Learn by unlearning
Teaching as a Subversive Activity - Neil Postman & Charles Weingartner
It’s agonizing and liberating at the same time when I’m reading the book.
We live in the Internet age with non-stopping changes. (For Mr. Postman and Weingartner, it’s the nuclear-space age. We can see how fast the world changes.) However, we’re still educated with Greek philosophical thoughts, history of the steam engine, grammar, etc. in an era when scientific changes and emerging challenges make the semantics, psychology, media study among others the most relevant topics to humans. We’re still imprisoned by school institutions and inculcated by numerous facts and points meaning nothing to us if not for the grades and the promised good university and well-paid job. We’re still ordered to be obedient to what “experts, presidents, great people” say without ever uttering our own problems and confusion. The agonizing part is that I’m the “product” of the education system mentioned above and I turn out to be the exact shape intended.
As an individual, I gain liberation by unlearning what I’ve been taught and starting from zero to learn how to learn. And the best starting point is the language. If before “medium is the message” said by Marshall McLuhan didn’t strike me as much, I can now recognize the impacts of language—the most comprehensive medium, or more clearly the environment—on me. Language is by no means merely the vehicle of our thoughts. It is the thought itself. When I say “Mike is stupid”, I’m not describing an intrinsic characteristic of Mike, but my perception of and feeling towards Mike. I am very likely to reach the conclusion because Mike didn’t go to college and I’m prejudiced by the hierarchy of degree which I’m inculcated and the superior emotion over him so that I say, “Mike is stupid”. The language is actually my perception of the world, and my perception is largely molded and impacted by my previous education and experience. So I have to examine the language environment I’m living in so as to finally unlearn and relearn.
Another thing that agonizes me is that this book is meant for teachers and school supervisors so that they can recognize the fallacy of the education system and finally let students learn how to learn and make them prepared in the face of our world, but since the publication of the book in 1969, the school no matter in Orient or Occident hasn’t changed much. Taking myself, I still have to wait until I get out of school and realize what I’ve been taught is an inhuman castration of soul. And I need to go through the pain of unlearning and recalibrating my language and learning how to learn.
The sole consolation I give to myself is that it’s never too late to learn what I truly want to learn and be. The best compliment I can give to the authors and this book is to do what they make sense to me. And I won’t stop revisiting the words that mean a new world to me:
One of the tenets of a democratic society is that men be allowed to think and express themselves freely on any subject, even speaking out against the idea of a democratic society. Schools are responsible for developing in the young not only an awareness of this freedom but a will to exercise it, and the intellectual power and perspective to do so effectively.
We need to understand how it is working than to know what it is called.
We do not get our perceptions from the things around us, our perceptions come from us. “Reality” is a perception, located somewhere behind the eyes.
A symbol system is in effect, a point of view. The more ways of talking one is capable of, the more choices we can make and solution one can invent.