This is an excerpt from Chapter Nine of The Read-Aloud Handbook by Jim Trelease (Penguin, © 2006,
6th edition). For a list of all topics covered here and in the print edition see Chapter Nine question list.

CHAPTER 9: TV, Audio, & Technology —
     Hurting or Helping Literacy?

ith electronic media now the dominant force in a child's life outside of family (and for some, even larger than the family), it must be included in any book or discussion of literacy. Does it help literacy or it is all harm? In reading the previous chapter, you saw the positive impact of Oprah's televised message. A big plus there. Recall the positive role TV played in raising public awareness during Vietnam, the Civil Rights struggle, and, more recently, the aftermath of hurricane Katrina. Big pluses there, too. In Chapter Five I alluded to a mechanical "tutoring" device widely used by the children in Finland, now boasting the world's highest reading scores—sounds to me like a good use of technology. We'll explore that and more in this chapter.

Her intuition pointed to the television that never seemed to be off when the boys were home. “From now on, you can only watch three television programs a week!”

On succeeding pages you'll also see negatives that counterbalance some of those positives, but first a hopeful message: media is very much like the medications in your medicine cabinet. Helpful as they might be, they definitely need parental oversight and controls. Can that be done with today's media? In response, I share the story I've offered to all of my parent audiences for 15 years.

It begins with a woman named Sonya Carson, trying to raise two sons in inner-city Detroit as a single parent. One of twenty-four children, Mrs. Carson had only a third-grade education. A hardworking, driven woman, she worked as a domestic and child care-giver for wealthy families—sometimes working two or three jobs at a time to support her sons. Sometimes she worked so hard that she had to “get away to her relatives for a rest.” Only years later did her sons discover that she was checking herself into a mental institution for professional help for depression.

Her sons, on the other hand, were not working themselves into any kind of frenzy. Both were on a slow boat to nowhere in the classroom. Bennie, the younger one, was the worst student in his fifth-grade class. As if raising two sons in one of the most dangerous cities in America were not enough, Mrs. Carson now faced the challenge of the boys’ grades. She met it head-on. “Bennie—you’re smarter than this report card,” she declared, pointing to his math score. “First thing, you’re going to learn your times tables—every one of them!”

A brilliant medical career could have been undone by over-dosing on TV
in his childhood.

“Mom, do you know how many there are? It would take me a whole year!” he replied.

“I only went through the third grade and I know them all the way through my twelves,” his mother answered. “And furthermore, you are not to go outside tomorrow until you learn them.”

Her son pointed to the columns in his math book and cried, “Look at these things! How can anyone learn them?”

His mother simply tightened her jaw, looked him calmly in the eye, and declared, “You can’t go out until you learn your times tables.”

Bennie learned his times tables—and his math scores began to climb. His mother’s next goal was to get the rest of his grades up. Her intuition pointed to the television that never seemed to be off when the boys were home. “From now on, you can only watch three television programs a week!” A week! (What Sonya Carson lacked in book sense she made up for with common sense that would be vindicated nearly thirty years later when major research studies showed a powerful connection between “over-viewing” and “underachievement.”)

She next looked for a way to fill the free time created by the television vacuum: She said, “You boys are going to the library and check out two books. At the end of each week you’ll write me a report on what you’ve read.” (Only years later did the boys discover she couldn’t read well enough to understand any of the reports.)

They didn’t like it, of course, but they didn’t dare refuse. And in reading two books a week, then talking about them to his mother, Bennie raised his reading scores. And because the entire curriculum is tied to reading, the rest of the report card began to improve. Each semester, each year, the scores rose. And by the time he was a senior in high school he was third in his class, scoring in the ninetieth percentile of the nation.

With colleges like West Point, Yale, and Stanford waving scholarships in his face but only ten dollars in his pocket for application fees, Bennie let his choice fall to whichever school won the College Bowl television quiz that year (Yale). He spent four years there majoring in psychology, then went on to the medical schools at the University of Michigan and Johns Hopkins. Today, at age fifty-five, Dr. Ben Carson is one of the world’s premier pediatric brain surgeons. When Johns Hopkins named him head of pediatric neurosurgery he was, at age thirty-three, the youngest in the nation.

Ask Dr. Carson to explain how you get from a fatherless inner-city home and a mother with a third-grade education, from being the worst student in your fifth-grade class, to being a world-famous brain surgeon with a brother who is an engineer. Again and again, Ben Carson points to two things: his mother’s religion (Seventh-Day Adventist) and the pivotal moment when she limited their television viewing and ordered him to start reading. (For the “complete” story, read Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story by Ben Carson [HarperCollins/Zondervan].)

I have people in my audiences with three times the education of young Mrs. Carson and ten times her income—but not half her common sense and courage when it comes to raising children. They can’t bring themselves to “raise” children—they can only “watch them grow up,” and most of the watching occurs from the couch in front of a television set.

There are two important things to remember from the Carson family’s story: (1) Mrs. Carson didn’t trash the set—she controlled it; and (2) with high expectations of her children, she demanded appropriate behavior from them. In controlling the dosage of TV, Mrs. Carson averted disaster. Dosage determines the impact of anything—from hurricanes and aspirin to reading and television.

NEXT: What is so wrong with television?

Chapter Nine — p. 1   p. 2   p. 3   p. 4   Footnotes