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 A Dissenting Opinion March 6, 2008
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
Most reviewers seem to like Teaching as a Subversive Activity. I am not among the book's fans.
The book's authors, Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner, score a number of points. They manage to "nail" educators for relying too much on the lecture method in which students copy, then memorize, the teacher's opinions. This is a very valid criticism; teachers do little to teach students how to think; we settle for teaching them what to think. The authors make another good point about the tyranny of testing, which has become far worse since the early 1970s.
Beyond these points, I found the book to be lacking. I think that the authors meander too far from their original point - that teaching needs to be reformed. They discuss an incredible array of topics in just over 200 pages, but the discussions are superficial due to the book's excessive breadth. And their digressions are not engaging and are often only tangentially related to teaching. For instance, the long list of quotations at the end of Chapter 7 is mind numbing.
The authors' arguments remind me of the old saw that it is easier to tear down a system than it is to build a new one. Many of their suggestions are quixotic, or just laughable. Consider what the authors suggest administrators do if students write graffiti about their teachers in school bathrooms; in this case, Postman and Weingartner state that the administrators should chisel the students' words on the front of their schools. Are they joking? Did the authors ever actually attend high school?
Some of the other ideas have the sound of bad 60s hangovers. For instance, Yale adopted the authors' idea about eliminating grades in the early 1970s - with disastrous results. The authors hold that there is no such thing as a shared reality - and that, therefore, the students should define the entire curriculum. (If there is no shared reality whatsoever, how did everyone interested in Teaching as a Subversive Activity end up on this page?). Student-directed learning might be interesting in some contexts, but it would be disastrous in others. For instance, I don't want to be a patient of the physician whose class decided that they weren't interested in learning about human anatomy. I don't want to drive across a bridge designed by the person whose civil engineering class decided that they didn't want to learn about bridges. Sometimes schools do have valuable content to teach students - whether they want to learn it or not.
Finally, since Postman and Weingartner published this book, there has been a wealth of research into the inquiry-based and active-learning methods the authors favored; the results have been mixed. We still have much to learn about exactly which methods produce superior student learning. These authors have some intriguing ideas, but they did not find the "Holy Grail" that will "cure" education of all its ills.
 Required Reading February 3, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
Although it was published nearly forty years ago (1969), this book should be *mandatory* (I really want a stronger word) for everyone who is even considering a career in teaching, educational administration, homeschooling, or choosing a school (K-college) for their children. The basic idea: learning must be internally motivated, that true education entails learning what questions to ask, and how to think about how to discover/develop answers. After a devastating critique of the educational establishment, the authors suggest what should be done and how: teachers need to learn to get out of the way of their students' learning, to stop identifying teaching with "getting through" or "covering" their agendas, to raise questions that will help their students raise and begin to answer good, worthwhile questions. Anyone who dismisses the authors' concerns should question his or her own commitment to genuine education and learning. Sorry, words are too weak.
Teaching As a Subversive Activity July 13, 2007
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
A classic for anyone in education.
As relevant today as it was when published in 1969.
The beginning of Education Reform May 25, 2007
3 out of 6 found this review helpful
40 years since Postman declared the need for reformed education and our school systems still look the same today as it did then. A new age is still growing for the next age of education.
This is the most excellent book on the nature of teaching and educating I have yet read. Postman articulates the utmost need for asking questions, for children and adults to think critically, to formulate conclusions, discover what they feel is relevant and important to modern life, and that this kind of process should be the basis for our education system.
Kids are taught to submit to authorities in school. They learn to answer the teacher's "Guess what I'm thinking?" The student answers his or her hand to offer the "correct" answer. Postman offers ways to change this about K-12 and university systems.
Postman explains the way in which the coming age can address relevant problems of today. To encourage students to think and search for new problems we aren't solving, while also being aware of those who've come before us - where things come from, why were things invented, for what need are certain things used?
This book is essential for anyone who is concerned about education, and the allowance for free thought, expression, and to build a society of intelligent citizens. It goes in depth and covers clearly the ways in which we can begin to reform education.
Interesting but not promising April 21, 2006
60 out of 79 found this review helpful
This book has some pleasant surprises, but leaves the reader with an overall sense of frustration.
The book's appeal today is not what it would have been in 1969. At publication, the book was probably radical for its experimental approach to education that suggests that stimulating creativity and questioning is more important than the transference of raw data to students. Today it is fascinating because it makes you wonder, Did people really think like this? Were the 1950's as mindless and autocratic as this book seems to suggest? Has no one since Socrates suggested this kind of provocative education?
The book becomes frustrating if you attempt to seriously apply their conclusions today. In suggesting that education cater primarily to the felt needs of students instead of communicated what is decidedly essential curriculum, the authors have committed intellectual suicide. If you let high school students shape their studies around their interests, there would be classes in fashion and video games and blogging. The classes would be less likely to have reading lists, and instead only movies to watch.
Sadly, the book begins by quoting Hemingway's suggestion that we need a "[...] detector" (p. 5). The next four chapters are then pretty much some of that. It suggests that education should gravitate in the direction of questioning, relevance, and addressing only what the students feel is worth knowing. This is like telling children that they should only take the medicine that tastes good.
Then, surprisingly, the book improves (I'm wondering if one of the authors picked up here). It enters into a layman's take on perspectivalism (C. 6). In the chapter on "Languaging," it attempts to present an even more sophisticated explanation of the ways that meaning is assigned to, and varies in, words. It does not cite the philosophical foundations on which it rests, but the authors are actually playing with the revolution in analytic, linguistic philosophy of the 20th century.
Then the book returns to its first style. It suggests that the learning environment should affirm, rather than correct, the presuppositions of the learner (p. 137). It proposes a five year moratorium on textbooks, the end of subjects, the end of tests, and the end of requirements.
There is an ironic chapter (10) in which they encourage the use of media in teaching, decades before the internet revolution. The suggest curricula that incorporate games to stimulate learning and letter-writing back and forth between students and teachers.
The upside of the book is that it challenges teachers to reevaluate their purpose and methods. The downside is the outright arrogance and simultaneous naivete that suggests that everyone everywhere needs to practice their methods while suggesting simultaneously that objective views should not be dictated universally.
My detector is registering.
The book is good as an anachronistic look at what SOME teachers were thinking over three decades ago.
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