After reading the editorial about TV viewing in the May 3 Journal, I did some calculations based on the average viewing habits of Americans:

If the average child watches TV 4 hours per day, from age 2-18, they will have done so for a total of 23,360 hours. Assuming that the child sleeps 8 hours per day (leaving 16 waking hours), their 4 hours of TV viewing represents ¼ of their conscious life. This means, by the time the average American child is 18, they will have spent the equivalent of every waking hour, for FOUR full years, watching television.

By comparison, the NYS Education Law requires that children “attend upon instruction” (school) six hours per day,180 days per year for the 10 years between ages 6 and 16. This adds up to about 10,800 hours – which is less than half the 23,360 hours the children spend watching TV. Consider the requirements of a good college education; If the average Cornell student invests 12 hours per day on their studies, each of the 160 days school is in session, for the four years it takes to earn a bachelors degree, their total invested time would be 7,680 hours. This is only 1/3 of the time they spent watching TV.

Even more interesting than these comparisons is the fact that up to 25% of every hour of television is taken up by advertising. If American children watch 23,360 hours of TV before graduating high school, this computes to about 5,840 hours of advertising. This is the equivalent of spending ONE WHOLE YEAR of their lives, from breakfast to bedtime, doing nothing but watching TV commercials.

We worry and complain about TV content, and cry that our schools are not preparing our children adequately. But isn’t the entire US economy founded on the premise that Americans can (and must) be convinced to want what we don’t need – and to buy it? It seems to me that we have no reason to complain. Our politicians, educators, and we parents, are not trying to raise a generation of well-informed, critically-thinking, politically savvy citizens. If that was our goal we would pass laws regulating TV or throw the sets out of our homes, but to do either is to risk losing the only effective way America has to prepare our children for their one true purpose in life – which is; endless material consumption.