"What's TV Doing to English?"

While I stumbled, wan and weary, through a boring committee meeting last summer, a long-distance phone call jangled me half-alive in my office. It was the TV editor of a national weekly, posing an apparently simple question: "What's TV doing to English?" He was planning a feature story and was looking for leads. As I gradually shook off the occupational ennui that makes committee meetings tolerable, his problem came into focus: He really meant to ask what TV was doing to the state of the English language, given the prevalence in teenagers' consciousness of rock and roll performers with guide-book size vocabularies and pool-hall diction.

When I explained that English teachers not only taught students the nature of the language but they also counseled them in how it is best used in first-rate fiction and non-fiction, he admitted that TV's impact on teaching drama and the arts also interested him but that the medium's influence on factual reporting didn't especially.

Wide awake now, having parried his questions, I found I could only hum and haw inadequate answers even though I had intentionally sought answers to his very question for the past several years for myself and the readers of this department. I promised to call him back in a day or so. I finally decided to write him an answer by thinking aloud about a problem that understandably concerns every thoughtful English teacher. Here is what I told him:

The funny thing about TV is that at its infrequent best it outclasses even the best classroom by a mile, but at its ordinary deadly level it puts even the best teacher at a real disadvantage. For as the National Education Association's Educational Policies Commission pointed out with a lucidity unusual in official pedagogical papers: The newer media complicate the teacher's role by enormously extending the vicarious experience of the student at the same time that the media create authority figures who undermine the status and respect of the teacher. (Mass Communication and Education, 1958, $1.25.)

Put simply, the typical teenager has probably seen more entertainment of high calibre on the Ed Sullivan Show than his parents saw in all of their pre-TV lives; and the same "sophisticated" teenager looks to Dick Clark's column in This Week rather than to his parents or teachers for help on the problems of adolescence.

Teachers ignore this shift in the nature of extracurricular experience and the rise of new authority figures at their peril. If this media experience or the new models of "excellence" remain unexamined, not all the Matthew Arnold in the world is going to help the ordinary youngster grow to maturity within the parochial limits of popular culture. This unexamined surface experience envelops the teenager in a cocoon of comfortable complacency: Thus the peculiarly American phenomenon of perennial adolescence, in which the adults concur in the teenager's equation of happiness with irresponsibility by saying, and wistfully, that you're only young once. (How untrue, when so few really grow up because they never grow tired of that cliche.)

The teacher who wants his students to grow in their handling of the language and to mature in their ability to read and write at complex levels of understanding must find ways to refine the low-grade ore of secondary experience that the media dump on our students in daily carloads, and must learn how to use authority figures in the mass media in ways that increase the rate of growth of their students as intelligent, imaginative individuals.

The first necessary but not sufficient step is to track down relentlessly every conceivably teachable smidgin of excellence on the medium. This is not as hard as it used to be. For over three years now, "The Public Arts" in this journal has given in its Bulletin Board details on promising plays, documentaries, and cultural events. A three-month deadline introduces a certain margin of error into these prognostications, but these can be checked against the weekly listings and study-guides prepared by my wife and me in "Look and Listen" in Scholastic Teacher (33 W. 42nd Street, New York 36).

Even closer checks are possible with the lively and literate syndicated column, "TV Key." (Write 28 E. 56th Street, Manhattan, to find out the nearest newspaper that carries this feature.) In the case of "naturals" (of which more later) for English teachers, The English Journal and "The Humanities Today" department in Clearing House (Fairleigh Dickinson U., Teaneck, N. J.) supply detailed study guides like Henry B. Maloney's on "Half a Hamlet Better Than None?" in last February's Journal.

A trickier but equally indispensable next step is to help students understand the mediocrity of the mediocre. This, essentially, is making ladders out of walls. If TV goes half-cocked on westerns, push Walter Van Tilburg Clark, A. B. Guthrie, and Francis Parkman for all they're worth. Use the unmotivated violence of mysteries and police films to explain the artistic integration of violence in the Greek tragedians, Elizabethans like Shakespeare, and moderns like Tennessee Williams.

Use sick humor as a peg for the analysis of the ugly strain of morbidity that runs through American humor from the frontier gander pullings of A. G. Longstreet's Georgia Scenes, through Ambrose Bierce to Mark Twain's later darkness. What is there in an officially 100% Happy Society that causes sick humor? In this task of baiting subversive trends in popular culture, our best critics are indispensable. John Crosby is well enough known by English teachers to be widely anthologized by now, but there are others, less known, who deserve whopping Trendexes in your classroom: William Ewald, syndicated by United Press International (my own current favorite), Robert Lewis Shayon of the Saturday Review, John Lardner of the New Yorker, Marya Mannes of the Reporter, Charles Mercer of the Associated Press, and cover stories and features in Time and Newsweek.

These writers are only a mimeograph away from your class, and print still remains the most democratic of media, giving as it does writers equal opportunities to express their thoughts however complex or simple and readers equally differentiated amounts of time to cover and understand such a range of expression.

Once you have used everything at hand to analyze TV's excellence and exercise mediocrity with a critic's infectious laughter, you are ready to tackle the tough one: the emergence of new authority figures like Dick Clark, Elvis Presley, and Fabulous Fabian who are frequently all the more influential because they are teenagers themselves with none of the inhibitions and reservations about entertainment-as-a-way of life that maturity entails.

Here I think our best strategy of the moment is to fight fire with fire (I'm tempted to say fight smoke with real fire). The only effective answer to Dick Clark is Leonard Bernstein; Steve Allen (Is his book on comedians, The Funny Men, Simon and Schuster, 1956, in your high school library?) is proof positive against a glib booby like Art Linkletter; Dave Garroway and Charles Van Doren are God's answer to a teacher's curse on unamiable nonentities like Jack Paar and that senile Beatnik Alexander King; Robert Herridge and John Frankenheimer, not Desi and Lucy; Chet Huntley and David Brinkley sufficiently reveal how unnecessary the next-door-neighbor approach is in world travelers like Lowell Thomas and John Cameron Swayze. For what we're after when we try to help our students use well the language and the cultural heritage it unlocks is to give them a modicum of urbanity, a sense of irony, the universal resiliency that is necessary in a metropolitan civilization where everyone is a citizen.

It's not that we have anything against rubes per se; it's just that the world moves too fast for folksiness to be a virtue anymore. Wholesome, cleancut types like Dick Clark are not up to it; absence of social vices is no sufficient measure of personal maturity. And that is what we're after as English teachers whose subject is at once the key to understanding all of the products of man's intelligence and that major sector thereof described as the humanities.