“My advice to people who want to teach is pretty simple and very likely to be ridiculed: don’t believe the bullshit. You’re not there to help students get skills for a workplace. You’re not there to make them more marketable. You’re not there to provide them with answers to petty, superficial questions. You’re not there to impress them – or yourself – with the latest technological wonder that promises to make something “better” but will probably only shorten some algorithmic process and benefit an employer. You’re not there to mass produce replaceable parts for the machinery of the global economy. You’re there for one reason and one reason only: to make them better people than they were when they came in.”

“Media are really nothing more than extensions of us. It is we, not the media, who are metaphysical. Metaphysics is part and parcel of an organ – the human brain – that processes information both propositionally and presentationally, in words and in images; in reason and in imagination. We believe and refuse to believe. We believe in things that have no physical nature, no material reality, and we refuse to believe in them. We believe in things that not only have a physical, material nature but are also empirically measurable, and we refuse to believe in them. And our media play a role in all of this.”

“It was only after oral tales became written orthodoxies that some people were labeled “pagans” and “heretics” and burned at the stake for unorthodox views. The greatest strength media ecology possesses is its ability to generate unorthodox views. Media ecology makes a better “Trojan horse” than a golden bull.”

“What makes a good teacher today is what has always made a good teacher: command of a subject, a critical mind, a demanding nature, and an ability to inspire students to pursue knowledge for some end beyond mere financial rewards. A good teacher might be entertaining and funny, but shouldn’t set out to be. A good teacher may have broad experience with and skills using technology, but the mere possession of such experience and skills doesn’t make one a good teacher.”

“When they ask how you’re feeling, you tell them you’re feeling like something important died screaming. You tell them you’re feeling like something even more important arrived breathing, something you should probably try feeding. When they ask how you’re living, you tell them you’re living like something important died hissing. You tell them you’re living like something even more important arrived giving, something you should probably try willing.”

“It is a truism today, in this highly technologically-developedculture, that students need technical computer skills. Equally truistic (and, not incidentally, true) is that the workplace hasbecome highly technological. Even more truistic – and farmore disturbing – are the shifts in education over the last twodecades as public elementary schools, public and private highschools, and colleges and universities have invested scoresof billions of dollars on “digital infrastructure,” computers,monitors and printers, “smart classrooms,” all to “meet thedemands” of this new technological workplace."We won’t dwell on the fact – an inconvenient truth? –that those technological investments have coincided with adecline in American reading behaviors, in reading and readingcomprehension scores, in overall academic achievement, in thephenomenon – all too familiar to us in academia – of “gradeinflation,” in an alarming collapse of our students’ understandingof their own history (to say nothing of the history of the rest of the world), rising ignorance of world and American geography, with an abandonment of the idea of objectivity, and with anincreasingly subjective, even solipsistic, emphasis on personalexperience. Ignore all this. Or, if we find it impossible to ignore,then let’s blame the teachers...”

“But what has changed? The truth is that nothing changes...It is we who have changed, we who are beguiled by technological change, we who have ceased to believe that a certain situation exists while beginning to believe a new one has replaced it. We still love and hate, suffer and feel joy, resent and admire, covet and sacrifice. We still allow some with power to exploit and marginalize others without power, and we still look on quietly, feeling bad about it all but doing nothing. Nothing at all changes when new technologies are introduced into a culture. Nothing changes but our attitudes about what is and is not “real,” what is and is not “important,” what is and is not worth knowing. And we change because we choose to change, because media, as McLuhan tells us, are nothing more than extensions of us.”