Teaching as a Subversive Activity

Postman and Weingartner published this in 1969 with a single argument: the purpose of education should be to produce crap detectors — people who can identify nonsense, propaganda, and manipulation when they encounter it, who ask the questions the powerful prefer not to be asked, who refuse to accept the official version without examination. The most directly punk education book ever written for teachers. Was banned in several school districts. Makes the case that the school system as currently constituted does the opposite of what it claims — it produces compliance, not inquiry; credulity, not skepticism; consumers, not citizens. Postman is already on the P&P shelf through Amusing Ourselves to Death. This is the earlier book and the more optimistic one — not just the diagnosis but the prescription, a set of proposals for what education looks like when it takes its own stated purposes seriously. The book that most clearly states the P&P educational philosophy: the goal is not to produce knowers but to produce questioners.