Watchers

Let me confess from the start I'm on the board of advisors of an organization called TV-Free America. As a schoolteacher I found that the kids who drove me crazy were always big TV watchers. Their behavioral profile wasn't pretty. TV addicted kids were irresponsible, childish, dishonest, malicious to one another; above all else they seemed to lack any sustaining purpose of their own, as if by consuming too many made-up stories, modeling themselves after too many men and women who were pretending to be somebody else, listening to too many talking hamburgers and too many explanations of the way things are (sponsored by oil companies and dairy councils) they had lost the power to behave with integrity - to grow up. It was almost as if by stealing time children needed

--John Taylor Gatto, "Weapons Of Mass Instruction", p. 91