Kids Turning On

Is it any wonder that children, as they grow to adolescence, often turn out to be complete strangers to their dismayed parents? Why do an enormous number of young people from educated and middle-class families find it difficult or impossible to relate to anybody and therefore drop out?

Good questions, but the answers are hard to come by. Does the fault lie with strict parents or permissive teachers? Urban tensions or too much affluence? Last week Semanticist S. I. Hayakawa of San Francisco State College suggested that the answer to so much disaffection among the young is television. TV, said Hayakawa, addressing the annual convention of the American Psychological Association in his home town, is a "powerful sorcerer." It can bewitch children into becoming alienated and rebellious dropouts or even drug addicts. "Parents and relatives and teachers may talk to them, but the children find them sometimes censorious, often dull. The child who watches television for four hours daily between the ages of three and 18 spends something like 22,000 hours in passive contemplation of the screen--hours stolen from the time needed to learn to relate to siblings, playmates, parents, grandparents, or strangers."

And what about the influence of commercials? They teach, says Hayakawa, "that there is an instant, simple solution to all problems. Acid indigestion can be relieved with Alka-Seltzer; unpopularity can be overcome by using Ban; feelings of sexual inadequacy can be banished by buying a new Mustang, which will transform you into an instant Casanova." Even TV documentaries, "offer neat wrap-ups of complex events." Yet, "the world makes all sorts of demands the television set never told you about, such as study, patience, hard work, and a long apprenticeship in a trade or profession, before you may enjoy what the world has to offer." As a result, the kids, "missing the pleasant fantasies they enjoyed when they turned on the set, 'turn on' in other ways . . . passively waiting for something beautiful to happen."

Having unburdened himself of all that, Hayakawa hastened to add that he had not intended to make a "terrible condemnation of television." After all, he said, it is "a wonderful instrument of communication, perhaps more effective than any in the history of the world. There are no villains in this story. We are all simply victims of the unforeseen consequences of a technological revolution."

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