Technology and Education

In the first chapter of Technopoly by Neil Postman entitled "The Judgment of Thamus", Postman asks whether or not technology has a positive or negative impact on culture, education, and life using the story of Thamus from Plato's Phaedrus. Postman discusses how technology drastically changes and alters a culture when it has been let in by the people of that culture. New technology and media change the meaning of foundational words and ideas in culture such as freedom, truth, and wisdom. Technology also changes the "winners" and the "losers" in the population. Those who fully embrace new technology are the winners in this situation. Those who don't embrace it, perhaps because they don't want to or because it might eliminate their job, are the losers. Technology also changes the way ideas are presented because the medium of delivery of an idea impacts how the idea is accepted, connecting well to technology's impact on education. Children these days are so plugged into the computer and the television that traditional education bores them easily and then they stop learning. According to Postman, as new technology is introduced, people personally remember less and less and rely on recorded data around them to know things. In conclusion, technology has a drastic impact on culture and the people in it as well as the main ideals upon which a society is built.

"Eventually, the losers succumb, in part because they believe, as Thamus prophesied, that the specialized knowledge of the masters of a new technology is a form of wisdom. The masters come to believe this as well, as Thamus also prophesied" (Postman 11).
The reason all people begrudgingly but eventually succumb to new technology and begin to use it is because they believe that the people who use this technology have new knowledge and more wisdom then they currently do. It's interesting how man seems to return to the quest for wisdom.

"This is the sort of change Thamus had in mind when he warned that writers will come to rely on external signs instead of their own internal resources, and that they will receive quantities of information without proper instruction" (Postman 12).
It's not just writers that come to rely on external resources rather than their own. All modern people in this modern age rely upon Google for a vast amount of their "knowledge" and this is not necessarily a good thing. It's not good because they're receiving this knowledge without valuable expert instruction. Some parts of society are almost devaluing expert instruction.

"The paradox, the surprise, and the wonder are that the clock was invented by men who wanted to devote themselves more rigorously to God; it ended as the technology of the greatest use to men who wished to devote themselves to the accumulation of money" (Postman 16).
The clock is thoughtlessly relied upon and used in today's culture for literally everything. It wasn't always like that though. It's interesting to see how quickly, in the grand scheme of the universe anyway,  the clock was corrupted from its original purpose.

"Technology is neither additive nor subtractive" (Postman 18).
Postman goes on to say that technology "generates total change", but how is total change neither additive nor subtractive? Surely the change must occur in one direction or the other.

"Orality stresses group learning, cooperation, and a sense of social responsibility which is the context within which Thamus believed proper instruction and real knowledge must be communicated" (Postman 17).
Doesn't a text help communicate knowledge to more people? Does the knowledge stop becoming "real" when it's printed?

Postman, Neil. Technopoly. New York: Vintage Books, 1993. Print.