I. Say whether the following statements are true or false. Develop the ideas you agree with.

1. Professor Postman assesses that the influence of television on children is disastrous.

2. Television is responsible for the disappearing of the dividing line between childhood and | adulthood.

3. Television is more important than school.

4. Children watch mostly morning programmes.

5. Television is primarily an entertainment medium.

6. On television the picture is far more important than the word.

7. Television can hardly teach a child to think and convey ideas the way print does.

8. Television is intelligible to many more people than the book.

9. The more children sit in front of the television, the more they know.

10. Watching TV is a passive experience.

II. Television's valuable capacity is to involve people emotionally in its pictures.

Television stimulates learning by making it a pleasure.

The word and all it stands for loses prestige, power and relevance in the audio-visual work

Do you agree with everything Professor Postman maintains in his interview?

Is television's impact only disastrous?

What advantages of television do you see in educating children?

Draw up of positive influences of television on children.

Here is something for a start list:

• TV programmes done with good taste and imagination can actually stimulate a child’s creativity.

• Television facilitates the child's entrance into the world of the adult.

• Seeing is the primary source of information and experience for a young child ...

• Read an article which treats of the influence of television on children's physical and ment health. Formulate the main points in English and write them down.

Vocabulary to the text What Dumbo Can Teach Your Kids

to decline - ухудшаться

literacy - грамотность

slatternly [slætənli] неаккуратный

to plonk down - уронить, бросить (что-л. тяжёлое)

to impart lessons - сообщать, передавать

toddler - ребёнок, начинающий ходить

nightshade - белладонна

to airbrush - ретушировать

poignant [poinjənt] трогательный, берущий за душу

snobbery - снобизм

coincidence [kəu^|insidəns] совпадение

to conjure up [k∆nd3ə] сделать как по волшебству

desensitize [di:^|sensitaiz] снижать чувствительность

tantrum [tæntrəm] приступ гнева

to creep - красться; подкрадываться

ingenuity [ind3i^|nju:əti] изобретательность, находчивость

bully – задира

What dumbo can teach your kids

PRE-READING TASK

I. Discuss the following: do you like cartoons? Why/why not? What are you favourite Disney films? Has your attitude to them changed since you were a child? Do you consider it vitally important that children should watch cartoons? Why/why not?

Having children brings out the snob and the puritan in a lot of people, and nowhere is this more clearly seen than in attitudes to videos.

Videos, cartoons in particular, have been blamed for our children's loss of innocence, declining literacy and inability to concentrate. Mothers who plonk their children down to watch one are condemned as lazy and slatternly. Yet, properly used, videos can teach a child as nothing else can.

"You can't make a blanket condemnation of videos," says Professor Elizabeth Newsons, an expert in child developmental psychology. "You shouldn't plonk a child down in front of a new video and walk away — that's stupid. But the videos that arouse compassion, and allow a child to flirt with fear, can be very positive."

Some videos are too frightening or violent for a particular age: the hyenas in The Lion King and Cruella de Vile in 101 Dalmatians are too much for many a three to four year old to cope with. Taken slowly, however, they can help a child to master fear (my four-year-old daughter will now eat anything with "hyena blood" ketchup), and impart life-saving lessons. Think of Snow White. How can books explain what poison does? At an age where a two year old toddles off and picks up a berry from some deadly nightshade, or wants to take sweets from a stranger, books are still talking about a world in which the worst thing that can happen is to be put in a pie by Mr McGregor. Yet for a child to see the wicked witch making the poisonous apple for Snow White is one of the most dramatic ways of talking to him in language he can grasp.

There are those who think it wrong to introduce a child to any concept of danger or threat, whether this is in videos or in Grimm's Fairy Tales. They wish to protect a child externally, rather than internally, to keep a child in blissful ignorance. Indeed it is a delicate balance between needlessly scaring a child and making him or her streetwise.

Once upon a time, I too despised videos, especially Disney ones. Cute, whimsical, coy, they seemed to air-brush everything savage and real out of life - pretending a fox and a hound could be friends, that a lion could be vegetarian, that an elephant could fly. Then I saw them again with my eldest and was amazed, not just by the superb graphics, but by the scripts. Could anything be more poignant than Dumbo separated from his mother? Or more brave than Thomas the alley cat when he leaps into the river to save a kitten in The Aristocats? Or more touching than Grommit's devotion to Wallace in The Wrong Trousers? Again and again, cartoons address a child's deepest fears and problems, and do it in a much more complex way than may at first appear.

