Thread by @StanCarey

Much of Neil Postman's "The Disappearance of Childhood" is about the effects of TV, but I like the early chapters on the growth of literacy and the emergence of childhood as a social idea and how it manifested in art, language, institutions, etc.

(Children did not constitute a separate category the way they do now; they were just seen as small and in some ways incapable people.)

"In the Middle Ages there were no children because there existed no means for adults to know exclusive information." —Neil Postman

"Childhood began as a middle-class idea, in part because the middle class could afford it." —Neil Postman, The Disappearance of Childhood

Neil Postman on children's exposure to news: "To what extent does the depiction of the world as it is undermine a child's belief in adult rationality, in the possibility of an ordered world, in a hopeful future?"

"Colloquies" (1518) offered guidance on things like romance and infidelity. Neil Postman: "One might say that Erasmus was the Judy Blume of his day." @judyblume

"A picture may, indeed, be worth a thousand words, but it is in no sense the equivalent of a thousand words, or a hundred, or two." —Neil Postman, The Disappearance of Childhood

"We can never underestimate the psychological impact of language's massive migration from the ear to the eye, from speech to typography." —Neil Postman

Agreed, apart from the logical error: stancarey.wordpress.com/2018/11/19/mis…

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