Educated Populace

In Amusing Ourselves To Death this is the thread Kyle tags as the structural defense of a self-governing republic: democracy presupposes citizens capable of negotiating the printed word. Neil Postman argues that the framers of the Constitution “assumed that participation in public life required the capacity to negotiate the printed word,” that “mature citizenship was not conceivable without sophisticated literacy,” and that this is why Thomas Jefferson “saw in universal education America’s best hope.” Kyle marks this constitutional-literacy passage with Educated Populace, distinguishing it from but pairing it with the related Educated Electorate and Voice of the People threads.

The concept runs as one of Postman’s key arguments: a print culture trained citizens in serious, sustained, rational attention, and the move from typography to television “altered the meaning of being informed” — hollowing out the literate-citizenry premise on which republican self-government rests. Postman’s broader claim, via Aldous Huxley, is that the danger is not Orwellian coercion but Huxleyan distraction: a populace amused into incapacity rather than oppressed into it.

Where this appears

• Amusing Ourselves To Death — Kyle tags Postman’s constitutional-literacy passage (Jefferson, the framers, “mature citizenship… sophisticated literacy”) as the structural defense of self-government