Customer Reviews: Read 14 more reviews...
 I was not prepared to go so far back into history July 5, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Beggining with Classical Greece, Postman catlogues the journey and development of childhood. I assumed he would have begun in the Industrial Revolution, which is where msot others might likely have started. However, Postman was never like most others.
An enjoyable, though troubling book to read, my favourite bits come earlier in the book where we find that childhood needs shame in order to be defiend. That shame is of adult things, and therefore, childhood is codefied by shame because the seperation then occurs, with adults needing to protect children. Is this shame then hidden in literature?
I'd go on, but you must simply raed through it yourself. I found it fascinating... and, as I've said before, troubling. This was written in the mid eighties, but this fact does not make it irrelevent. The apst twenty-some years may only provide more confirmation of Neil Postman's thesis.
A great book.
Outdated, but excellent July 2, 2008
This book predates the popularity of the internet, and is immediately outdated as a result, but closely examines how recent cultural trends (e.g. television) have vastly changed the concept of childhood as known since the time of the printing press. Postman argues forcefully that children are becoming young adults from when they can talk a bit - just because they are able to copy what they watch endlessly on TV.
Neil Postman died in 2003 so will not be writing about what the Internet will be doing to childhood. I wonder who is going to take the baton.
An Almost Astonishing Book- October 5, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
It isn't often anymore that I read something that pops my eyes wide open. Postman is always interesting, always thought provoking, but in this book, he had me outside my own box, looking back in. So seldom am I offered new ideas, new perspectives based on intelligent rersearch and analisys. And what he has to say here is a little chilling. His history of the existance of our idea of childhood was fascinating - but his warning for the immediate future is important and powerful. I might, myself, have titled the book The Disappearance of Adulthood - Postman's points here explain so much. Coupled with David Elkind's The Hurried Child and Brizendine's The Female Brain, this book sheds huge light on why things are happening in our homes, our culture, the world. Add a little research into the new work on adolescent brain chem, and suddenly, the way we have been doing things for our children springs serious holes. An engaging, pleasant read with thorns. Highly recommended to anybody who loves kids. We need to understand what to expect from them and ourselves.
The Attacks on this Book are as Weak as the Arguments of the Book are Strong August 10, 2007
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
It is simply untrue to write, as Amazon Reviewer Aaron Swartz writes, that Neil Postman praised the Children's Letters "because they agreed with him". Rather, Postman praised them because they showed by their responses that they valued the declining institution of Childhood, and that they were clearly distressed by the possibilities raised in Postman's Book.
Basically, Postman in his book said: "Society no longer values the distinctiveness of Children relative to Adults, and as a result the institution of Childhood is eroding out of existence."
The Children responded by saying: "We are TOO Distinct from Adults!", and Postman praised them for valuing their declining distinctiveness enough to defend the concept that they are still distinct (a concept all too often not defended by Adults).
Postman values Childhood, and as a result he values (and praises) children who show by their words that they value childhood themselves.
And the thing that is that Postman explicitly said in his Preface to the new edition that he was praising the Children for showing they valued Childhood and for raising the thrilling possibility to Postman's mind that Children could themselves be a conserving force against the array of Adult assaults upon the Childhood Concept. Moreover, he most assuredly gave no indication that he was praising them for agreeing with him.
There is nothing difficult to understand in this, and as a result one may conclude it possible that the misreading of the Amazon reviewer (a misreading clearly intended to discredit Postman) was both willful and deceptive in its intent.
And as for the claim that Postman never explains why he considers the Disappearance of Childhood a bad thing, it is a claim devoid of merit as Postman gives many reasons for why he values Childhood and fears its destruction.
For instance, what part of the explosion in Juvenile Crime does not the Amazon reviewer understand? Or is it that he thinks crime a good thing and thus was perplexed as to why Postman make the unexplained assumption that it's a bad thing?
As Postman lays out in his book, Persons Under the Age of 15 once (1950) committed serious crimes at 1/215th the rate of persons 15 and older, but in deep and disturbing contrast, by 1979 they were up to committing serious crimes at very nearly 1/5th the rate of their elders.
And when I say serious crimes, I exclusively mean Rape, Murder, Robbery, and Aggravated Assault.
