It`s Silly To Ban Tv-watching

January 07, 1985|By Andy Rooney.

The library in Farmington, Conn., a city of 17,000, has started a campaign to get people, especially children, to watch less television.

This makes as much sense as a television station organizing a campaign to get people to read fewer books. Barbara Gibson is director of the Farmington Library and if Barbara thinks all books are good and all television is bad, she hasn`t been to a bookstore lately. I can say with confidence that the percentage of junk in print is at least as high as the percentage of junk on television. Does she advise children not to read?

I`d suggest to the Farmington Library that it stop advocating not watching television at all and start trying to get kids to be more selective in their viewing. Every newspaper carries daily television listings. Farmington should suggest that kids set a television time limit for themselves. They`d decide they were going to watch television for two hours a day, perhaps. They wouldn`t sit down in front of the set and watch everything that came on. They`d select, in advance, what they were going to watch. They`d open the newspaper on the floor and mark, with a pencil, the things they wanted to see. Selective viewing, not a ban on viewing, would be the answer.

Nancy DeSalvo is the children`s librarian in Farmington. She says that when children spend too much time watching television, they aren`t living a normal life.

``Preschoolers have to conquer their world by playing,`` she says.

``They`re not playing when they sit in front of that television. They`re not mastering their world at all.``

That`s a pretty good statement, but of course kids aren`t playing when they`re reading books, either.

Helen McMullen, principal of the Noah Wallace elementary school in Farmington, is having teachers hand out ``I Pledge Not To Watch TV`` cards. I wish, instead, that she was asking children to watch the news on television. It`s the best way to get kids interested enough in the real world so they`ll read the newspaper for the full story when they grow up.

There`s too much that`s good on television to tell children not to watch it. You can`t expect television to be any better than our movies, our books, our clothes, our restaurants, our columnists or the classes in Helen McMullen`s elementary school.

Television has expanded, not contracted, children`s views of the world. Children know more about everything than pre-TV generations did. Even if you wish they didn`t know some of it, you have to believe that some of that knowledge is good. If you believe in information, you have to believe in television.

For all that`s wrong with television, there`s too much evidence that, overall, it has been an educating force in the world. The best thing about it is that it distributes information to everyone. Television isn`t fussy. It doesn`t limit itself to people with brains the way a good newspaper does.

Most of television is aimed at an audience of average, or less-than-average, intelligence. That`s because people with average intelligence will not watch a broadcast that calls for any thought. It is strange but true that, on the other hand, a lot of smart people do watch dumb television. I don`t know why that is.

Of course, there`s a lot of terrible television, and some kids watch too much of it. But to say they shouldn`t watch any is a silly, fake-intellectual suggestion. Television need not replace play or anything else. It is an added dimension in all our lives.