Abstract
In 1982, Neil Postman wrote The Disappearance of Childhood. In that work, Postman recounted the invention of childhood in the modern world and its demise at the hands of, among other things, the electronic media (principally television). In Postman’s view, television had transformed education into ‘edutainment.’ The implications of this loss were devastating. Taking up where Postman left off I wish to reexamine his claim and amend and update his thesis by suggesting that, after the latest electronic turn, we now live in societies where a meaningful conception of adulthood is disappearing. It is disappearing, in part, because of an impoverished conception of citizenship. Yet it is additionally undermined because, claims to the ascendancy of the ‘knowledge worker’ notwithstanding, the fundamental connection between education and employment is unraveling. In this climate, the purposes of education are constantly queried and scrutinized as its telos is redefined by criteria external to the practice of education: cost-effectiveness, value-for-money, and so on. I suggest that only be reclaiming a meaningful conception of adulthood can education be defended and only by so doing can individuals hope to understand the world around them.
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Notes
In other works, notably The End of Education, Postman returned to this theme in greater detail.
It is precisely this approach that characterizes the recent report from the British Government on the future of Higher Education. See Securing a Sustainable Future for Higher Education (2010), especially Chapter 4.
The fact that so much of the new technology is designed by the young and has been adopted by an entire society should not be overlooked. See Zadie Smith’s discussion of the Facebook phenomenon in ‘Generation Why?’ in The New York Review of Books, November 25, 2010.
One study noted that college students implicitly trusted the Google search algorithm’s ability to rank results by relevance in response to a query, even if the higher ranked results were less relevant to their initial inquiry (see Pan et al. 2007).
The relevant numbers here are astonishing as the number of employable people has doubled since 1979 to 3 billion (see Mason 2009, p. 130).
A reason, perhaps, why Christopher Lasch lambasted Reich’s categories (1995, p. 35).
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Acknowledgments
My thanks go to Professor Michael Katz for inviting me to deliver the lecture, my colleague Professor Kenneth Peter for his astute comments, and the editors of Studies in Philosophy and Education for their thoughtful critique and suggestions.
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Quill, L. The Disappearance of Adulthood. Stud Philos Educ 30, 327–341 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-011-9231-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-011-9231-1