Also, does Swartz consider it a good thing that persons under the age of 19 now suffer from a much higher rate of Venereal Disease than they did in time periods that had more respect for the Childhood Construct?
But the primary reason why Postman views the disappearance of childhood as a bad thing is because he believed the rise of the "Adult-Like Child" would lead to the "Child-Like Adult", who would lamentably lack traditional Adult Virtues such as Literacy, Logical Thought, Impulse Control, the Ability to Delay Gratification, and Considerate Manners.
I'll leave it to the readers of this review to draw forth from their experience to see if they might not find some little scraps of evidence here and there that such a rise of a Child-Like Adult has actually occured.
The reason why the Adult-Child would lead to the Child-Adult is a bit too complicated for me to get into here, but suffice it say that Postman explains the whys and wherefores in excellent and logical detail in his book.
Postman's Footnote to The Gutenberg Galaxy June 20, 2007
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This is one of Neil Postman's best books. It is also one of his shortest, and it makes a great introduction to the world of his thinking. Postman had a knack for downloading the difficult ideas of media philosophers like Marshall McLuhan and stating them plainly, directly and with very little artifice. So, for those who have attempted to approach McLuhan, but find his hyperbolic way of speaking off-putting, Postman makes a good introduction. In fact, Postman's books are probably the best introduction for the beginner to the entire field of Media Studies, which began in 1950 with the publication of Harold Innis's Empire and Communications.
Postman gets right to the point, and his point is that childhood--though a biological phenomenon--is largely a cultural construct. It is not a given. If a society regards its children as miniature adults, as they were so regarded in the Middle Ages,then it will not treat them like children, but like adults. When they are treated like adults, they act with all the knowing concupiscence and violent irascibility of adults. When they are treated as a separate category from the concept of "adult," their behavior patterns evidence a very different psychology. Thus, "childhood" in this sense is indeed a culutral construct, and it is a construct, according to Postman, that is now in full disinetegration.
In many ways, Postman's book can be regarded as a footnote to McLuhan's Gutenberg Galaxy, for in that book, McLuhan discussed how the advent of the printing press brought with it a whole series of new social and cultural structures and ideas that did not exist prior to its invention, such as the nation state, the idea of intellectual property, the idea of individuality itself, linear, organized thinking, etc. It made possible the invention of new literary genres such as the essay and the novel, and changed the social conditions that had once made it possible for the epic to flourish. Thus, the printing press put the epic out of business and favored the rise of the novel. Postman's book adds to this list of new Renaissance cultural modalities made possible by typography, the idea of the child as a distinct entity from an adult based on the fact of the adult's literacy and the child's lack thereof. With print, the adult came into possession of a new hoard of secret knowledge that only those who could learn how to read could have access to. Thus, knowledge regarding such matters as shame and sexuality, sin, the structure of the cosmos, morality, etc. became things which a child did not properly know about until he was of an age to be able to read. Thus, literacy and its gradually increasing mastery became identical with the idea of a responsible adult.
Postman says that this idea is now disappearing as a result of the flourishing of electronic culture, and in particular, the television. Television as a mass medium lays all the secrets of adult life bare and open and accessible for any child who wants to hear about them or see them demonstrated. Ageing, illness, death; transvestism, homosexuality, violence; all are daily subjects of commercials and talk shows, and all are readily available to the child.
Conversely, as the distinction between the child and the adult erodes, the adult, Postman says, is becoming "childified." The adults on sitcoms or soap operas or other television shows can scarcely be distinguished from children not only in the lack of difference in the clothes which they wear, but in their lack of references to cultivation, learning, books, classical music, etc. Postman says that only the character of Felix Unger on The Odd Couple comes anywhere close to representing this older Renaissance idea of the adult as a cultivated being qualitatively distinguishable from the child through the making of literary references in his convesation. "Adults" on television are no more literate than children are nowadays, and so can scarcely be distinguished from them.
Thus, according to Neil Postman, the concept of children as different beings from adults is now in full disintegration due largely to electronic media such as television. And let's face it: who can say that he is really wrong here?
--John David Ebert, author, Celluloid Heroes & Mechanical Dragons: Film as the Mythology of Electronic Society
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