Wising Up to Shoddy Television : Kids are taught how to avoid being manipulated by programs and commercials

By the age of 18 the average American child has spent more hours in front of a television set than in a classroom, watching and often uncritically absorbing hundreds of thousands of images and messages. Education is supposed to help teach people how to think. Most television, conversely, is pitched at viewers who are expected to be unanalytical and manipulable, whether in response to program material or the advertising that sustains it. That passivity does nothing to nourish minds.

There’s no reason to believe that television will change its ways any time soon. Far easier, probably, to change the way TV viewers respond. As Claudia Puig reported in The Times Thursday, schools in a growing number of states, led by New Mexico and including California, are starting to train students to be more informed and active viewers in an approach called media literacy. That effort, as described by Bob McCannon, director of New Mexico’s Media Literacy Project, simply aims at helping make kids who watch TV “wise consumers.”

The program, as it has evolved abroad and in the United States, can start as early as kindergarten and extend through high school. In broad terms its method is similar to teaching children how to approach literature critically. Emphasis is put on selectivity, meaning carefully choosing what to watch. How to watch is equally stressed. Children are made more aware of how their wants and emotions can be manipulated, through images, repetition and how lighting and music are used. As one high school student wrote in an evaluation, media literacy classes teach children “how to avoid being just another sucker.” And that, we think, is an estimable achievement.

Media literacy has a lot of support, ranging from the Parent-Teacher Assn., which has joined in sponsoring 32 workshops around the country, to academia. It also has some critics, who complain not about what media literacy does but what it isn’t doing. The overriding need, these critics say, is to focus on improving TV programming, particularly by lessening violence and increasing the informational and educational programming available to children.

That programming sorely needs improvement is clear. That TV viewers--children and adults alike--would all benefit if they would bring more questioning and analysis to what TV offers is equally clear. The media-literacy effort deserves to be judged on its own terms, on what it tries to do. And so far, from the evidence, it’s doing a commendable job.