Published: April 1, 2000

Teaching As A Subversive Activity

NEIL POSTMAN AND CHARLES WEINGARTNER

(Delacorte Press, out of print)

It's 1969. The war in Vietnam is raging. The anti-war movement has reached a fever pitch. Militant leftists are bombing draft offices and ROTC buildings. The nation appears to be coming apart at the seams.

Against this backdrop emerges a provocative little book titled Teaching as a Subversive Activity, by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner, two unknown education professors at Queens College in New York. Billed as "a no-holds- barred assault on outdated teaching methods," the book features a clichéd red apple on the cover—except that this apple is a bomb and the stem is a lit fuse. The message is clear: Before our schools can be saved, they...