Read the 1987 WBHS School Magazine online
Courtesy of the WBHS Archives in the Oude Wijnberg Museum – the digital copy of the 1987 School Magazine.
From the Magazine Editorial:
Both home and school face a daunting challenge in this latter half of the Twentieth Century in that there is growing evidence that they are losing their place as regulators of child development. Neil Postman, in his acclaimed book, The Disappearance of Childhood, describes how the electronic media have wrested control of information from the home and the school and now provide the child with a never-ending stream of information which calls upon their emotions, not their reason, and asks them to feel rather than think …
What gives additional cause for concern is the way in which the electronic media move literacy to the periphery of culture and take its place in the centre. Postman points out that this means that those characteristics which are associated with a fully literate culture (“the capacity for self-restraint, a tolerance for delayed gratification, a sophisticated ability to think conceptually and sequentially, a preoccupation with both historical continuity and the future, a high valuation of reason and hierarchical order”) are replaced by a new diminished definition of adulthood: the adult whose emotional and intellectual capacities are not fully developed.
