AS A NATION, we are at a crossroads in deciding not only what we expect from education, but what education can expect from us, individually and collectively. The degree of our commitment will determine whether we graduate to a new era of progress and prosperity or fail our children and ourselves. Like education itself, our decision involves something beyond pragmatism. It is also a test of our values.
Do we believe children can learn if they are taught in a way that takes account of their particular talents and holds them to high and clear expectations? Do we believe all children deserve an orderly learning environment? Are we willing to set national goals for educational performance and provide incentives for teachers, schools, and students to meet them? Are parents ready to become partners with schools again, for the benefit of their own—and other—children? And how about the other members of the village, those who are childless or whose children have passed school age? Are they—are all of us—ready to join this partnership?
If we can answer yes to questions like these, we can be successful in educating children to move confidently into the future, carrying the village with them. The root of the verb “to educate,” after all, means “to lead forth.”
Seeing Is Believing
As television has ravenously consumed our attention, it has weakened the formative institutions of church, family and schools, thoroughly eroding the sense of individual obedience to the unenforceable on which manners and morals and ultimately the law depend. Obviously, we need to rebuild our families, our schools and our churches. But we cannot complete these reforms until something is done about television, for in both its advertising and its programming it has created demands that appeal, not to the best in our natures, but to the worst.
JOHN SILBER
A friend of mine told me about a visit she made to a family with five children. Down in the basement, she could hear the two teenage boys and their buddies singing along to the latest “gangsta”-rap CD. On the first floor, the six-year-old and the eight-year-old were slouched at either end of the couch, motionless in front of the screen, “surfing” the channels. Click. A futuristic battle scene. Click. Graphic images of a recent murder in the city. Click. Two men fighting. Click. What appeared to be a “docudrama” about rape. In an upstairs bedroom, their twelve-year-old sister was watching an “R”-rated video with a friend. It was a clear case of media assault.
When my friend gently raised the issue of the poison that was pouring into those children’s minds, her harried hostess could only say, “Look, I’m doing my best.” Clearly, this mother, like nearly every parent I talk with, could use some assistance from the village.
Some of that assistance has come from Tipper Gore, whose 1987 book, Raising PG Kids in an X-Rated Society, sums up the challenge parents face. Long before I met her, I admired Tipper for having the courage to stand up and say what millions of other fathers and mothers were thinking: that some of the media our kids are exposed to is doing them harm.
Tipper and her watchdog group, the Parents’ Music Resource Center, were leading forces behind the effort to get record companies to put warning labels on music recordings with violent, degrading, and sexually explicit messages that are inappropriate for children. Yet Tipper was attacked and ridiculed for her outspokenness, and accused of supporting censorship for advocating voluntary warning labels.
Finally, other public figures have taken up her call for action. C. DeLores Tucker, head of the National Political Congress of Black Women, teamed up with William Bennett against “gangsta” rap. They confronted media giant Time Warner, which has since decided to sell its stake in Interscope Records, the company that produced some of the music with the most offensive lyrics. Although it has taken a long time, public opinion seems to be mobilizing to force the entertainment and news industries as well as the government to address concerns about the effects of the media on our children and our society.
The recent attention that has been brought to bear on the content of movies is also overdue, given their powerful influence on the culture. At least we have a movie ratings system, although there is much we can do to refine it and to improve the content of films in the first place. For example, we can look to countries such as Great Britain and Australia, which have stricter codes for violent content. But in this chapter the focus is primarily on what happens all day on our television screens, both because that is where most people see the movies Hollywood makes and because its presence and influence so pervade our society.
Former Federal Communications Commission chairman Newton N. Minow sounded the alarm long ago. In 1961, Minow decried television as a “vast wasteland” and urged that the networks be held to a high standard of public interest. Since then, Minow has devoted himself to this vitally important issue in a variety of communications and public service positions. Most recently, in Abandoned in the Wasteland: Children, Television, and the First Amendment, he and Craig L. LaMay catalogued the overwhelming evidence of television’s negative effects that has accumulated over the past three decades and took broadcasters to task for evading the consequences of their decisions by hiding behind the First Amendment.
Minow’s portrayal of how deeply televised violence has embedded itself in our national psyche is as shocking as the violence itself:
So routinely do Americans accept television’s version of their lives, that on January 18, 1993, when seventeen-year-old Gary Scott Pennington walked into his high-school English class in Grayson, Kentucky, and fired a .38 caliber bullet into his teacher’s forehead, killing her, one of the students who witnessed the murder remembered thinking, “This isn’t supposed to happen. This must be MTV.” Must be. The average student in Gary’s senior class had already seen 18,000 murders on television. The average student in the class had spent between 15,000 and 20,000 hours watching television, compared with 11,000 in school; every year the average American child watches more than a thousand stylized and explicit rapes, murders, armed robberies, and assaults on television.
