PEDIATRICS Vol. 56 No. 1 July 1975, pp. 51
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SCHOOLS AND AUTHORITY

Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner

If you go through the daily papers and listen attentively to the radio and watch television carefully, you have no trouble perceiving that our political and social lives are conducted to a very considerable extent, by people whose behaviors are almost precisely the behaviors their school environments demanded of them. We do not need to document for you the pervasiveness of dogmatism and intellectual timidity, the fear of change, the ruts and rots caused by the inability to ask new or basic questions and to work intelligently toward verifiable answers.

The best illustration of this point can be found in the fact that those who do question must drop out of the "Establishment." The price of maintaining membership in the establishment is unquestioning acceptance of authority. acceptance of authority.