Page 529 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

0 | Telev s on n Schools

Teachers, the Media Education Foundation, and the American Academy of Pe-
diatrics). Resistance has also been expressed at the level of school governance:
both New York and California school systems banned Channel One from their
public schools, though California later lifted its ban.
The criticisms of Channel One extend beyond the advertising embedded in
their programs. Many have argued that the programs do not represent serious
educational content and that less than half of the material is actually news-
related. And some feel strongly that Channel One represents a model of educa-
tion that is authoritarian, taking from educators the responsibility for making
decisions about how and what to teach their students. Medical and parent groups
have objected to the lifestyle and dietary models promoted by the program.
In light of this criticism and organized opposition, it is striking that Chan-
nel One has been able to gain such broad penetration within U.S. schools. It is
worth noting that the rise of Channel One was coincident with several other
tendencies that have placed pressure on schools, perhaps influencing them to
negotiate agreements with private businesses that would have seemed unlikely
in the past. These include the advocacy of school choice and voucher systems
that allow families to opt out of the public system and shift tax dollars to private
schools; the increasing popularity of home schooling; and the proliferation of
commercially run for-profit charter schools.

ConCLusion

Debates over television’s place in classrooms and schools continues, in large
part because television represents so many different things to different people:
to some, it offers solutions to educational dilemmas; to others it promises to
offer the very future of education; while to others its mode of delivery and its
preferred images represent an apotheosis of education. Debates over television
in schools are, therefore, effectively debates over what both education and televi-
sion are, and, importantly, what they should or could be.

see also Advertising and Persuasion; Children and Effects; Digital Divide; Hy-
percommercialism; Media Literacy; Product Placement; Public Access Television;
Public Broadcasting Service; Youth and Media Use.
Further reading: Aronowitz, Stanley, and Henry Giroux. Postmodern Education: Politics, Cul-
ture, and Social Criticism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991; Boddy, Wil-
liam. “The Beginnings of American Television.” In Television: An International History,
ed. Anthony Smith. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995; Buckingham, David. After
the Death of Childhood: Growing Up in the Age of Electronic Media. Cambridge, MA: Pol-
ity, 2000; Buckingham, David, and Julian Sefton-Green. Cultural Studies Goes to School:
Reading and Teaching Popular Media. London: Taylor and Francis, 1994; Clark, Richard.
Learning From Media: Arguments, Analysis and Evidence. Charlotte, NC: Information
Age Publishing, 2003; Cuban, Larry. Teachers and Machines: The Classroom Use of Tech-
nology Since 1920. New York: Teachers College Press, 1986; De Vaney, Ann, ed. Watching
Channel One: The Convergence of Students, Technology and Private Business. Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1994; Goldfarb, Brian. Visual Pedagogy: Media Cultures
in and beyond the Classroom. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001; Goodman,