WHO’S AFRAID OF THE BIG BAD TUBE? : GUESS WHAT: TV’S NOT MAKING OUR KIDS STUPID

We have been told so often that television dominates our minds, lifestyle choices and political behavior that we believe the telling without conscious choice, without critical attention. It is an assertion that operates on a level analogous to myth itself. Perhaps no aspect of our obsession with the power of TV is more traumatizing than the oft-quoted figures that supposedly prove our children spend thousands of hours before the TV set, presumably wiring themselves into lifelong illiteracy.

The myth maintains with particular insistence that TV controls unformed minds, luring children to worship comic-book superstars and to plague their parents for flashy products beamed at them in endlessly vulgarized commercials. According to the myth, television is the hypnotic cause for the almost unbroken decline in literacy and arithmetic skills reflected since 1963 in slumping test scores, especially on the Scholastic Aptitude Test given each year to potential college freshmen.

When well-meaning critics find TV at the core of a problem like the intellectual shortcomings of our youth, they indirectly enhance the value of every televised minute no matter what is on or who is watching. In this equation, TV, even in its shallowest moments, has a more profound impact on the child than what is real : the defining power of history, of personal heritage, of income, of competing attractions and, most of all, of the obdurate powers of resistance in every human mind. But in truth, evidence of our resistance to the omnipotence of television extends all the way down to our earliest years, to those moments in childhood when we are supposedly transfixed by TV.

THE MYTH THAT TV NUMBS STUDENTS AND DESTROYS THEIR IMAGINATION bares its fangs most blatantly when its disciples repeat over and over that American students spend more hours in front of televisions than in front of teachers, that they watch TV more than they read books. The myth makers deluge us with frightening figures that are often exaggerated and supported by only the barest references to their sources.

“By about age 15, the average American child has spent more time (about 20,000 hours) in front of television than in the classroom--or doing homework,” writes Joel Swerdlow in The Wilson Quarterly in 1981. And according to the A.C. Nielsen Co.--the central bank for TV numbers-- kids and teen-agers spend more than three hours a day watching television. But even the networks, who stand to profit from the Nielsen numbers, complain that the viewing habits of young children are largely unfathomable because of the difficulty of measuring their behavior by means of the usual systems--personal diaries or meters with buttons that must be pushed by viewers. But even if the method of counting is accurate, a moment’s reflection reveals that the numbers tell us almost nothing about TV’s relevance to growth and education. What happens during those 20,000 hours? We don’t know, and even A.C. Nielsen doesn’t pretend to (although the company is now conducting studies to find out). Their meters may tell us the TV set is on, but who is really watching? Anecdotal evidence ought to inspire doubt in any parent that anyone or anything--whether TV set, hapless mothers or friends--can command the undivided attention of a child. More to the point: Daytime classroom hours, managed by teachers, are more demanding than relaxation or play before a TV set at home. Directly comparing classroom and homework hours with TV viewing is obviously wrongheaded.

Who gains from the assumption that television simultaneously rules and decimates the minds of our students? In addition to those who sell commercial time to toy manufacturers, the obvious answer is educators and politicians. Battered in recent decades by mounting evidence that American students appear to be losing ground to their counterparts abroad, our teachers, administrators, college deans and not a few social critics have increasingly blamed television.

They have even discerned changes in the student physique. The eyes of American students can no longer concentrate on a stationary page of print, we are told, conditioned as they are to shifting electronic motion. They have become “couch potatoes,” weighed down with fat, not muscle. Marie Winn’s book “The Plug-In Drug,” with its cries of rage, sums up this veiled paean to TV power.

Americans seem to take perverse joy in quoting the Nielsen numbers along with declining test scores. Yet even Winn, read closely, concedes that blaming TV for a child’s poor educational performance ignores the overwhelming universe of motivations and influences playing upon him or her beyond the TV set. What about the debased curricula offered our students or the impoverishment of many of the public schools they attend or the differing social contexts in which TV is viewed (whether in a poor, single-parent kitchen or a comfortable suburban library). No “fair sample” can be taken, Winn admits, to prove or disprove TV’s guilt amid such forces. The only fair test would require matching our behavior with that of a similar society deprived of television.

Nor is it a simple matter to stack our viewing habits against those of other countries and come to valid conclusions. To compare the influence of TV on a highly literate Japanese middle-class student, required to spend hours alone at night studying, with its impact on a poor teen-ager in the Bronx, one of a family of six or seven barely attended by an ill-paid working mother, is farcical. All attempts to compare the test scores turned in by a heterogeneous, multicultural society like that in the United States with older, more homogeneous, class-conscious nations like England, Germany or Japan partake of this blindness. In all of these situations, TV is as much a cultural receiver as a sender, acted upon by the viewers, youthful or not, as vigorously as it acts on them.