Since the 1950s, a steady stream of articles, books, and studies have documented the harm television does to children. The American Psychological Association’s Commission on Violence and Youth points to three major reports, each a decade apart—by a surgeon general’s commission in 1972, by the National Institute of Mental Health in 1982, and by the American Psychological Association’s Committee on Media in Society in 1992—which reviewed hundreds of studies to arrive at the same unshakable conclusion: that “viewing violence increases violence” and “prolonged viewing of media violence can lead to emotional desensitization toward violence.”
Ninety-eight percent of American homes have at least one television set, which is watched each week for an average of twenty-eight hours by children between the ages of two and eleven, and twenty-three hours by teenagers. Children who grow up in lower-income families, with fewer organized activities or places to play, watch even more TV than their more affluent peers.
Children themselves report that certain television shows encourage them to engage in sexual activity before they are ready, to behave aggressively, and to be disrespectful to their parents. Eighty percent of Americans responding to a 1993 Times-Mirror poll said that they believe TV is harmful to society and especially to children. And we know that saturating young minds with increasingly graphic and sensational depictions of violence prevents them from developing the emotional and psychological tools they need to deal with the threat and the reality of violence. Shootings, beatings, even killings, begin to seem normal and, in an odd way, painless. Children become numbed—“desensitized”—to violence.
Whether, and under what circumstances, the violence people see on television and at the movies actually incites violent acts is a question researchers have debated for years, ever since the surgeon general’s 1972 report. As with smoking and lung cancer, however, we know that there is a connection. Yet just as somebody—most often somebody well paid by the tobacco companies—is sure to stand up each time a new finding confirms the l
inkage between smoking and lung cancer and shout, “That’s not definitive,” every time a new report draws a connection between the violence on our television screens and the violence on our streets, some in the entertainment industry try to refute, or at least to dilute, the claim.
You don’t have to conduct research worthy of a Nobel Prize to grasp that what most children are seeing on television can’t be good for them. Just turn on your television, any time of the day, any day of the week, and see what is competing for their attention. I’ll bet that if a stranger came into your home and began telling your kids stories about the same kinds of characters and events, using the same kinds of words and pictures, you’d throw him out. You wouldn’t wait for a surgeon general’s report to validate what your instincts as a parent told you was a hazard to your children’s mental and emotional health.
Defenders of television argue that children are subjected to images of violence in all sorts of media—including fairy tales and other literary classics—and complain that it is not fair to hold television to a higher standard. But as Minow points out:
The tradition of oral and written storytelling embodied in both fairy tales and modern children’s literature developed in the service of children’s moral education, and its lessons helped to define the boundaries between childhood and adulthood. In traditional settings, violence was but one possible outcome of conflict, not the only one or even the primary one. Moreover, stories that included violence surrounded it with meanings created by adults for instructing children, not by adults for entertaining adults.
Television executives are also quick to say that they are a major provider of information as well as entertainment. They stress that it is the duty of journalists to report what goes on in the world. It’s true that children now get most of their information about events at home and around the world directly from the media instead of filtered through their parents, teachers, or other adults. And it’s also true that we need to be made aware of crime and violence so that we can take actions to protect ourselves, such as supporting measures to impose sensible gun control. But why, when we turn on the evening news these days, do we find ourselves awash in depictions of sensationalized violence that are increasingly difficult to distinguish from the gore that permeates the latest “action” series?
In 1992, the Center for Media and Public Affairs counted the acts of violence on ten television channels in the course of a single eighteen-hour broadcast day. When the study was repeated just two years later, the center found that the incidence of television violence had increased by 41 percent, with the greatest rise occurring in news shows. Another recent study found that local news coverage of murders tripled last year, even though there was no corresponding rise in the recorded murder rate. The explanation is obvious. News executives are acting more single-mindedly from the same motive that drives their colleagues in the entertainment business: violence sells. Ellen Hume, a senior fellow at the Annenberg Washington Program in Communication Studies, points out in her recent report, “Tabloids, Talk Radio, and the Future of News,” “News about crime and violence is cheap and easy to cover.”
The exhaustive coverage of violence and bad news in general contributes to young people’s increasing sense of alienation and to the dysfunctional, antisocial behavior that accompanies it. Many kids become depressed or have nightmares because of the barrage of bloodshed they see on TV. It numbs them to the pain and destructiveness of actual violence, encouraging a stance of ironic detachment. At worst, it contributes to what social scientist George Gerbner has identified as “the mean world syndrome,” where children internalize the negative attributes of the world as they see it portrayed in the media.
