Tag: Forgetting

  • Higher Education Inquirer : Forgetting Neil Postman

    Higher Education Inquirer : Forgetting Neil Postman

    [For my good friend, a higher education executive who has seen it all, and suggested that all of us pause, take a look back, and think.]

    Neil Postman first gained national attention in 1969 with Teaching as a Subversive Activity, co-authored with Charles Weingartner. In a period marked by war, civil unrest, and cultural transformation, Postman offered a bold challenge to the status quo of American education. Schools, he argued, were failing not because they lacked resources or rigor, but because they had lost sight of their deeper purpose. Instead of fostering critical thinking and civic engagement, they were manufacturing conformity through standardized tests, textbooks, and passive learning. Postman envisioned classrooms without fixed curricula, where teachers would become co-learners and facilitators, helping students develop the tools of inquiry and what he memorably called “crap detection.” It was a radical vision: education as an act of democratic resistance.

    By the early 1980s, Postman had turned his attention to how media was shaping society—and deforming education. In The Disappearance of Childhood (1982), he claimed that television was dissolving the cultural boundaries between children and adults. Television, unlike print, made no distinction in content delivery; it treated all viewers as equal consumers of images and sensation. The consequences, he warned, were profound: children were becoming prematurely cynical while adults increasingly behaved like children. The medium, he believed, flattened developmental distinctions and eroded the cultural function of school as a place for guided maturation and ethical formation.

    Then came Amusing Ourselves to Death in 1985, Postman’s most widely read and enduring work. Written during the ascendancy of television and Reagan-era consumer culture, the book argued that television had transformed public discourse into entertainment. It was not merely the content of television that disturbed him, but its form—its bias toward speed, simplification, and emotional stimulation. In such a media environment, serious discussion of politics, education, science, or religion could not survive. News became performance, candidates became celebrities, and education was increasingly judged by its entertainment value. Postman lamented the way Sesame Street, often hailed as educational television, conditioned children to love television itself—not learning, not schools, not the slow, difficult process of study.

    As the decade progressed, Postman began articulating a broader cultural critique that culminated in Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (1992). In this work, he defined technopoly as a society that not only uses technology but is dominated by it—a culture that believes technology is the solution to all problems, and that all values should be reshaped in its image. Postman acknowledged that tools and machines had always altered human life, but in a technopoly, technology becomes self-justifying. It no longer asks what human purpose it serves. Postman noted that schools were being wired with computers, not because it improved learning—there was no solid evidence of that—but because it seemed modern, inevitable, and profitable. His question—“What is the problem to which this is the solution?”—was a challenge not just to education reformers, but to an entire ideology of progress.

    In The End of Education (1995), Postman returned to the question that haunted all his work: what is school for? He argued that American education had lost its narrative. Without compelling guiding stories—what he called “gods”—schools could not inspire loyalty, discipline, or moral development. In place of narratives about democracy, stewardship, public participation, and truth-seeking, schools now told the story of market utility. They trained students for jobs, not for life. They emphasized performance metrics over philosophical inquiry, and they treated students as customers in a credential economy. Education, he warned, was becoming just another mass medium, modeled increasingly after television and later the internet, with predictable results: shallowness, fragmentation, and disengagement.

    By the time Postman died in 2003, the world he had warned about was rapidly taking shape. Facebook had not yet launched. Smartphones had not yet arrived. Generative AI was decades from the mainstream. But already, education was being reshaped by branding, performance metrics, digital delivery, and venture capital. The university was becoming a platform. The classroom was being converted into content. Students were treated not as citizens in formation, but as users to be optimized. The language of education—once rooted in moral philosophy and civic purpose—had begun to sound more like business strategy. Postman would have heard the rise of terms like “learning outcomes,” “human capital development,” and “scalable solutions” as evidence of a culture that had surrendered judgment to systems, wisdom to code, and meaning to metrics.

    Postman’s refusal to embrace digital culture made him easy to ignore in the years that followed. He never gave a TED Talk. He didn’t blog. He didn’t build a brand. He never even used a typewriter. He wrote every word by hand. In a world of media influencers, LinkedIn thought leaders, and edtech evangelists, Postman’s ideas didn’t fit. But the deeper reason we forgot him is more unsettling. 

    Remembering Postman would require a painful reckoning with how far higher education has drifted from its public mission and democratic roots. It would mean admitting that education has been refashioned not as a sacred civic institution but as a delivery mechanism for marketable credentials. It would mean asking questions we’ve tried hard to bury.

    What is higher education for? What kind of people does it produce? Who decides its purpose? What stories do our schools still tell—and whose interests do those stories serve?

    Postman would not call for banning screens or abolishing online learning. He was not nostalgic for chalkboards or print for their own sake. But he would demand that we pause, reflect, and resist. He would ask us to think about what kind of citizens our institutions are shaping, and whether the systems we’ve built still serve a human purpose. He would remind us that information is not wisdom, and that no innovation can substitute for meaning.

    As the Higher Education Inquirer continues its investigations into the commercialization of academia, the credentialing economy, and the collapse of higher ed’s public trust, we find Postman’s voice echoing—uninvited but indispensable. His critiques were not popular in his time, and they are even less welcome now. But they are truer than ever.

    We may have forgotten him. But we are living in the world he tried to warn us about.

