TOO many of our children in Bahrain are spending too much time glued to their televisions!
“It rots the sense in the head!/ It kills imagination dead!/ It clogs and clutters up the mind!/ It makes a child so dull and blind/ He can no longer understand/ A fantasy, a fairyland!”
The children’s author Roald Dahl had strong opinions on television but his insistence that it makes people stupider has been hard to verify. Now there is evidence he was right.
When Norway introduced cable TV in the 1980s it rolled it out gradually. It also happened to record the IQ of the country’s male 18-year-olds when they entered national service. Some 30 years later researchers spotted a trend.
The earlier boys had been exposed to trashy TV the lower their IQ and the more likely they were to drop out of school. Figures were not available for girls, who did not do national service, but their school dropout rate was unchanged, suggesting, curiously, that they are more resistant to this particular type of mind-clogging.
Similar results have been found in Italy, another thin, mountainous country which was obliged to introduce commercial TV slowly. Watching bad telly does, it seems, make boys stupider. A possible reason was suggested by the Norway study. The more children watched, the less they read.
This finding would have pleased Dahl, whose poem went on to implore parents to throw away their television sets and instead “install a lovely bookshelf on the wall”. Of course Dahl’s suggestion may have been coloured by the fact that he made his living selling books.
In fact the study did not specify which reading material produces the cleverest children. But there can surely be little doubt as to the conclusion that future studies will reach.
T L
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