Debating television and video games is like debating religion: no matter how long or hard you argue over it, you will never come to a mutual agreement. I thought I’d share what Linda, a local unschooler, has to say about it.
Why is it that the opinion on watching tv is so poorly regarded? It’s a point that often gets discussed, for sure! When snowboarding was being broadly disparaged as the activity of the lawless hooligans on the ski hills my mom quipped ‘and in a minute it will be in the Olympics and become a mandatory subject in public school.’
Well, she was right about the Olympics… it’s not mandatory yet, but schools organize cut-rate priced trips so even ‘regular’ kids can get to go. When my mom was in school, science fiction was generally regarded as mind-fluff written by idiots about nonsense for the indiscriminate masses. Is it possible to make it through to grade 10 today without having to do one of the ‘classics’ –Earthsea, Chrysalids, 1984…?
It seems to me that some e-mails have shared that they do not watch tv and have included the number of years they have been tv free as some badge of honour from that mindless, lifeless box called the television.
I think this is often the approach taken by people who step outside the mainstream in all kinds of areas… it’s not simply that they prefer not to, it’s the they come across as exalted in their superior choice –perhaps a defense mechanism to cover the sense of not fitting in, or to help withstand the pressure they feel to conform. I’ve seen the same expressions from people who don’t drive, people who have never held a driver’s licence, vegetarians, people who don’t use white sugar, people who don’t eat McD’s, people who have messy houses…it’s certainly not limited to people who elect not to watch broadcast tv (or any tv at all).
I think, in fact, it’s one inevitable result of a dogmatic approach. I am sure we’ve had the discussion before. I do find it curious that as unschoolers our minds are closed to this as something that doesn’t have to be good or bad but rather interesting. What are we (you) protecting your children from?
I find it interesting that the same people who ‘don’t watch tv’ have tvs at all, and spend a remarkable amount of time watching them, considering. I’m a bit of a literalist and am always surprised by people who feel tv is ‘wrong’ but who nevertheless watch whole series’ of programs, documentaries and movies sometimes far in excess of the amount I watch. I tend not to watch tv, and tend to wander away in the middle of movies –I’ve actually stopped going to theatres at all because I tend to want to get up and leave sometime shortly after the movie starts…with very rare exceptions. But I’m married to an addict who watches his regular soap operas (Stargate, Supernatural, Battlestar –man, I’m glad that melodrama’s over!) and gets bent if he can’t watch his taped shows (yay for video recorders!!) before the next ones have aired. He tapes, during the high season, 3-8 hours of tv a week, in addition to the viewing he does when he’s just sitting around. I’m often in the room for it, but will drift away in the middle of shows I’m watching –new CSI episodes, reruns of Inspector Morse I haven’t seen, etc., and forget to come back (although, being a true addict, dh tends to nag from the other room that I’m ‘missing it’ and it’s ‘back on.’ <G>). I currently have all of Richard Brannah’s Shakespeare movies on DVD and Coupling (a hilarious BBC comedy series) that I haven’t even put near the tv, much less watched — and I’ve had them for months.
Apropos of nothing in particular, I’m reminded of a family I knew that took off for the wilderness, to live close to the land and all that. After years of preparation and planning and explaining all the tremendous benefits that they’d be getting in leaving all us poor folks home in the pollution and crowded rat race and getting to return to the perfection of nature free from the fake economy, back to where people belong. Now, I’ve known a number of people who moved to farms and ranches and remote areas for any number of reasons, but this family was going because it was the intelligent, evolved, environmentally right thing to do.
It turns out, this family discovered, that philosophy isn’t very warm on cold nights when things go wrong and need to be fixed or replaced when there is no money, when it’s been colder than expected, or the wood gathered doesn’t burn as hot –or much faster than expected. Even adamant righteousness doesn’t stop kids from getting too sick for homeopathy and herbal remedies to work. I thought, all along, that they were too far removed from anyone who’d ever lived off the land, even for part of a year, to have anything like realistic expectation of just how dirty, hard and nasty that lifestyle tends to be, to say nothing of the ‘fun’ of cabin fever on the 50th day of rain and wind or snow in a row without power or novelty or anyone else to talk to. In less than 18 months, they were back to town, and if anything their lives became more mainstream than people who never think about the issues at all.
I’ve known what I’d lovingly call ‘rabid unschoolers’ who utterly refuse to do anything at all that even smells like a school might think it was an adequate idea… their basic approach being all reaction, no moderation. These are the same kind of folks as the rabid vegetarians who gorge on bacon when they fall off the wagon. As soon as they decide that unschooling (vegetarianism, no-tv, whatever) hasn’t only failed to solve every single one of their problems –but generated a pile of new ones they weren’t expecting– they throw the whole idea in, baby, bathwater, towel and all, join the yuppie rat race and wallow in all its comforts.
So, in a round-about way, as I’ve changed the subject line to mirror, I think the issue is dogma –not tv at all.
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