Literacy, reason, and childhood matter—and we’re losing all three

Mark Milke, The Hub, November 27, 2025

Back in the 1970s and 1980s, three useful books pressed people to think about thinking.

In Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, released in 1978, San Francisco advertising executive Jerry Mander argued that style increasingly trumped content. That was in part because television, with its unavoidable, image-based nature, prioritized the pretty girl or cool guy over the brainiac.

An example: The televised debate between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy in the 1960 presidential election campaign. For the first time, candidates squared off on television, then a new medium. When beamed into your living room, the urbane, tanned Kennedy simply looked better. The sweaty and shifty Nixon seemed untrustworthy. Forget if either man had the better arguments, platform, or policy. Politics went Madison Avenue, image-conscious. It’s been there ever since.

Another author, New York University professor and culture critic Neil Postman, offered two books with additional insight into why ever-fewer people could think their way through life, and why that was dangerous for deliberative democracy. In his 1982 book, The Disappearance of Childhood and in 1984’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman also blamed television for the decline in literacy and reason. But he spotted another nasty side effect: The image box was also destroying childhood.

To understand why literacy, reason, thoughtful democracy, and childhood were all linked, Postman argued we had to grasp how literacy helped childhood as a concept come into being. His argument: Prior to widespread literacy (which peaked in the West between the mid-19th and mid-20th centuries due to an emphasis on universal education), there was no concept of childhood—there were only “big people” and “small people.” The notion that children were any different than other human beings and needed time to develop intellectually, or needed protection, had not yet developed. It’s why it was routine for children to be employed on the farm, or in coal mines, or even worse.

However, as literacy spread, so too did the concept of childhood. As a small person starting out, the “big” people who could read—your parents, teachers, others—could keep secrets from you because they could read and you could not, and that helped protect your innocence, at least for a time. Critically, you could only leave childhood slowly over time, as you learned to read and, in parallel, how you matured mentally and physically. That’s what we now call childhood.

This ability to read, Postman argued, also tutors us in rudimentary reasoning. The written word, at least when propositional, invites analysis. When you read a sentence, you are forced to think through the claim as your mind churns through it. You don’t react emotionally to black marks on a page. You have to first grasp what those black marks mean alone and in sentences to even begin to have an emotional response. And even after that, reading even an emotionally provoking account still engages you in thinking.

In contrast, our minds do not argue with images. Whether on Plato’s cave wall or on a television screen, our minds accept images as real. They provoke an immediate emotional response. It’s why we flinch when some actor in a movie is dangling out of an airplane. We can tell ourselves it’s fake and no one is in danger. But we still have an emotional reaction.

Why does the distinction between image-based emotional response and reason matter? Consider images from a war zone. Images have the ability to shock. But what the flickering image cannot do is help you figure out what combination of people and events were “prime movers” in a war and deserve some, all, most, or none of the blame.

An example: No one forced the Allies to go to war with Germany in 1939 over Poland. But after six years of German remilitarization, aggression, and invasions, the calculation in Western capitals was that German fascists had to be stopped lest what was left of civilization in Europe fall into the dark abyss of tyrannical Nazism.

Skip that six-year lesson and all that occurred (including attempts to reach peace with Germany in the 1930s), and a simple image from burning German cities in 1945 can provoke a horror at how “we” the Allies could do such a thing.

Except the image tells you nothing. Reasoning through the previous dozen years from Hitler’s rise, or even before to the First World War, can also be part of that reasoning process. (Example: plenty of people blame the Versailles Treaty for Hitler’s rise. I do not, as Germany was bathed in victim thinking as far back as the early 19th century.)

But agree or disagree, if we read, write, and discuss Versailles, Mein Kampf, the Beer Hall Putsch, 1933, the reoccupation of the Rhine, Kristallnacht, the invasion of Czechoslovakia, Poland, the Nazi-Soviet pact, and much more, we are at least engaged in some sort of reasoning, even when imperfect. We are not just throwing shocking images at each other, which is what most often happens on the internet today.

Our present age

Fast-forward to our present day. Thirty years on, the internet has supplanted television as the main “tube” for how most of us view pictures. It also has plenty of text.

So, let’s update the Mander-Postman thesis and concern: images alone still tell you nothing; they still provoke an emotional, not a reasoned response. All online images, from sordid to sorrowful to sunny, also shred the protection and paced development of childhood because the quick hits of TikTok scrolling and other image-based sites work against literacy and reason.

To be sure, unlike television, the internet is a boon to those who read. But it is also the carrier of images akin to those on the wall in Plato’s Republic: They tell you nothing about the outside world. You have to go “outside” and escape from the images for that.

Mark Milke is President of the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy. Image credit: Pixabay.