The TV Generation

Just as every man is supposed to have his price, so also does every man have a bait to which he will rise. Mine is the Dec. 26 “Quotable,” in which Gene F. Jankowski, former president of the CBS Broadcast Group, says, in part, “Experience simply does not support the notion that television is some kind of preemptive force that can displace home, school, family, church, state, friends, genes or history.” I must take strong disagreement.

Experience shows that “young people today are doing poorly in their school work because they have been brought up as passive listeners in a TV generation” (a quotation from Notice of the American Mathematical Society, November, 1989).

I believe there is no question that scientific and mathematical education in the United States today is in a crisis state and that this situation can be in the largest measure blamed on the pervasive and pernicious influence of television.

This situation constitutes a disease, a failed revolution in technology and industrial capability, and has preemptively forced a nationwide failure to occur in education and society in general.

JAMES H. CLIBORN, Topanga