By rejecting such complexities, the blanket assertion that television is to blame for destroying students leads to errors in judgment. Worse, it tends to discourage positive action, particularly among the humanists and traditionalists who guard education here and abroad. Since TV is assumed to be dangerous to children’s intellectual health, our school systems and universities have all but ignored its powerful potential as a teaching medium. We spend almost no time talking or listening to children about either the aesthetics or content of TV. When the Department of Education produced its call to arms with intense fanfare early in the last decade--the report portentously entitled “A Nation at Risk”--its authors, the cream of the nation’s educational establishment, did not once so much as mention the word television .

NOT LONG AGO, I HAPPENED TO SIT DOWN AT MY MACINTOSH WHILE MY DAUGHTER, Victoria, age 9, and one of her friends, Arthur, age 8, were glued to the television set, watching “Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego” on PBS. I hadn’t even opened my directory when they rose from the TV and clamored for what they called the “real” Carmen Sandiego. They meant the interactive software program that preceded the television series by several years and more than 2 million customers. Both of the children played “Carmen” regularly. “Just watch,” they told me, “we’ll catch her.” As soon as I agreed, they turned the TV set off.

Carmen Sandiego is a clever, animated thief. In the series of programs first devised by Broderbund Inc. for the home computer, she is the center of the plot and a motivating force for interaction. Every child wants to catch her by responding to questions asked on the screen as any one of hundreds of plots buried in the software unfolds through the keyboard. By sitting, focusing intently on the screen, reading the questions asked, interpreting the verbal and visual clues provided and tapping out replies on the keys, the viewer-player tries to apprehend Carmen or one of her colorful, nefarious colleagues.

On this afternoon, I watched Victoria and Arthur chase the bandits. It was a demanding exercise, and while they were engaged, I switched on the forgotten TV set, permitting myself the opportunity to see and hear both the computer program and the television program play out, side by side. It was an instructive experience. I recommend it for all those who believe TV is by its very nature the cause of educational ennui in the United States.

In one ear, I was treated to the cheers and shouts of a studio audience that duplicated almost to the decibel the sound level of similar audiences heard on prime-time adult game shows. They were being entertained by a familiar pair of hosts, a young man and woman exuding charm and cheer. They were convulsed with laughter over what they saw and heard from the contestants, three students answering questions in pursuit of a villain fleeing through films and cartoons, while music roared in the background.

In the other ear, I heard only two voices, equally vibrant, rising from the “other,” supposedly powerless, side of a screen. For Victoria and Arthur, the line between “computer” and “television” screen is nonexistent. By the advent of the first grade, their entire generation has already worked out on dozens of interactive video games For them, the word “video” may safely be said to subsume virtually all images seen on a small electronic screen. While I watched, Victoria and Arthur quickly typed their way from San Francisco, where the home office of the Acme Detective Agency, Time Crimes Division, dwells, back through history to the Peru of the Incas, to 16th-Century Spain and 20th-Century Holland. At every step, they were required to read, plot and make decisions based on clues.

Finally, on this day when PBS’ program was completely forgotten, Victoria and Arthur nabbed their suspect, a blond, snaggle-toothed vixen named Lynn Gweeney. The heavens opened and a helicopter, like an airborne vacuum cleaner, sucked her inside. “Congratulations,” announced the program to the two detectives, “You are being promoted.” Their cheers almost reached the levels attained by the 200-plus studio audience in my other ear. Further, they erupted in response to events on the screen that were produced as much by their own actions as by Broderbund Inc.--in brief, the powers of the receivers more than matched those of the senders.

It is difficult if not impossible to reconcile this increasingly common interactive rambunctiousness with the chilling solipsism described by Winn and other TV critics: “Whether the program being watched is ‘Sesame Street’ or . . . ‘Fantasy Island,’ there is a similarity of experience about all television watching. . . . It is a one-way transaction that requires the taking in of particular sensory material in a particular way, no matter what the material might be. There is, indeed, no other experience in a child’s life that permits quite so much intake while demanding so little outflow,” writes Winn in “The Plug-In Drug.”

Winn might argue that “Carmen” on my computer is not “Carmen” on television, but TV, or video, as we’ve already noted, means both less and more than she states. It denotes a screen on which imagery, symbols and sounds cavort. Increasingly, it also means, as millions upon millions of computers enter our homes, a screen equipped with methods of interaction more demanding than the generic Nintendo games that flashed onto the market in the 1980s. On this higher level of intense interaction, eyes truly glued to both images and words, hands ready to strike the keyboard, our Victorias and Arthurs are surely as alert, as focused, as open to learning as they are before a printed page.

