The Making Of Adaptable, Curious, Open, Questioning

Certainty Abolishes Hope, And Robs Us Of Renewal.

Childhood Is Analogous To Language Learning. It Has A Biological Basis But Cannot Be Realized Unless A Social Environment Triggers And Nurtures It, That Is, Has Need Of It. If A Culture Is Dominated By A Medium That Requires The Segregation Of The Young In Order That They Learn Unnatural, Specialized, And Complex Skills And Attitudes, Then Childhood, In One Form Or Another, Will Emerge, Articulate And Indispensable.

Embedded In Every Technology There Is A Powerful Idea, Sometimes Two Or Three Powerful Ideas. Like Language Itself, A Technology Predisposes Us To Favor And Value Certain Perspectives And Accomplishments And To Subordinate Others. Every Technology Has A Philosophy, Which Is Given Expression In How The Technology Makes People Use Their Minds, In How It Codifies The World, In Which Of Our Senses It Amplifies, In Which Of Our Emotional And Intellectual Tendencies It Disregards.

If We May Say That The Age Of Andrew Jackson Took Political Life Out Of The Hands Of Aristocrats And Turned It Over To The Masses, Then We May Say, With Equal Justification, That The Age Of Television Has Taken Politics Away From The Adult Mind Altogether.

Television Screens Saturated With Commercials Promote The Utopian And Childish Idea That All Problems Have Fast, Simple, And Technological Solutions. You Must Banish From Your Mind The Naive But Commonplace Notion That Commercials Are About Products. They Are About Products In The Same Sense That The Story Of Jonah Is About The Anatomy Of Whales.