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Watching television over a long span seriously damages children's ability to think clearly and the exposure to TV sensationalism robs youngsters of childhood.
It's turning out to be a disastrous influence, at least as far as we can determine at present. Television appears to be shortening the attention span of the young as well as eroding, to a considerable extent, their linguistic powers and their ability to handle mathematical symbolism. Even more serious, in my view, is that television is opening up all of society's secrets and taboos, thus erasing the dividing line between childhood and adulthood.
I call television the "first curriculum" because of the amount of attention our children give to it. By now, the basic facts are known by almost everyone: between the ages of 6 and 18, the average child spends roughly 15,000 to 16,000 hours in front of a television set, whereas school probably consumes no more than 13,000 hours. Moreover, it is becoming obvious that there really is no such thing as "children's" programming. Between midnight and 2 in the morning there are something like 750,000 children throughout America watching television every day. There's a fantasy people have that after 10 p.m. children aren't watching television; that's nonsense.
Many parents, as well as educators, also have the mistaken belief that television is an "entertainment medium" in which little of enduring value is either taught by or learned from it. Television has a transforming power at least equal to that of the printing press and possibly as great as that of the alphabet itself.
Television is essentially a visual medium. It shows pictures moving very rapidly and in a very dynamic order. Although human speech is heard on television, it is the picture that always contains the most important meanings.
Television can never teach what a medium I like a book can teach, and yet educators are always trying, to pretend that they can use television to promote the cognitive habits and i the intellectual discipline that print promotes. In this respect they will always be doomed to failure. Television is not a suitable medium for conveying ideas, because an idea is essentially language - words and sentences.
The code through which television communicates - the visual image - is accessible to everyone. Understanding printed words must be learned; watching pictures does not require any learning. As a result, TV is a medium that becomes intelligible to children beginning at about the age of 36 months. From this very early age on, television continuously exerts influence.
For the reason, I think it's fair to say that TV, as a curriculum, moulds the intelligence and character of youth far more than formal schooling. Beyond that, evidence is accumulating that TV watching, hurts academic performance. A recent California Department of Education survey indicated that the more children sit in front of the television, the worse they do on achievement-test scores.
What emerges most clearly from the mass of figures of numerous surveys is that parents exercise little control over their children’s viewing, even when it worries them. They throw the onus on the programme makers, which is both cowardly and irresponsible. The people who make and schedule programmes should not be the ones who have to worry about little children being upset.
Much I am personally for some sort of indication given to parents as to the suitability of programmes. While children cannot be prohibited from viewing at home by anyone except their parents, as they can be an X certificate in the cinema, there is a precedent for guidance in another way. Adopting an R for Restriction recommended to be clearly attached to tricky titles in programme journals and in on-air trailers, would be immense assistance to responsible parents, and would encourage those who are less keen to take their job of guiding the young seriously.
I'm not criticizing television for that. I'm saying that's what television does; that is the nature of the medium. Television, after all, does have a valuable capacity to involve people emotionally in its pictures.
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