Children and The Boob Tube

Megan Cox Gurdon ponders some new evidence about the effect of television on young children.  Those effects are mixed, although she does conclude:

But over and over, Ms. Guernsey's findings point away from the beneficence of the screen and toward the irreplaceable value of loving and engaged contact between parents and children--and between children and their own imaginations. "It is play, plain and simple play, that affords many of the most essential intellectual and social advantages for children," Ms. Guernsey says, quoting from a book called "Einstein Never Used Flashcards." At another point she writes: "Video exposure is no match for the stimulation children experience in real life. Scientists have so far come up with nothing to suggest that babies are better off watching a baby video than, say, watching Dad fold laundry."

Ms. Guernsey is tolerant and circumspect about what she has found. I don't have to be. If you have small children at home, please turn off that wretched TV.

The defense of our increasingly visual culture is that we are becoming wiser in our use and interpretation of imagery.  A colleague of mine who teaches a class on pop culture and advertising tells me that our students are very sophisticated interpreters of visual stimuli.  So it might be that we are trading one sort of literacy for another.  Thus it may not be a problem, it could be argued, that each generation's vocabulary is decreasing and the ability to communicate in the written and spoken word is on the decline.  This is no worry unless the ability to speak and write is essential to being a fully rational human being.