Education: Spelling by TV

Television, according to broadcasters, is intrinsically educational. It broadens young minds and uplifts old ones. Last week a plausible footnote to this plausible theory came from English Instructor Ralph S. Graber of Pennsylvania’s Muhlenberg College. TV may open all sorts of vistas, Graber reports, but the quality of its teaching is dubious. The effect on his students, he avers, is “a marked increase in the number of malapropisms and errors in diction.”

As evidence, Graber put together a montage of gems from recent themes produced by Muhlenberg freshmen: “Now of days it is quite difficult to find a student who doesn’t have a devil-makes-hair attitude and take his educational opportunity for granite. The student does not do his upmost in his studies, nor does he possess the self-insurance necessary for him to face the complexing problems of college . . .”

The reason for such college illiteracy, Graber firmly believes, is TV’s strictly phonetic teaching. The more the student watches TV, the more he learns new words through spoken rather than written language. “Because of the slovenliness of American speech and the ease with which words can be misunderstood, he does not hear the word correctly. Since he does very little reading, he has no idea that he is using the wrong word, for he has never seen the expression in print.”