Where cartoons use fairy tales, they almost always improve them. Grimm's Snow White is irritatingly stupid in being fooled three times by the wicked Queen; the dwarves are already competent house-keepers. Disney's version develops both Snow White and the dwarves. In fact, it's they who really change in Snow White — they go from being terrified of the "monster" sleeping in their beds to heroically chasing the witch to her death.

The best videos, unlike most fairy tales, also challenge snobbery on all fronts. "Dumbo comes straight out of The Ugly Duckling," says Professor Newsons, "but the story is better. He doesn't have to change into a beautiful swan to be valued - he finds that big ears are useful. What you get is the message that people can do all kinds of things if they put their minds to it. That's an important message to give a child, who often feels powerless."

It is perhaps no coincidence that many of these cartoons are American, for the Americans have a strong belief in the power of the individual to change their destiny. What counts is courage, kindness and love. Aladdin, the poor "street rat", has to find out that his princess loves him for himself, not for the riches the genie of the lamp can conjure up for him. When humans fail them, Pongo and Perdita take on the demonic power of Cruella de Vile, and rescue an entire tribe of puppies. Even Cinderella, given the magic coach and gown, ultimately depends on the mice she has befriended to free her from her wicked stepmother. Where traditional fairy tales give their heroes and heroines special gifts to help them overcome difficulties, cartoons tell us that these gifts are inside our own hearts, if only we can find them.

In Beauty and the Beast, arguably the best cartoon film ever made, this is developed even further. The Beast begins, like the worst kind of child (he's 11, in fact), "spoilt, selfish and unkind". In order for Belle to learn to love him, he has to control both his temper and his selfishness - a much bigger and deeper journey than overcoming Belle's traditional fear.

The fact that the Beast's journey towards becoming civilised is very funny doesn't let us forget the real damage bad nature can do: the Beast's kingdom and castle, like the family of a seriously spoilt child, is made tense and wintery patrolled by storms and terrifying wolves. Only when he learns to love and be loveable, can life return. This as much as the idea that love can literally bring someone back from the dead, is the real climax of Beauty and the Beast. Its deeper meanings may be beyond a child but, for someone just out of having tantrums, it's a convincing way to demonstrate the destructiveness of anger and selfishness.

The Lion King, though probably the scariest, is also the only animated film to tackle the concept of death in a positive way (Bambi is too painful, and the one I would ban). Mufasa's murder is agonisingly painful, but the fact that he is reborn in his son and, in a moment of crisis, returns in spirit to guide Simba, is fascinating to a young child.

"The important thing is that a cartoon shouldn't desensitise a child or kill their sense of compassion," says Newsons. "The message that terrible things happen, but that you can overcome them is reasonable. There's the possibility of nightmares, but the message behind films like Power Rangers, where problems are solved by violence, is far more worrying."

Less deep, but more complicated ideas are also made easy for a child to grasp. My daughter is too young to have The Wind in the Willows read to her — but the brilliant Carlton video, with Rik Mayall as Mr Toad and Alan Bennett as Mole, not only has her in fits of giggles, but explains why, for instance, you mustn't steal. Toad's trial and imprisonment for the theft of a motor car is just grim enough to explain what a prison is.

The Wrong Trousers with Wallace and Grommit is also about crime and punishment -and the importance of having a loyal friend to stand by you in times of trouble. At the age when children start to push out the boundaries of their world and make friends, this is one of the most important concepts you could hand on to a small, social (or even unsocial) person. Friendship, says The Wrong Trousers is your only defence when things go wrong — and, when things go right, adds to contentment. The loyal, affectionate, but demanding relationships between characters such as Wallace and Grommit, Mole and Ratty, and Simba, Pomba and Timon is something a child can absorb at just the right moment.

Videos, far from being brain-rot, are the modern equivalent of medieval morality plays. Far from being despised, they should be part of any child's imaginative life. They teach us that love, ingenuity and courage can overcome bullies and creeps; that generosity, common than vanity and selfishness and, above all, they are really, on the 1,000th viewing, great fun.

Amanda Craig's new novel, A Vicious Circle, sense and kindness are better ways of surviving is out soon.

"SHE"

WORD STUDY