American Vidiot
TV or not TV, that is the question. For kids like 13-year-old Carson Tsang, it's a no brainer:
Television is important, the Visitacion Valley Middle School seventh-grader said. There's commercials. There's news. And there's animals in trouble.
This week, organizers of the seventh annual TV-Turnoff Week are hoping Carson and other kids will reconsider, or, if that's an impossibility, that their parents will do it for them, pulling the plug on the box for a week (or at least waiting until after the children have gone to bed).
Such an extreme measure may seem like cruel and unusual punishment for kids and parents both, but consider this: It's well documented that too much TV rots the brain.
OK, maybe not, but it does increase playground bullying by upwards of
50 percent. There's the health and fitness, family togetherness and time waste factors to
consider as well.
Taking a page from Philo Farnsworth:
There's nothing on it worthwhile, and we're not going to watch it in this household, and I don't want it in your intellectual diet.
And that's coming from the inventor himself.
School's challenge: No TV [SF Chronicle]
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