Tuning Out
On Monday, students at Visitacion Valley Middle School in San Francisco were asked to sign a contract promising to go 10 days without television and video games. The pledge was a tough sell: "Why would we want to turn off the TV?" asked one 7th grader. School officials consider the plan—which coincides with the national TV-Turnoff Week, an annual event—a way to reduce bullying. The school is using a curriculum that has been shown to significantly reduce both physical and verbal aggression on the playground. Whether the kids will follow through remains to be seen. In fact, many children don't think it's possible to go a full day without TV, says Thomas Robinson, an associate professor of pediatrics at Stanford and one of the curriculum's creators. The program "helps kids recognize you can live life without TV," he said. "The world does not end."
Get RSS Feed
Comments
Once again an attempt is made to tie in violence with video games and tv. Wake up! Human history is steeped in violence. This is nothing new. Bullying is nothing new. I don't think the priests of the Spanish Inquisition needed TV or Video games to enact there cruel torture methods to get a confession which meant that you were damned if you do confess and damned if you don't confess to heresy. Lets not forget the Witch Hunts of Salem. Same thing. We don't talk about these things though.
Posted by: Luther | April 26, 2007 9:20 AM
I would like to see some details about this study ... did they stop just TV? TV and Internet? IPods?
I can't see how this would impact the kinds of behaviors discussed here, but it would be interesting to see how they derived their conclusions.
Maybe this problem is more related to poor ethical education than TV. It's always easy to find a problem; it's always harder to create a solution that actually does something for the problem (right problem/wrong solution).
Posted by: tim | April 26, 2007 3:12 PM