One of the common defenses I’ve seen of lesser-regarded young adult fiction (for example, Twilight) is that “at least kids are reading, rather than watching television.” This is certainly true, but I fail to see how getting kids to read is, in itself, a particularly important goal. We certainly want kids reading important and challenging works, both fiction and nonfiction, and I’ll concede that you can probably find more of those in written form than video. However, I’d much rather that my hypothetical kid watch a Frontline documentary or a Shakespeare adaptation than some pulp novel. Is this preference mistaken, or misguided? Because if not, it certainly seems that celebrating pulp novels for getting kids to read pulp novels misses the point - it encourages recreational activity that isn’t intrinsically more valuable than anything else.
Reading does require more active mental engagement than watching TV. That doesn’t mean that TV can’t be mentally engaging, but it’s possible to totally zone out with TV in a way that’s hard to do even with really trashy fiction.
Of course, videogames are even more mentally engaging than books. That’s why I let my kids play them all the time. My son taught himself to read by playing Pokemon … . 
I’m not sure that’s true. It’s certainly just as easy to zone out reading Charlaine Harris as it is to zone out watching television, and good television engages me way more than bad books do. Better to watch Nova than read Dan Brown. Hell, better to watch Buffy than read Dan Brown.
Better to take a swift kick to the groin than read Dan Brown …
Hey, this is fun!
For one thing, they’ll never realize if they like it if they don’t try it - that’s one reason why it’s a good reason to expose kids to a bit of everything. And forcing them to read in school doesn’t work well for that; I love to read, but hated almost everything they made us read in school. They need the experience of reading as something other than “that really boring stuff they forced us to do in school”.
Television on the other had is pervasive enough it doesn’t need any help.
But is good television sufficiently pervasive? I’m not sure that kids will turn on Frontline or Nova without a bit of nudging. And that’s sort of my question, in a nutshell - would it be reasonable for a parent to say “Put down that trashy novel and turn on the television, Frontline’s doing an episode on foreclosure reform”?
Hard to say – even though I’d say your examples are not exactly comparable; i.e. reading fiction and watching science show are two different things regardless of the medium so I’ll be comparing content.
At my age I still cannot believe that people can watch Gray’s Anatomy dialogs and not burst laughing so I may not be the best to answer this question (because ANYTHING is better than most TV fiction series). However, as it was mentioned, reading simply engages different cognitive and brain functions and the hope is that, eventually, kids themselves will move on to something more challenging. However, don’t expect the quantity of kids interested in quality stuff to increase today as it was very low when I was in high school (20 years ago). And I’m sure that at that time there were people decrying the state of the reading good stuff affairs.
So I vote for reading…
A kid who can read juvenile fiction can ALSO read instruction manual, and it can be argued, with much more ease and skill than one for whom reading is always associated with “school” or “work.” So … yes, encouraging kids to read is good. Also, there is a lot of information buried even in works of fiction. Finally, I think there has been evidence that the mental processes involved in reading, even light fiction, are more conducive to rational thought than the mental processes associated with watching TV or movies. Video games … different, I guess. FPSs even can involve a certain amount of logic and puzzle solving as you figure out how to survive the game and win it. Some games definitely give you brain a workout.
I guess it boils down to a parent’s opinion of what is “good” or “important.”
Personally, I’d rather the child read Twilight over sensationalized documentaries such as Frontline. (I say that as a person who enjoys a lot of documentaries including a ton of Frontline episodes.)
Frontline has similar problems to most other documentaries: flawed use of statistics, stating correlation as causation, etc. If a child went through several months of rigorous study on argumentation and critical analysis (including statistics), maybe I’d let him watch Frontline. Some of the other documentaries (Nova or National Geographic) covering more neutral subjects such as animals or astronomy are probably ok but I think kids already get a ton of that during school hours.
Test your child on the proposed “educational” TV show. Let him watch an episode of Frontline. After it’s over, ask him for 10 things that was mentioned that had bad logic, flawed statistics, or spurious evidence. If the child can’t evaluate it on those terms, treat Frontline the same as pornography.
Disclaimer: I work in educational publishing, so am probably biased. That said.
Everything you read as a kid is not only reading but also practice for other reading (and writing). Even in *Twilight *or other trashy romance novels, a kid is likely to encounter at least a few new vocabulary words or unfamiliar sentence constructions, as well as repeats of words and constructions that they haven’t mastered yet.
The nature of reading is fundamentally different from that of viewing TV, in that it’s tough (not impossible, maybe, but pretty darn hard) to read without understanding anything of what you read, while it’s perfectly possible to watch TV with little or no conscious engagement. Reading is more active while watching is more passive.
It’s also different in that reading is universally recognized as a necessary life and job skill, while TV watching is not. You could (and I would) argue that visual *literacy *is almost as important a life skill as written literacy now, but again, due to the nature of the activity, you can passively watch TV twelve hours a day all your life and develop minimal visual literacy, while it’s much harder to do the same with reading.
So this is all talking about the skills used rather than the content. On the other hand, I think you’re absolutely right to imply that the content of many books is not superior to the content of many movies and shows.
