British Teachers Complain About TV
The history of education over the past one hundred years is the history of ongoing complaint concerning the impact of technology upon student learning. Julian Chapman, president of the UK National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers, believes teachers “struggle to complete with the sort of presentations seen on television.” He argues, “students’ concentration span appears to have been tailored to the sound and vision bite rather than the more rigorous process of in-depth learning.” Complaints concerning how the media impacts youth language can be traced to the 1930s film, “Dead End,” which was the first American film dealing extensively with slum children and their language. All the boys in the film were taken off the streets of New York City and spoke perfect New York slum dialect.
Chapman raises the issue of sound bites although email language most probably is equally as guilty in fostering short-hand reading and writing. The fist major exploration of media and youth violence in America was the Senator Kefauver hearings in the 1950s on the impact of comic books upon language and violence. Perhaps, there is further need for serious research into the developmental process of how media impacts youthful thinking and behavior. We now have a hundred years of movies and, most probably, are still unclear as to exactly how that medium has impacted the behavior of young people.
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