I have an ongoing campaign to get television banned in public places, just as surely as smoking is banned, and for much the same reason. I have made a nuisance of myself resisting television in hospital patient rooms, hospital waiting rooms, and jury rooms. I am happy to report that the last time I was on jury duty (in January), the stupid television was kept OFF in the jury waiting room. But in the form I filled out in response to the summons, I had complained greatly about how it was above and beyond the call of duty to have been subjected to television as part of jury service.

One of my rants about an experience in a hospital waiting room is here.

One of my sons did eventually thank me for not letting him watch much television when he was a kid. But these days I worry more about the effect of television on oldsters. We’re losing a generation — the older generation.

We had a No Child Left Inside policy at my house, get noticed indoors too much and one was assigned to Rock Pile duty, moving a pile of rocks from one side of a lower forty walk to the other. Needless to say, we spent most of our time outdoors as a result, not really avoiding the penalty of Rock Pile so much as enjoying the great Tabula Rasa of the outdoors.

The mistaken idea that legislative remedy will cure what ails us allows everyone to think that legislation is about controlling events under the rubric of “equalization” rather than what it really is within a proper Republic: protecting the freedoms of self-motivation and self-realization within a healthy culture. One does not need a culture when one thinks legislation is an “incentive”.

As I’ve said before “No Child Left Behind” will be a stirling success within its narrow universe because No Child Will Go Forward. The ones that do certainly will not do so because they were harangued into it by legislative embrace.

But no, the root of the problem is not that. The root of the problem is the anti-intellectual philosophy foisted on us by the intellectual class. The symptoms are in part the over-entertainment aspects, but that’s not quite the root of it.