I would argue that reading strengthens comprehension and language skills. Television consists almost completely of spoken dialogue, and often ignores language rules. Written narration, on the other hand, typically follows language rules and also tends to include a more impressive vocabulary.
If you’ll add “prescriptive” to “language rules,” I’d agree, but please note that spoken language adheres to language rules too – otherwise, you wouldn’t be able to make any sense of it. To that end, if your spoken language skills need work, watching TV in the target language may help strengthen them – though I believe, based on limited experience as an ESL coach, that radio works better for this until your proficiency level is high, because people on radio enunciate so much more clearly.
In other words, if your goal is to read formal English, read more formal English. If your goal is to understand informal spoken English, listen to more informal spoken English. Fewer native-born US kids need practice in informal spoken English, while many need it in formal written English.
This strikes me as a perhaps unrealistically high standard for most children, but a good idea for teens or maybe gifted tweens. But I’d do something similar with Twilight: “Look, kid, you can read the damn book if you want to, but when you’re done we’re going to have a discussion about gender roles, healthy relationships, plot structure, propaganda, appropriation of culture, and maybe derivative art.”
Some spoken language adheres to the rules, but not all. Maybe not even most. Double negatives, improper verb tense and generally poor grammar are pretty common in TV dialogue.
Maybe not foreclosure reform, but if the subject were something my kid had an interest in, I’d definitely do this. For instance, if we’d recently had a “family discussion” about why our family doesn’t choose to shop at Walmart including that bike my kid wants so much, I’d make him put down whatever he was reading (homework deadlines aside) to watch a *Frontline *on the subject. Including a Ruminator-style follow-up discussion on how *Frontline *may or may not have stretched a point to make the 'Mart look bad, etc.
I’ll drop it as OT after this post, but again, you’re correct if “the rules” are “rules” in a prescriptive sense only. Barring people who are still learning a language (or pretending to for comic effect on TV), spoken “rule breaking” such as double negatives follows predictable, orderly, logical patterns and makes perfect sense. Much, if not most, of the study of linguistics is devoted to understanding the patterns and rules of natural speech rather than “formal” language, which can be said to be artificial and of recent invention.
[RIGHT]–sez emmaliminal, the professional prescriptivist married to a professional descriptivist.[/RIGHT]
I guess I don’t fear Twilight because the book is embedded in a universe of fantastical fiction. The child knows it’s fake before he begins reading the 1st page. Likewise, if he reads a Superman comic, I don’t worry that his intrinsic sense of physics and gravity will get warped such that he’ll try to jump off the roof of a house or stop a moving car.
On the other hand, documentaries like Frontline are intended to be serious and authoritative. In other words, it’s supposedly conveying The Truth.
I’m not a child psychologist but to me, there seems to be an internal mental switch regarding fiction vs non-fiction. I routinely hear kids pick apart plot holes and inconsistencies in fictional books & movies but don’t have the same level skillset with analyzing documentaries. The documentaries “look real” so they must be real.
Would I lose sleep and ban TV if my child happen to catch a glimpse of Frontline? No, but I also wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s superior to reading Twilight. That’s overstating it, imo.
(I haven’t actually read Twilight. I’m assuming is no better or worse than the stuff I read as a child: Charlie and Chocolate Factory, Spiderman, etc.)
It’s much, much worse*. And I get your point about what kids are skeptical about; what worries me about Twilight is not the plot holes, though I’d want to talk about them too, but the very common adulation for all things Twilight among kids – girls, mostly – of a certain impressionable age. Think less *Superman *and more, I dunno, maybe Chronicles of Narnia for a non-Christian household, or Phillip Pullman for a Christian one, if either of those series were as currently popular as, say, Spiderman was five years ago. Twilight’s not overtly religious or anti-religious, but it has, shall we say, core values which I do not find desirable.
- So bad, in fact, that I haven’t been able to make myself read more than excerpts, but if my kid wants to read it or its successor someday (he’s only 5 months old), I’ll read it cover-to-cover, I promise. Or [(cover-to-cover) x 4] in case of the Twilight series (shudder).
I think people who say this mean “not watching television at that moment” not that reading Twilight should replace all television watching.
Reading usually gives you the possibility of getting a much broader range of inputs than
TV, even in this 200 channel range. Reading gives you a much more in depth understanding of a subject than any documentary. Compare the book of “A Beautiful Mind” with the movie. For get the stuff they fictionalized for dramatic reasons. You have a much better understanding of Nash and Alicia from the book than the movie, however good it was.
Second, it is important for kids to learn how to communicate through writing. I bet everyone has written a sentence that didn’t sound right - you know this because you have read lots of sentences that were properly constructed. Now, if you plan to make films, watching them is pretty important, but that pretty rare.
Third, books force you to fill in a lot of the background, while movies and TV do it for you.
I agree that if you are learning a new spoken language, movies or TV shows in that language are a big plus. But so is reading in that language. We gave our daughter learning German a bunch of German DVDs. But she didn’t really learn German until she lived there for a year.
I haven’t read Twilight either, but I’d suspect that not many kids would start believing in vampires or werewolves because of it, no more than they would believe in Superman. But the gender relationship issues are a lot more subtle, and more believable, and so are more an issue.