Teaching As a Subversive Activity
by Neil Postman, Charles Weingartner
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Book Summary Information
Author: Charles Weingartner, Neil PostmanEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 1971-07-15
ISBN: 0385290098
Number of pages: 240
Publisher: Delta
Book Reviews of Teaching As a Subversive Activity
Book Review: A Dissenting Opinion
Summary: 2 Stars
Most reviewers seem to like Teaching as a Subversive Activity. I am not among the book's fans.
The book's authors, Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner, score a number of points. They manage to "nail" educators for relying too much on the lecture method in which students copy, then memorize, the teacher's opinions. This is a very valid criticism; teachers do little to teach students how to think; we settle for teaching them what to think. The authors make another good point about the tyranny of testing, which has become far worse since the early 1970s.
Beyond these points, I found the book to be lacking. I think that the authors meander too far from their original point - that teaching needs to be reformed. They discuss an incredible array of topics in just over 200 pages, but the discussions are superficial due to the book's excessive breadth. And their digressions are not engaging and are often only tangentially related to teaching. For instance, the long list of quotations at the end of Chapter 7 is mind numbing.
The authors' arguments remind me of the old saw that it is easier to tear down a system than it is to build a new one. Many of their suggestions are quixotic, or just laughable. Consider what the authors suggest administrators do if students write graffiti about their teachers in school bathrooms; in this case, Postman and Weingartner state that the administrators should chisel the students' words on the front of their schools. Are they joking? Did the authors ever actually attend high school?
Some of the other ideas have the sound of bad 60s hangovers. For instance, Yale adopted the authors' idea about eliminating grades in the early 1970s - with disastrous results. The authors hold that there is no such thing as a shared reality - and that, therefore, the students should define the entire curriculum. (If there is no shared reality whatsoever, how did everyone interested in Teaching as a Subversive Activity end up on this page?). Student-directed learning might be interesting in some contexts, but it would be disastrous in others. For instance, I don't want to be a patient of the physician whose class decided that they weren't interested in learning about human anatomy. I don't want to drive across a bridge designed by the person whose civil engineering class decided that they didn't want to learn about bridges. Sometimes schools do have valuable content to teach students - whether they want to learn it or not.
Finally, since Postman and Weingartner published this book, there has been a wealth of research into the inquiry-based and active-learning methods the authors favored; the results have been mixed. We still have much to learn about exactly which methods produce superior student learning. These authors have some intriguing ideas, but they did not find the "Holy Grail" that will cure education of all its ills.
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