Television: The Cyclops That Eats Books
March 9th, 2005 | Published in Culture, Education, Technology
Television: The Cyclops That Eats Books
An insightful lecture on the dangers of television. Thanks to JT at Between Two Worlds for pointing this article out to me. Here are some “highlights”:
What is destroying America today is not the liberal breed of one-world politicians, or the IMF bankers, or the misguided educational elite, or the World Council of Churches; these are largely symptoms of a greater disorder. If there is any single institution to blame, it is, to use the cozy diminutive, “TV”…. One of the most disturbing truths about TV is that it eats books. Once out of school, nearly 60 percent of all adult Americans have never read a single book, and most of the rest read only one book a year. Alvin Kernan, author of The Death of Literature, says that reading books “is ceasing to be the primary way of knowing something in our society”….
Recent surveys by dozens of organizations also suggest that up to forty percent of the American public is functionally illiterate; that is, our citizens’ reading and writing abilities, if they have any, are so seriously impaired as to render them, in that handy jargon of our times, “dysfunctional”. The problem isn’t just in our schools or in the way reading is taught: TV teaches people not to read. It renders them incapable of engaging in an art that is now perceived as strenuous, because it is an active art, not a passive hypnotized state…. TV eats books. It eats academic skills. It eats positive character traits. It even eats family relationships. How many families do yo know that spend the dinner hour in front of the TV, seldom communicating with one another? How many have a television on while they have breakfast or prepare for work or school?