Article Link: http://exchangepress.com/article/helping-children-avoid-the-perils-of-television-by-improving-their-education/5012857/
Children aged three to seven are not yet able readers; they are watchers. For them, the bane of our media culture is television. More serious than its portrayal of sex and violence is its inducement to unthinking passivity. Sitting hours on end before the television not only opposes good day care and family life, but - and this is important in our cynical society today - it evades and erodes childhood experience in preparation for the later responsibilities of democratic community.Many of us try to prevent objectionable or excessive television watching by stopgap measures: arguments, expedient substitutions, and adamant discipline.
Certainly, if television watching is allowed at all in the early years, simple, consistent rules are important. But also, given adequate help, children themselves will eventually choose to avoid television ills.
Good education derives from experience. For the youngster, this means child-initiated, active learning. It means deep personal involvement. It means our encouragement of child perception paced accord-ing to individual needs, with ease and time to discover and test relationships between things, events, and persons. An abstract, predetermined, two-dimensional screen image directed at masses of children cannot provide these essentials. Paint, paper, blocks, and play can. When such unstructured materials and activities are ...