We have been told so often that television dominates our minds, lifestyle choices and political behavior that we believe the telling without conscious choice, without critical attention. It is an assertion that operates on a level analogous to myth itself. Perhaps no aspect of our obsession with the power of TV is more traumatizing than the oft-quoted figures that supposedly prove our children spend thousands of hours before the TV set, presumably wiring themselves into lifelong illiteracy.

The myth maintains with particular insistence that TV controls unformed minds, luring children to worship comic-book superstars and to plague their parents for flashy products beamed at them in endlessly vulgarized commercials. According to the myth, television is the hypnotic cause for the almost unbroken decline in literacy and arithmetic skills reflected since 1963 in slumping test scores, especially on the Scholastic Aptitude Test given each year to potential college freshmen.

When well-meaning critics find TV at the core of a problem like the intellectual shortcomings of our youth, they indirectly enhance the value of every televised minute no matter what is on or who is watching. In this equation, TV, even in its shallowest moments, has a more profound impact on the child than what is \o7 real\f7 : the defining power of history, of personal heritage, of income, of competing attractions and, most of all, of the obdurate powers of resistance in every human mind. But in truth, evidence of our resistance to the omnipotence of television extends all the way down to our earliest years, to those moments in childhood when we are supposedly transfixed by TV.

THE MYTH THAT TV NUMBS STUDENTS AND DESTROYS THEIR IMAGINATION bares its fangs most blatantly when its disciples repeat over and over that American students spend more hours in front of televisions than in front of teachers, that they watch TV more than they read books. The myth makers deluge us with frightening figures that are often exaggerated and supported by only the barest references to their sources.