Okay, folks, point taken. I am definitely willing to consider the possibility that the average American is a bit better informed than I have suggested. I certainly hope that is the case.

I think the biggest problem with the knowledge of the public in all our modern societies such as USA/Canada/UK is this: several generations of children have now grown up being home educated primarily by watching the TV rather than by reading books! That has caused a massive dumbing down of people, in my opinion. It has made people very superficial in their thinking, and very ephemeral in what they think about.

Watch the old movie "Network". It makes a very good comment about the situation as it has evolved on Network TV (where News programs are usually about the lowest-rated programs of all).

Books, you see, are not saturated throughout with aggressive advertising that leaps out at you every ten pages or so and yells at you for 3 minutes about some consumer products that you probably don't need. Books don't give you a couple of "sound bites" about a politician or a situation, they go into in-depth detail about it, including the history that led up to it. They give you the whole story. TV gives people little fragments, momentary images, blurbs, overlaid with a constant flow of advertising. That tends to shorten people's attention span to a minimum and reduce their powers of reasoning and analysis to a minimum as well. TV emphasizes outer appearance over actual content, looks over character. It goes for easily graspable stereotypes...images...rather than looking into all the subtleties.

The overall influence of TV on young minds, as opposed to what could have happened had their spare time been mostly spent reading books instead....has been a disaster.

And that's not because TV could not have been truly informative, just as books are. It's because it never really tried to be, because TV programming is just there so that you will tune in for a hour, watch the ads, and then go out later and buy whatever they're selling.

That's not the case with books, because a book sells itself!!! And there's the difference. If TV could have been separated FROM advertising from the beginning....well, then, things would have been very different. And far better.

I had the odd experience of growing up in the 60's without a TV in the house till I was age 18! Everyone else we ever knew had one. The thing that most radicalized me and gave me very different values from almost all my schoolmates was this: they were watching TV. I was reading books. And, boy, could I ever see the difference that resulted from that. It made me the odd man out among my peers. It also made me a natural radical and a nonconformist in a society that was so obessed with prime time present realities as to be mostly quite out of touch with the past. Now, when people fail to learn history it is said that they are doomed to repeat it. Germany launched pre-emptive wars in the late 30's on trumped up excuses. Guess who's been doing that lately?

I know that many of you here are also avid bookreaders, so I am not trying to tar you all with the same brush, I am just saying that the overreaching influence of TV on several generations of children, accompanied by the declining influence of books on those same children, has done real damage.....and that's because TV has been relentlessly commercialized and aimed at the lowest common denominator since its inception...and it has steadily gotten worse.

You cannot allow commercial advertisers to dominate the medium which is most directly affecting your children's view of life and their place in it. If you do, they will take maximum advantage of your children, and they will do great harm, because they are only in it for the money.