For years the question has been debated whether the school or the family is the primary force in the education of the young. This question is academic. Neither parents nor teachers are any longer the principal shaper of children's minds in the United States. Television is.
Television is now the major influence upon children's lives, surpassing the oral environment of tradition and the literary environment of post-traditional culture. The above quote by one of the early chairmen of the board of National Educational Television was made in 1979: a period when movie marquees still proclaimed "Fight Pay TV," when the initials "VCR" meant nothing, and when anyone living fifty miles outside of a major metropolitan area considered themselves fortunate if they could receive three television stations without static. Needless to say, videocassette recorders, cable and satellite dishes have inundated the American child with television images in the mere fourteen years since then (Henry 3). If, as Norman Cousins posits, television was the principal chalk slate in the classroom of children's minds before, it is safe to say that the slate has since expanded a thousand times to enormous blackboard size. Whether those were halcyon days or not is a question to be debated among nostalgics, historians and cultural anthropologists; in today's reality the images are changing too fast for "the hurried child" to catch a breath and consider (Elkind 71).
A major portion of those images directed specifically at children is in the form of animated cartoons. Saturday morning blocks of network programming are dedicated to cartoons. The Disney organization, having grown from the creation of 1930s animated movie shorts and features into a giant multimedia consortium, now has its own cable channel devoted to "family entertainment" relying upon fifty percent cartoon programming from its sixty year film library - in addition to supplying blocks of progra...