    Sources

    Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner, Teaching as a Subversive Activity (1969)

    Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985)

    Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (1992)

    Neil Postman, The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School (1995)

    Postman’s archived writings: https://web.archive.org/web/20051102091154/http://www.bigbrother.net/~mugwump/Postman/

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  • Higher Education Inquirer : Forgetting Henry George

    Higher Education Inquirer : Forgetting Henry George

    As American colleges and universities spiral deeper into debt, corporatization, and social irrelevance, it is worth asking not just what ideas dominate the landscape—but what ideas have been buried, neglected, or deliberately forgotten. Among the most significant casualties in our intellectual amnesia is Georgist economics, a once-influential school of thought that offered a radical, yet practical, alternative to both capitalism’s excesses and socialism’s centralization. And in today’s extractive academic economy—what Devarian Baldwin calls the “UniverCity”—its insights are more relevant than ever.

    The Ghost of Henry George

    Henry George, a 19th-century American political economist, is best known for his seminal work Progress and Poverty (1879), in which he argued that while technological and economic progress increased wealth, it also deepened inequality—primarily because the gains were siphoned off by landowners and monopolists. His solution was deceptively simple: tax the unearned income from land and natural monopolies, and use that revenue to fund public goods and social services.

    At one time, George’s ideas inspired political movements, policy debates, and even academic curricula. He was considered a serious rival to Karl Marx and a practical philosopher for American reformers, including the early labor movement. Cities like San Francisco saw brief experiments with land value taxation. But today, outside niche think tanks and the occasional urban planning circle, Georgism is a faint echo, barely audible in the halls of economic departments or public policy schools.

    The University and the Land

    If we look at contemporary higher education through a Georgist lens, what emerges is a sobering picture. Colleges and universities are not merely neutral grounds for the exchange of ideas—they are massive holders of land, beneficiaries of public subsidies, and agents of displacement. Institutions from NYU to the University of Chicago to Arizona State have used their nonprofit status and real estate portfolios to expand into communities, often gentrifying and pricing out working-class and BIPOC residents.

    At the same time, these same institutions profit from a credentialing economy built on a foundation of student loan debt. Over 43 million Americans collectively owe more than $1.6 trillion in federal student loans, an economy of indebtedness that props up tuition-driven institutional budgets while shackling generations of graduates. The very students who attend these universities, often in the hope of upward mobility, find themselves trapped in debt servitude—subsidizing administrative bloat, sports franchises, and real estate empires they will never own.

    This is where Devarian Baldwin’s work becomes critical. In In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower, Baldwin exposes how universities have become “anchor institutions,” deeply embedded in the urban fabric—not just through education, but through policing, property development, hospital systems, and labor exploitation. These institutions accumulate wealth not by producing new knowledge, but by extracting rents—social, economic, and literal—from their surroundings.

    Baldwin and George, though a century apart, are speaking to the same fundamental economic injustice: wealth flowing upwards through property and privilege, at the expense of the many.

    Why Georgism Was Forgotten

    So why has Georgism disappeared from mainstream education? The answer lies partly in the success of those it sought to regulate. Landowners and financiers, who stood to lose the most from land value taxation, worked diligently to discredit George’s theories. Neoclassical economics, with its abstract models and marginal utility curves, became the dominant language—obscuring the real-world power dynamics of land and labor.

    Universities, especially elite ones, adopted this neoclassical framework, increasingly aligning their interests with those of capital. Philanthropic foundations and corporate donors funded economic departments and think tanks that promoted market fundamentalism. Over time, Georgism—radical yet rooted in common sense—was pushed out of the curriculum.

    This forgetting wasn’t accidental. It was ideological.

    A Forgotten Game with a Forgotten Message

    A striking example of Georgism’s cultural erasure lies in the very board game that has taught generations about capitalism: Monopoly. Originally created in the early 20th century by a woman named Elizabeth Magie, the game was first called The Landlord’s Game and was explicitly designed to illustrate Henry George’s ideas. Magie’s intent was pedagogical—she wanted players to see how land monopolies enriched a few while impoverishing others, and to promote George’s remedy of a single land tax.

    But over time, the game was appropriated and rebranded by Parker Brothers and later Hasbro, stripped of its Georgist message and recast as a celebration of ruthless accumulation. What began as a cautionary tale about inequality became a glorification of it—a metaphor for how George’s ideas were not just buried but inverted.

    In that sense, Monopoly is the perfect symbol for the American university: a system that once had the potential to democratize opportunity but now functions as a machine for privatizing wealth and socializing risk, leaving students and communities to pick up the tab.

    What Higher Education Could Learn—and Teach

    If the goal of higher education is to educate an informed, critical citizenry, then forgetting Georgist economics is not just an intellectual oversight—it’s a moral failure. Henry George offered a vision of society where value created by the community is returned to the community. In the age of student debt, university land grabs, and deepening inequality, this vision is urgently needed.

    Imagine a higher education system where public revenue from land values funds debt-free college. Imagine a world where students no longer mortgage their futures for degrees whose value is increasingly uncertain. Imagine colleges not as engines of gentrification but as stewards of local wealth, investing in community-owned housing and cooperatives. Imagine students learning about economics not just as math problems, but as moral questions about justice, equity, and the public good.

    Devarian Baldwin’s scholarship, much like George’s, invites us to interrogate power structures and imagine alternatives. It’s time for a revival of that imagination.

    Relearning the Unlearned

    Reclaiming Georgist economics in the academy would not be a return to some golden past, but a reckoning with the present. It would mean confronting the rentier logic at the heart of higher education—and the debt-based financing that sustains it—and reorienting our institutions toward justice and common prosperity.

    In a moment when so much of American higher ed is collapsing under its own contradictions, perhaps what’s needed is not another billion-dollar endowment or ed-tech unicorn, but an idea long buried: that land—and learning—should belong to the people.

    For the Higher Education Inquirer, this is part of an ongoing inquiry into the pasts we forget, the futures we imagine, and the power structures that shape both. 

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