In fact, the particular kind of intelligence demonstrated by Victoria and Arthur in nailing Lynn Gweeney is several notches above and beyond the great but perhaps outdated goal of literacy, as it is conventionally understood. “Carmen” on the computer requires the use of simultaneous spatial, temporal and linguistic skills. Victoria and Arthur, responding to verbal and visual demands at once, are also actors. They must operate on several levels, not simply one, not simply on what may be called the sequential, reflective mode of reading.

To say this, and then to go further and argue that video, that broadcast television itself, is inherently two-way in its nature, not one-way, that even the PBS version of Carmen could have roused its youthful viewing audience to touch, tap or dance on the screen simply by asking, is sacrilegious, of course. It is particularly satanic now, when virtually all informed opinion repeats the incantations enjoined by the myth that TV destroys students. But in intensive research on kids watching television in Australia, Bob Hodge and David Tripp concluded that “there is a two-way interaction between the culture of the school and the culture of television”--that is, between mind and medium.

There is certainly evidence that the medium can prod and inspire from inside to outside, from sender to receiver. The lively, involving cartoons and skits generated by “Sesame Street” have demonstrably improved test scores among disadvantaged minority kids. And MTV surely has altered social attitudes, manners, clothing and behavior, primarily by responding vigorously to changing values.

We have almost totally ignored the powerful outside culture that competes with TV. And there is certainly one very obvious piece of evidence to prove that the receivers are prodding back--Victoria and Arthur’s willingness to turn the set off. The study “Television in the Lives of Our Children,” by Wilbur Schramm and others, published in 1961, found long ago that life itself replaces the TV screen in the center of most adolescent lives. And Schramm and his colleagues couldn’t have foretold the fluid, dynamic learning interaction between Victoria, Arthur and my Mac.

More and more, as alternative means of seeing and living present themselves in the post-industrial era, children are beginning to find these replacements for TV earlier and earlier in life. Far from acting as a surrogate pacifier, what might be called traditional over-the-air TV programming is becoming an increasingly intolerable agent of ennui, boring our children, provoking them into new realms of life and action.

IT IS POSSIBLE TO SEE THE state of education and of the child in two radically dissimilar ways: one in which TV overwhelms both, as the myth of TV omnipotence would have it, the other in which the larger context--as well as the sacred inner preserve of the mind--prevails. The latter view at least matches the complexity of the society we now inhabit, where prodigious feats of learning and research occur daily at our universities and think tanks in the face of doomsday reports about intellectual capacity.

Despite our adulation, our oft-repeated belief in its awesome power, what we have come to call television would fall to any half-hearted revolution. In one sense, TV as network monolith, as baby-sitter, as night light to the nation is already teetering, prodded by the spread of cable television, where a proliferation of channels fragments power and production; by the booming popularity of videocassettes and portable cameras, which have personalized TV in the home--a change occurring precisely during the years when the big TV networks have begun to lose viewers, steadily. In the past election, many viewers fled the nets for cable TV and radio talk shows.

Marshall McLuhan and others saw in television the demise of print media and the proliferation of passive couch potatoes. But that was decades before the personal computer tripled the amount of paper produced and read by each of us and long before jogging became a favorite morning sport.

McLuhan and company, in fact, have much to answer for. They include Marie Winn, of course; a coterie of condescending second-rate academics, and the brilliant, unsuspecting George Orwell, whose “1984” unfortunately emphasized the notion that whatever Big Brother sends us will be received in our minds as he intended. As for McLuhan, his brilliant, wrong-headed metaphors and slogan--”The Medium Is the Message”--inadvertently confirmed Orwell’s prophecy by assuring readers that the mere reception of a transmitted image guarantees acceptance. McLuhan’s apocalyptic embrace of the electronic age has since been indirectly endorsed by a cadre of equally charming intellectual Visigoths who cede to television such overwhelmingly destructive power that they perversely align themselves with the god they seek to counter, ascribing to him mind-bending power over all who behold TV--excluding, of course, themselves.

But the medium is not the message. You and I, in all our obstinate, unpredictable glory and complexity, are the message. The ultimate power lies on this, the other side of the TV screen, in the eye and mind of the viewer who can increasingly become the actor. Television--or rather, the uses we have made of it--surely has an impact on our lives and on our children, but we are still in possession of our minds and our willpower. We are quite capable of turning off the TV set and going elsewhere for the information we need. Together, you and I, the audience, are leaving far behind the limitations once assumed to be an inevitable byproduct of a monolith that is no longer in power.