Happy 80th Birthday, Neil Postman

“Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see.” -- Neil Postman (The Disappearance of Childhood, 1982)

A note from Lance Strate:

Friends, today is the 80th anniversary of Neil Postman's birth, and by way of honoring his memory, I want to ask you, and especially those of you who have blogs and websites and/or are on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and the like, to help in an effort to correct an injustice that exists online.

Neil's most memorable quote is, “Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see.” But if you Google that quote, you'll find that more often than not, it is attributed to someone else, specifically John W. Whitehead (the rightwing lawyer who represented Paula Jones against Bill Clinton).

Naturally, this is upsetting for many of us, and it is pretty much impossible to get websites to change their listings, but we can drive themdown in the Google rankings by posting in searchable sites that Neil Postman wrote “Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see.”

So, we have a begun a campaign on this day to spread the word, and set the online record straight, at least as much as possible.

Glad to help, Lance. And anyone reading this who'd like to set the record straight, feel free to post this great quote from one of America's great thinkers of the last century.