Educational Television

Educational television in Thousand Oaks went on the air Thursday, the culmination of a 10-year cooperative effort among area public and private schools. Educational Television for the Conejo airs on Channel 59 through Ventura County and Falcon cable companies, offering a bulletin board of activities in Conejo Valley schools for the first 30 to 45 days. The channel will air in Thousand Oaks, Westlake Village, Agoura, Newbury Park and Calabasas.

Rules proposed Friday by the Federal Communications Commission would require broadcasters to air at least three hours of children's educational television programs each week. The proposed rules also would limit on-air broadcasters' use of characters such as Viacom Inc.'s SpongeBob SquarePants to hawk products on the Internet during TV shows. The rules, recommended as part of a three-year transition to digital broadcasting in the U.S., don't apply to cable or satellite TV channels.

Educational television began service this week in Calabasas, Agoura, Westlake Village and parts of eastern Ventura County, culminating a 10-year cooperative effort among area public and private schools. Educational Television for the Conejo is carried on Channel 59 through Ventura County and Falcon cable companies, offering a bulletin board of activities in Conejo Valley schools for the first 30 to 45 days.

Viacom Inc. has asked a federal court to overturn new rules requiring more educational TV programs for children and setting tighter limits on kids' exposure to advertising in the age of digital television. The suit comes a week after a group of entertainment companies, including the Walt Disney Co. and General Electric Co.'s NBC Universal Inc., asked the Federal Communications Commission to postpone the rules, which were approved last year and go into effect in January.

Lewis Arnold Pike, a nutritionist and pioneer in educational television in Southern California, died May 31 of pneumonia at Kaiser Permanente Hospital in Woodland Hills. He was 82. Working alongside early broadcasters like veteran KTLA newscaster Stan Chambers, Pike began his television career in the 1950s producing instructional shows for children.

Federal regulations that would push TV stations to air at least three hours a week of educational programming for children seemed virtually guaranteed Friday after Federal Communications Commissioner James Quello said he will vote in favor of them. "It's time for us to get out of this deadlock," Quello said in an interview. "Three hours a week is a reasonable amount. I will go along with a [license] processing guideline."

Declaring that the nation has entered a "Clinton-Gore era" in children's programming, members of a congressional committee chastised television broadcasters Wednesday for failing to provide educational programming for young people. Under the Children's Television Act of 1990--which originated in the same committee--television broadcasters were ordered to produce a certain amount of "educational and informative" programming, or risk losing their broadcast licenses.

For most of the 20th Century, your government has been the enemy of the people. Most of your choices about where you will live, and how, have been made for you by fiat. Freedom of speech and religion are oxymorons. So in moving to the United States, the psychological adjustments are enormous. But that's not all: It turns out that much of what you've been told about the United States by Russian TV is wrong.

Producers of prime-time television series and representatives from nearly every segment of the Hollywood television establishment were implored Monday to use the power of their medium to help deal with the increasing crisis in American education.

Southland children know that if they want to watch "Sesame Street" weekend mornings, all they must do is tune in to KCET-TV Channel 28 at 6:30 a.m. But if perchance they flick the TV on a little earlier, they might feel they're watching their favorite show through the looking glass. Yes, there's a funky bird that looks like Big Bird, but he's a parrot and he's green. There are some Muppets that bear resemblance to the familiar Elmo and Oscar, but they have names like Pancho and Lola.

The proposed sale of financially strapped KOCE-TV Channel 50, Orange County's only public television station, has attracted bids from 10 entities -- including Christian powerhouse Trinity Broadcasting Network -- setting the stage for a potentially heated debate over the future of the 30-year-old station.

"My child isn't going to watch that stuff," my family heard me say more than once. But the pressure is high. Disney, Pokemon, Power Rangers: An endless list of television characters fills the toy stores and fast food eateries (there's a topic). Come watch me, come play with me, they beckon to children. Can even parents resist the temptation of tuning them in? "Scooby-Doo" is still my favorite.

Parents, heads up: NBC is offering your children an educational opportunity this morning. It's called "NBA: Inside Stuff," and it teaches "peaceful conflict resolutions and global awareness." Or maybe they've already caught the Saturday morning music videos that a San Francisco station says give children an appreciation for the "multicultural aspect of music and the world around them."

Lewis Arnold Pike, a nutritionist and pioneer in educational television in Southern California, died May 31 of pneumonia at Kaiser Permanente Hospital in Woodland Hills. He was 82. Working alongside early broadcasters like veteran KTLA newscaster Stan Chambers, Pike began his television career in the 1950s producing instructional shows for children.

The entrepreneurial itch came to Barbara Bentree four years ago out of her conviction that the wrong people did children's television. At the time she worked as a private-school music teacher and freelance television musical director, and she believed that when children's programming didn't bombard kids with commercial messages, it bored them. She thought she could do better. Her idea--unformed, at first--was to start a company, Turtle Creek Productions Inc., (http://www.turtlecreekproductions.

About 50 children at Rossmoor Elementary School in Los Alamitos are logging on to the Internet, writing critiques about their favorite educational television shows once every couple of weeks and then sending them off to Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. On the receiving end is psychology professor Sandra Calvert, who can't wait to read them.

While President Clinton and the national television networks congratulate themselves on their pact to air three hours of instructional programming a week, this town's educational leaders have done them one better.

"Mathematics can be as beautiful as sculpture," Jim Blinn, a pioneer of computer graphics, once told graduating students at New York's Parsons School of Design. For Blinn and others in his field, mathematics is sculpture. Chipping away at equations and shaping chunks of computer code, they create the virtual images used in everything from NASA flight simulations to Hollywood movies.

There was a certain degree of angst when the Western football team assembled to watch videotape of its last-second loss to El Toro the night before. From accounts on both sides of the field, the Pioneers appeared to have scored the winning touchdown with 53 seconds left. But after some delay, referees waved off Jason Baughman's 27-yard pass to receiver Will Ruffin, saying that Ruffin stepped out of bounds before entering the end zone.