this explicitly. P&W are the political theory; Papert is the engineering.
The Socratic method in action β pure inquiry pedagogy applied to computer science. No declarative sentences. Only questions. Exactly what P&W prescribed. The Little Schemer IS a crap-detector training manual for programmers.
Design thinking = inquiry thinking. Cooper's insistence on understanding users before building = P&W's insistence on understanding learners before teaching. The "Dr. Gillupsie" satire could describe most software built without user research.
Heuristics vs. algorithms. PΓ³lya's method IS the inquiry method applied to mathematics: ask questions, look for patterns, work backward, check your assumptions. P&W want every subject taught the way PΓ³lya teaches math.
Systems thinking, self-reference, the limits of formal systems. GEB demonstrates what P&W's "open systems" look like intellectually β where every answer generates new questions, and the boundary between observer and observed dissolves.
The purpose of education is to help all students develop built-in, shockproof crap detectors as basic equipment in their survival kits.β Postman & Weingartner, final chapter
In 1969, this was radical. In 2025, when every feed is an algorithm, every headline is optimized for outrage, and AI can generate infinite plausible-sounding nonsense β it's a survival manual. The fact that schools STILL haven't listened is the strongest argument in the book's favor.
Read it alongside Mindstorms. One tells you why the revolution is necessary. The other shows you how to build the weapons.