Children also learn from television that we prize celebrity above all else, regardless of how it is achieved. At the same time, television may leave them with the impression that people hardly ever do anything good or right and that few, if any, adults are worthy of respect. We are saturated with stories about priests who molest children, gangs of young thugs who vandalize and victimize indiscriminately, and families that are nightmares of abuse and neglect. The lurid accounts tend to eclipse positive stories about priests and other clergy who help people come to terms with loss and find meaning in their lives, teenagers who feed the homeless, clean up our parks, and help the elderly, and families who pull together in times of stress.
Small wonder, then, that many children grow up skeptical that organized religion can offer guidance and sustenance, that they or their peers can be a force for good, that families can be a lasting source of strength and stability. The merciless, minute scrutiny of crimes and victims emphasizes and exaggerates the powerlessness of individuals, especially in the minds of children, whose own lack of power in the world is all too plain to them. More insidiously, it undermines their faith in institutions, their belief that individuals can band together for good as well as for evil.
Leonard Eron, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan and a leading expert on the effects of television, warns: “In the same way television teaches violence, it now teaches youngsters that…dysfunctional families are par for the course.” Professor Froma Walsh of the University of Chicago echoes him. Consistently seeing the sensational way families are portrayed on most talk shows and many prime-time programs encourages people to “view their own families through a glass darkly and look for pathologies,” even when families are “just trying to cope as well as they can.” Such research suggests that whatever is provided as a steady diet on television becomes reality in the minds of frequent viewers. That’s not good news for any family, given what’s currently on the menu.
And the menu is expanding. Video games have transformed millions of television sets into scenes of blood and violence that children not only watch but participate in. Agile fingers race across the controls of best-sellers like Mortal Kombat and Killer Instinct, directing characters on the screen to execute the most desired outcome—a brutal murder. There are also moves like the Neck Breaker, the Skeleton Grab, the Skull Rip, and the Death Scream. In Mortal Kombat, a computer-generated voice urges “Finish him!” as blood continues to spray.
Recently, a fourteen-year-old boy from a Maryland suburb where actual violence rarely intrudes described his fascination with electronic violence to Washington Post Magazine staff writer David Finkel. “I like violence,” he said. “I like seeing violence. I just really like watching violence.” This boy’s parents are involved in their son’s life—they go to the movies with him and try to interest him in reading—but they also believe he is old enough to watch what he wants to see, listen to what he wants to hear, and play the games that amuse him. This boy assures Finkel that his life would be very different without this connection to violence. “I’d be scared to be with anyone else,” he explains. “I wouldn’t be able to relate to anybody else because they’ve all seen it.”
It is too early to evaluate the effects of video games fully. But already some psychologists have pointed out that children’s direct control of the violence in video games could be more harmful than what they only observe passively. Dr. Carole Lieberman, a UCLA psychiatrist and former chair of the National Coalition on Television Violence, refers to video games as a “new drug.” “I think it’s worse than television violence because children are pushing the buttons themselves,” Dr. Lieberman says. “They are getting rewarded for destroying people in a game.”
We already know that television doesn’t just affect what we think; it also affects how we think. The medium, as Marshall McLuhan pointed out, is itself the message. The episodic, reactive, almost frantic pace of what is broadcast makes children feel and act frantic and shortens their attention spans and their patience for activities that take time and problems that don’t yield immediate solutions.
Children—and teenagers—need stimulation, but there is a limit to how much they need, and what kind. Consider for a moment what it means to put the remote control in the hands of a preschooler. She does not have to work har
d to be entertained, to use her imagination as she would if she were listening to a story or playing make-believe. She does not have the ability to screen out what she sees and hears, let alone to evaluate it. And least of all, faced with the dancing images and bright colors and exciting sound effects, is she equipped to walk away.
The pull of television is irresistible to children, riveting their attention the way traffic accidents draw rubberneckers. The homes in America where television sets blare night and day are like highways clogged with accidents. Only, in this case, the children gawking mindlessly, overstimulated and underchallenged, are the victims.
MY PARENTS did not worry so much about the content of the television shows my brothers and I watched as they did about the amount of time we would spend at it, if they let us. They wanted us reading, doing chores, or playing outside, so they regulated our viewing hours strictly. Bill and I restricted both the amount and the kind of television Chelsea watched as a child, and even now we check up from time to time on her TV and movie watching. Parents are beginning to come up with other ways of defending themselves and their children from the excessive influence of television. They may eventually get some help from technology, such as the V-chip included in proposed telecommunications legislation. The V-chip is a computer chip with which parents could block television programs designated as containing material unsuitable for children. Making the technology available is only half the battle; putting it to good use will require a strong, clear rating system like the one we now have for movies.
In the meantime, parents are on their own in making sure children are not watching inappropriate shows or too much television, period. They can continue to trade their own “ratings” informally. They can encourage the newspapers and magazines that are beginning to gear reviews of movies and music toward parents to cover television in this way as well. They can also teach their children how to watch television, the same way they teach them to cross the street: carefully.
It Takes a Village Page 24