Why the Networks Need to Be Educated About Children’s TV

The promise by commercial television networks to air eight hours of educational programming next April (“Networks Get a Lesson on the Education Crisis” by Steve Weinstein, Aug. 14) in reply to calls for help in dealing with the educational crisis in this country is obviously too little response from a TV system licensed by law to serve the public interest.

Fortunately, it is not too late to get stations to do more. The Children’s Television Act of 1990, now working its way through Congress, requires stations to serve the educational needs of young viewers as a condition of license renewal and will open up a market for what’s missing from TV offerings for the young.

With television now feeding kids a steady diet of animated comic strips interrupted by exhortations to spend money, we are denying youngsters a chance to benefit from the most cost-effective educational system ever devised. Once envisioned as a magic carpet, TV today rarely carries the child audience farther than the toy store. Commercial television provides few excursions to lands across the sea or contacts with characters who are not zany cartoon ducks, dogs or dinosaurs. Morover, it gives youngsters only a smattering of information tailored to help them understand the major issues of our time.

Children, especially those who lack the support of stable families and well-funded schools, need social institutions like TV to steer them in appropriate directions and help them make the most of available learning opportunities. Television can, on a daily basis, encourage virtually all of America’s youngsters to read, including the 13 million who live in poverty, those who will pay illiteracy’s greatest penalties.

Nothing in our culture can match TV’s extraordinary capacity to touch children and to influence how they think and behave. During the 25 hours per week that they watch it, TV should be sending out a loud and clear message that knowledge matters--a lot. The message demands more than well-intentioned public-service announcements promoting the joy of reading, more than an occasional documentary spotlighting student skill deficits, more than the excuse that PBS stations and cable channels are “taking care of the problem.”

Our need to know is more than just curiosity. In a democratic society, there is an obligation to inform and an equal obligation to be informed. Democracies depend on citizens who know enough about what’s going on to choose leaders and chart policies that reflect their will. While children, too, have a need to know, their capacity to deal with some of the events that make news is limited by their cognitive and emotional development.

Action for Children’s Television (ACT) believes that along with fun and games the broadcast menu should include news and public-affairs shows geared to young people. Children’s interests are poorly served when the most accessible news-gathering system in the world dispenses only news that’s fit for adults. The news children see on TV does not help them understand what’s happening (government), where it’s happening (geography) and why it’s happening (history).

TV used to give children’s literature a better break. In the 1970s, networks and stations frequently turned to books to entertain school-age viewers. Since then, deregulation has worked to distance children’s programming from the printed page.

TV and books are good for each other. TV builds readership for books, and books bring readers to the small screen to watch familiar scenes and characters come to life. Prize-winning author-illustrator Maurice Sendak noted that the TV version of his “Really Rosie” stories was seen by “more children than I could ever reach in 20 publishing lifetimes,” an audience vastly multiplied since the release of the home-video cassette. Booksellers and librarians report they cannot keep in stock books that have made their television debuts.

Some people who worry about children’s TV think it can be improved by taking “bad” shows off the air. ACT disagrees on the grounds that censorship is never a proper remedy. Instead, we should make sure that the schedule gets filled with the kind of programs that are now missing. Were television programmers to look more often to bookshelves rather than toy shelves for inspiration, there might be less apprehension about TV’s damaging effects.

That’s why America’s parents will be cheering when President Bush signs the children’s television bill. I bet Barbara will be clapping, too.

See letters to Counterpunch, F4.