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I graduated from college, I jumped right into the teaching profession.Â
I was not of the generation who grew up watching television, although
we did have a TV from the time I was maybe 13. I can't remember
exactly.Â
Back
then there was no such thing as "cable." Everyone had antennas. We
lived over 150 miles from Oklahoma City, so you can imagine the kind of
picture quality we had, even with a sky high antenna.
At any rate, I developed the habit of reading at a young age, never really getting "addicted" to the boob tube.
That
cannot be said for the generation growing up behind me. From the time
they were small, they sat in front of the television. It was there
from such shows as Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers Neighborhood that many
of them first were exposed to learning. What they learned was that
education should be, first and foremost, fun! Â
They
also became passive learners and that carried over into their school
days. They expected their teachers to teach in short, little spurts
with lots of fun activities and treats laced in along the way.
Now,
I will say this. They were good little children in that they sat,
absorbing every word the teacher said and taking it as "gospel" , so
long as she/he told lots of jokes along the way, making them laugh. In
short, teachers, in order to teach anything, had to sacrifice valuable
educational time with frivolous activities and humorous anecdotes.
Instead
of being just educators, they also had to be entertainers. That
carried right on through to high school when I had those same
students. They were like little robots, repeating back to me verbatim
what knowledge I did manage to impart to them.
I
actually told my students to listen for me to make an error or
deliberately to tell them something contradictory to fact. Â I
encouraged them to challenge my logic. Â I wanted them to become
critical thinkers as well as good students. Out of a class of twenty
or twenty-five students, I might have one or two who ever called me on
anything.
99%
of them just assumed if I said the sun rose in the west that it
evidently did. This generation is now the adults who still turn on the
television set the minute the walk in the house and watch it, even in
bed, until their eyes are bleary.
Is
it any wonder that the news media eventually realized that it could
spoon feed these little robots anything their heart desired just as
their teachers in school had done? I mentioned the other day that the
news media in the United States has completed disintegrated into a
propaganda machine.
Fox
News began it and the other stations picked it up. Both sides are
equally guilty of slanting their news either to the left or right.Â
They know from polls that 99% of their audience is going to believe
every single word so long as it is entertaining. Furthermore, it will
never once even occur to them to verify whether it is indeed true.
That
is why news commentators are often entertainers with backgrounds in
such things as sports radio or as disc jockeys. They are good
"talkers."Â The network doesn't care whether they get the facts
correct; the "robots" are going to believe it anyway. Just look good
and keep 'em entertained so they'll be back tomorrow night.
Have
any of you watched The Bill O'Reilly Show recently. He now
intersperses these funny little vignettes in between his commentary or
his interviews. That's so obvious to those of us who have ever studied
human behavior.
Blame
it all on the boob tube, the single worst deterrent to critical thinking and the defining invention that will most represent the prevailing legacy of the 20th Century in historical annals of the future.
