BORED OF EDUCATION : THE IDIOT BOX

 

BORED OF EDUCATION? : THE IDIOT BOX
by Paul Schroeder

Another September and with it, the culture  shock of Summer’s end and like a broken record, school beginning anew ;  outside of the tall windows of my Senior Literature class, the trees were dropping their September alphabets.

“With the power invested, in me, in this state of intoxication, I pronounce you student and book!”

Anthologies of World Literature, tomes four inches thick, were distributed by chagrined monitors.

“Do we have to bring these in every day?”

My students groaned.

I asked them pointedly, “If college IS the next step for all of you, will years of watching television make you unable to compete with students who love to read?”

“200 pages a week of reading, will be assigned, in your Freshman year, readings from an amalgam of broad spectrum required Liberal Arts courses in: English Literature, Classical Civilization, American History, Philosophy and Psychology.

They were now clearly distressed.

“Everything that you’ve endured in twelve years of education, has been just simple preparation for what you face next year, in schooling.”

“What happens if you are kicked out of college and you end up in your mother’s kitchen and she says,”What are you doing, here?”

“What are you then going to say?”

“If you’re watching television, now, instead of assigned readings, you’ll be on your couch, and watching television, for the rest of your life.”

I had to scare them into thinking.

“Has watching too much television and hating to read, already sabotaged your future?”

They looked vaguely worried.

I tried another tack.

” Can you be “dumbed down”?

They refused to accept that idea.

I asked them

what they thought could happen to a nation of people, by  government, if rather

than read, they were addicted to nightly series of reality shows and  sit-coms ?”

“If a nation is only as smart as its citizens, can a nation be destroyed by avoiding reading, by its love for watching simple plots filled with silly, banal characters?

“Like the mystery of a contagion of yawns in a room, television scenarios that ARE stupid, SEEM funny,  because they’re surrounded by synthetic, plugged-in laugh- tracks.”

They were listening and thinking.

“Those background plugged-in laughs, like the trigger of yawning when someone else yawns, makes you grin, in a sympathetic type of mind control.”

“When you go home, listen to the conversations on your favorite shows and block out the laugh track, by actively ignoring it.”

” How can minds who’ve dwelled on television for years, be able to do college work, to struggle to understand an oblique idea written in a paragraph, a dancing linear line, on a white page?”

I assured them that if they were to survive college, they must now become devout and eclectic readers.

Tonight’s assignment is to try to feel insulted,

by television’s use of
“plugged-in laughs”,  from audiences who were never there.

“A smart person evolves to resent  television’s scheming, its subliminal attempt to ‘force’ a laugh from us by using  electronically plugged in laughs”.

“A trick played on the conscious mind, makes one smile at  banal, unfunny situations , common to all sit-coms.”

None of the spoken lines, I dared them, are  funny enough to deserve such laughs.

Students in their senior year then named five situation comedies that they watched each night; I gave a homework assignment, a field experiment:

They were to watch any two favorite situation comedies, but were directed to be aware of background laughs, to ignore and remove the ‘laugh-track’, from their minds.

By being aware of the artificial  laughs, they were then to to ‘weigh’ how funny the ” lines” actually were.

By the third day of discussion about watching television and the promise of carrying fat anthologies, they had found that
television comedy that had earlier made them smile and grin, wasn’t funny at all, when viewed without that background plugged-in laugh -track.

In the coming weeks of reading World Literature, I brought in DVD  filmed copies of sit-com shows with edited out laugh tracks.

Critical awareness quickly grew, in class, of sit-coms’ forced subliminal control, a manipulation that they now resented, but one that had succeeded with them, earlier.

Now, they felt disappointed but also felt a little smarter..

I told them that “Mash”, the series, had been shown in England without the laugh track heard in America, and had succeeded, as a sitcom on its own funny merits, oddly benefiting from the lack of a laugh track.

The British knew and didn’t need to be told what was funny.

But now, how to encourage them that the dancing linear line, in reading books, was also pleasant and superior to the idiot box?

Reading was work and sitcoms were mental Valium.

I deeply knew  how  most students, in their senior year, felt about school and the reading of books, for the most part.

Having taught for thirty-five years, to motivate minds, I once stumbled across a desk -carved graffiti graphic,  succinct and apt, in its genuine emotion about school, for

within the face of a drawn tombstone, with set flowers on both sides of the gravestone, read:

R.I.P. :

“This is Dedicated

To All of Those

Who Died,

Waiting, for the bell to ring…”