HyperVideo-Web-2010

Yeah, I know, there is the usual "Television is Evil" over-reaction. Then there is the head in the sand denial that anything could possibly be wrong with the ways we bombard ourselves and our children with a steady stream of sex, violence and hyper selling on steroids disguised as entertainmnet.

We have the choice to passively study what TV gives us and/or we can re-program ourselves to more actively choose what TV, streaming media and the internet delivers to our eyeballs and ears and thus become better stewards of our own continuing education.

"Educational television should be absolutely forbidden. It can only lead to unreasonable disappointment when your child discovers that the letters of the alphabet do not leap up and dance around with royal-blue chickens."

-- Fran Lebowitz, Metropolitan Life, 1978

Statistics collected by the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) show that student achievement in both reading and writing has been declining in recent years. The NCES 1998 Writing Report Card states that 16 percent of 4th and 8th graders and 22 percent of 12th graders have not mastered basic writing skills (March, 1999). The NCES 1998 Reading Report Card shows that across grades 4, 8, and 12, no more than 40 percent achieved the "proficient" level of reading and only 7 percent of 4th graders, 3 percent of 8th graders, and 6 percent of 12th graders could read at the "advanced" level.

"The average, or typical, American student is not a proficient writer. Instead, students show only partial mastery of the knowledge and skills needed for solid academic performance in writing," said Gary W. Phillips, Acting NCES Commissioner in a press release after the 1998 Writing Report Card report was issued (Sept. 28, 1999).

The Stream TV is Home Study at it's Finest. Study Scripture with Streaming Media!

"Do you know we are ruled by TV?" -- from the poem An American Prayer by Jim Morrison

"They put an off button on the TV for a reason. Turn it off . . . I really don't watch much TV." -- President George W. Bush, C-SPAN interview, January 2005

"American children and adolescents spend 22 to 28 hours per week viewing television, more than any other activity except sleeping. By the age of 70 they will have spent 7 to 10 years of their lives watching TV."

-- The Kaiser Family Foundation

"You watch television to turn your brain off and you work on your computer when you want to turn your brain on." -- Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple Computer and Pixar, in Macworld Magazine, February 2004

"Everybody’s got values . . . The thing that frightens me is the way that an eroding public school system . . . and television on all over the place is leading to a steady dumbing down of the American public and a corrosion of basic critical thinking in the population." -- Jamie Raskin, American University law professor, November 2004 on the Democracy Now! radio program

"Protestant clergy named divorce, negative influences from the media, and materialism as the three greatest threats to families in their communities." -- from an Ellison Research study of 695 Protestant church ministers nationwide, October 2004

"The media can wreak great harm on the family when it offers an inadequate or even distorted vision of life, of the family itself and of religion and morality." -- Pope John Paul II, May 2004