A new view on TV
It didn't take long after America started tuning in to television
that people started to worry about what it was doing to children.
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Television might actually have a positive effect on children’s
cognitive ability |
"When it offers a daily diet of Western pictures and vaudeville by
the hour, television often seems destined to entertain the child into a
state of mental paralysis," wrote The New York Times in 1949.
A generation later, the Scholastic Aptitude Test scores of
college-bound teenagers had fallen significantly. A 1977 panel appointed
by the College Entrance Examination Board suggested television bore some
blame for the drop.
Indeed, the decline began in the mid-1960s, just as the first
students heavily exposed to TV took their SATs.
But University of Chicago Graduate School of Business economists
Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro aren't sure that TV has been all that
bad for kids.
In a paper published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics this year,
they presented a series of analyses that showed that the advent of
television might actually have had a positive effect on children's
cognitive ability.
The two are part of a tight-knit group of young economists using
statistical techniques to examine how television affects society.
The group's research suggests TV enabled an earlier generation of
American children in non-English-speaking households to do better in
school, helped rural Indian women to become more independent and
contributed to lowering Brazil's fertility rate.
Wall Street Journal
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