Behind the Tinsel Curtain, part two

The Trial of Socrates

Criticism in the Classroom

And to lead the examined life---the only kind worth living according to the philosopher--the adolescent must be led to examine those influences which shape him daily. He must learn to examine systematically, in short, the commercial mass media. For these influences literally create the moral and mental climate in which he lives. So far as I can see, the English classroom is the place in the secondary school where such an examination of values and thought should take place.

And to establish such a tradition of criticism would entail nothing more than an awareness on the part of the teacher of what her students were experiencing on the media and an occasional inclusion in the curriculum of printed materials on the newer media. Take the case of TV. It is the enfant terrible of the popular arts, and if one can be convinced that it should be examined in the classroom, then a fortiori the other popular arts have a place there too.

The first thing we can do in the case of TV is simply to list programs. The fact of choice is thus first made selfconscious. "Listenables and Lookables" in Scholastic Teacher or superior programs underlined in the local paper are possible approaches. The larger metropolitan areas usually have TV supplements, among the best being those of the New York Times and Herald Tribune. I sold copies of TV Guide to a fourth of my high school students, passing on to them the below-newsstand price that the magazine distributor was willing to extend us. Five minutes a week for previewing the best of next week's programs as summarized in TV Guide is a wise investment for any English teacher.

Reading John Crosby's better columns to a class prepares it for the idea of literate criticism of semi-literate programs. His articles on sob shows and repetitive panel shows proved very effective in the tenth grade. Goodman Ace's new collection of criticism from the Saturday Review, The Book of Little Knowledge: More Than You Want to Know About Television (Simon-Schuster, $3.00), is another excellent starting place. His spoofing of advertising and ratings and his defense of the writer will suggest to many of your students the importance of expecting quality from TV. It is a short step from your reading to them to their reading of criticism of all the popular arts from magazines and books in a classroom media library. The magazine Variety has a rare combination of raciness and good judgment that will appeal to advanced classes. The wonderful thing to remember is that you will have them reading and thinking about media of which they were formerly the supine victims.

Once the teacher has enabled the student to see the importance of picking and choosing, the offensive for excellence can be pushed forward. On a recent weekend, a TV viewer could have seen "The Caine Mutiny Court Martial" (CBS), "The Devil's Disciple" (NBC), "She Stoops to Conquer" (CBS), and "The Lavender Hill Mob" (ABC). Here is surely an embarrassment of riches. The hitch is this: If these cultural programs do not pay off, if enough people do not call for more, then we may revert to the wrestling match level of a few years ago. It seems to me that English teachers have a great deal at stake personally in the future of top quality programming.

What can an English teacher do to encourage creative programming ? By teaching the best programs, of course. But there is another dimension to our encouragement of excellence in the mass media. Tomorrow's Paddy Chayefskys and Robert Alan Arthurs are now in our classrooms. What have we done to help them understand the importance of artistic integrity in the popular arts? Do we make them feel that film and television deserve as much of their creativity as novel and lyric ?

One way to establish such a climate for excellence is to suggest that they read the comments of leading TV playwrights and directors on their crafts. William Kaufman has edited two slim, inexpensive volumes on these subjects that you might place in your classroom media library, How to Write for Television and How to Direct for Television (Hastings House, $2.50). Mature students will want to read the essays on the craft of TV drama in Paddy Chayefsky's collection of plays (Simon-Schuster, $3.75).

A practical way to sharpen your students' awareness of the special form of TV art is to have them make sample scripts, adapting short stories and dramas from their anthologies and staging them in video terms. You will find that their increased awareness of esthetic form will lead to a deeper appreciation of the traditional forms--fiction, poetry, drama. Multi-media translation of literary works is a technique recommended by Professor Marshall McLuhan of the University of Toronto. He conceives of the newer media as new languages which we must learn to master.

And just as we learn much from translating English into French and French into Latin, so will your students learn the languages of the newer media by seeing Herman Wouk's novel, The Caine Mutiny, undergo permutation as, successively, film, stage play, and TV presentation. But they must be taught to see these fine points, and only we can teach them. This teaching of preciseness and nuance is exactly what our profession has been doing right along. The emergence of the mass media has just complicated our task at the same time that it has opened brilliant new vistas of dramatic experience for our students.

Finally, a reactionary proposal. You will see a common strategy in my suggestions . They all included the use of printed aids to the newer media. Print alone will stop the teen-ager from his whirl of confusion long enough to achieve the necessary perspective. Printed aids are a long overdue complement to audio-visual aids for teaching the older forms of literature. Printed aids do two things for the student: (1) criticize mediocrity and (2) hold out a vision of excellence. Printed aids help the student to take the popular arts seriously; they have already taken him-as consumer-in dead seriousness. The urgency of the English teacher's responsibility to the popular arts comes from the fact that the student is unprotected. He desperately needs help only we can give him.

As English teachers, then, we must live in two worlds to be effective with frequent comparisons and contrasts in the English classroom. Moreover, this was for many students (particularly in the lower classes) their first extended writing experience involving the preparation of several units of material culminating in one long work; certainly for many it was the first extended writing experience which had maintained their interest at a reasonably high level. Those students participating in the project came to recognize the necessity for careful planning, much revision, and the need to objectify emotions and attitudes clearly if they are to be communicated successfully to another person. With this experience students also developed a new respect for the skill and craftsmanship of first-rate professional writers.

When one class read Walter Van Tilburg Clark's The Portable Phonograph a short time later, we were able to discuss with greater understanding not only what the author was saying but how he had said it. The ability to make such an analysis, of course, is of inestimable value to a young reader approaching modern literature in which so much is communicated through suggestions, implication, and indirection.