Teach The Children

Edwin Newman hosts this critical look at television which zeroes in on what the medium is saying to our children, why, and whether parents and educators can do anything about it. The program opens with the standard litany: American children are watching an average of five hours a day of television. By the time they are teenagers, each of these kids will have seen about 20,000 murders on TV. Every seven minutes they are hit with a commercial. Interviews with a wide range of commentators, from Peggy Charren (Action for Children's Television) to media critics' George Gerbner and Ron Powers are intercut with the history of television, particularly its initial promise and what eventually went wrong. As an introduction to the subject, Teach the Children is a good program for parents to watch, particularly those parents who either see television as a good or even benign influence. Unfortunately, it's also on the level of a moralistic fairy tale: television is a big, bad wolf that is corrupting our children. The fact that an extraordinary amount of educational and cultural programming (such as that found on The Discovery Channel or A & E) has recently come to television is not addressed. Instead, a token nod is given to PBS as the sole source of intelligent programming. Action shows with their endless commercials for plastic figures are damned with predictable regularity, but nothing is said about the current wave of toys, videos, and recordings tied in to PBS's Barney & Friends series. (Interestingly, the March 12 issue of Entertainment Weekly reports that the show's creators have just signed a million dollar toy deal with Hasbro.) Or, for that matter, what about Sesame Street? I don't know how many inner-city kids had Bert & Ernie speaking dolls, but I know that a whole lot of kids from upscale baby boomer families had them. While I share the interviewees disdain for commercial television (I don't watch it), I think the issues surrounding the subject are far more complex than the presenters imply here. It's kind of ludicrous to carp about the way that scientists and teachers are portrayed on TV and bemoan the sliding literacy rate, yet obviously not be familiar with what's being written for young adults today by Christopher Pike and his ilk. Yes, television has many problems; yes, we need to address them; no, we don't need to make the tube a scapegoat for society's woes. Teach the Children will make some parents think, one just wishes that it was less certain in its--to me--overly simplistic conclusions. Recommended. (See ALEX HALEY for availability.)