Idiot Box Addiction

This time, I have to start of with an humble acknowledgement. The theme-idea came as a sort of responsive-inspiration to what I tried to paint under “visualization”.
The linguistic decoration is done by me to what was contributed by my sister.

“Elders find fault with children, when they spend too much time watching TV”

But, the elders are sometimes unable to explain as to what is EXACTLY wrong with watching TV?

Advantages of TV comes to the mind…..
1. News channels—information.
2. Educative channels—knowledge.
3. Children’s story/cartoon channels—heroism inspiring with entertainment.
4. Etc.
Now,
To put it in a simple way,
We find that ‘excessive’ dependence on pocket calculators takes away the ability to do simple additions, multiplications etc , mentally! Another example, the Bank staff, now being used to ‘core-banking’ software on computers, would find it too cumbersome to even write simple domestic income-expense accounts! During the very brief parallel run period of manual ledgers and stand-alone computerized book-keeping in banks, a power-shutdown did not affect much the customer-service. But now the Banking activity comes to a stand-still even when there is a ‘system’ failure! No thought is given to do any spade-work even during the brief intervention period. No pacifying talk to customers even. Dependence on electronic gadgets affects everybody’s attitude. Just that the children are more vulnerable!
Once addicted to TV or even computer games, children find inanimate printed text books to be too dull. Even a blank word file or worksheet does not seem to attract them to try on some creativity! These gadgets by itself fail to ‘evoke’ strong visualization capabilities! All this happens only over a period of time, like some slow poison!
A new set of educational-video CDs have started appearing. Science lessons etc on Audio-Visual CDs. But they did not get the “expected” levels of popularity. People try to draw some ‘false’ consolation saying that very few can afford, that is why it is not so popular. But that does not seem to be so. Amongst those who did afford, the frequency of use is far below optimum. The teacher’s dependence on CDs tends to dull that human-emotional-touch & intense involvement, without which, the creativity-instincts of the child do not get really fired.
We remember the ‘sound-track’ of film on All India Radio. We could almost ‘visualize’ the films we never saw. We could see the heroes, heroines, and their emotions, listening to that sound track, eyes closed!
Video CDs do help a lot, but not as a ‘replacement’ to human involvement in teaching, but only as a supplemental support.
After all, powder milk or baby food can only supplement, but can NEVER replace mother’s milk!
Epilogue:
Has this visualization skill got something to do with communication skills? Or is it because of TOO MUCH of the present day pattern of multiple-choice-answers/objective-type test examinations, that the children mostly tend to give a “mono-syllable” reply (Hmm, yep, nope, etc) when replying to queries from their parents/elders?
Psn(9th April, 2009)