levision culture of slander and aspersion. Television s apparentattachment to "everything dumb" sparked a complaint from Newsweek that "Stupidity, served with knowing intelligence, is nowTV s answer to real smarts," implying that sarcasm is the real indication of brilliance (3) Esquire s Jamie Malanowski agrees byconcluding, "So this is what we ve come to: smart people then matched quotes from Shakespeare; smart people now matchquotes from Seinfeld." (3)Many people may find it hard to imagine a world without television. The conservatives who despise and ridicule TV concentrate on"cultural literacy" while overlooking actual literacy, which means they are only focusing on the popular ideas that are stupid insteadof focusing on the intelligent ideas that are popular. The problem of student illiteracy is a constant problem with a long history, notnecessarily a crisis. However, critics of TV are ignoring real problems that are more appropriately labeled, "crises," than suchconservative anxieties like political correctness, radical professors, and the inability of students to quote Shakespeare.Media critics are also concerned with free speech issues, but they will deny academic freedom to scholars who disagree withthem. They ridicule humanistic investigation into music, video, and film, denouncing media studies and the academic freedomnecessary to conduct such studies. If students cannot depend on the freedom to explore media like movies and television, how canthey be exposed to everything technology today has to offer? Taking away these resources, as some critics have suggested, mayprove to be just another form of censorship. Children will have their ideas decided for them.The goal of skeptics who consider television a threat to education should be to utilize television and think of it instead as a path to amore enhanced form of learning. If kids are so amazed and influenced by television, why not educate them while they arewatching? The pot...
