Turning Off TV: A Quiet Hour

Many people in the United States spend most of their free time watching television. Certainly, there are many worthwhile programs on television, including news, educational programs for children, programs on current social problems, plays, movies, concerts, and so on. Nevertheless, perhaps people should not be spending so much of their time in front of the TV. Mr. Mayer imagines what we might do if we were forced to find other activities.

I would like to propose that for sixty or ninety minutes each evening, right after the early evening news, all television broadcasting in the United Stated prohibited by law.

Let us take a serious, reasonable look at what the results might be if such a proposal were accepted. Families might use the time for a real family hour.

Without the distraction of TV, they might sit around together after dinner and actually talk to one another. It is well known that many of our problems - everything, in fact, from the generation gap to the high divorce rate to some forms of mental illness - are caused at least in part by failure to communicate. We do not tell each other what is disturbing us. The result is emotional difficulty of one kind of another. By using the quiet family hour to discuss our problems, we might get to know each other better, and to like each other better.

On evenings when such talk is unnecessary, families could rediscover more active pastimes. Freed from TV, forced to find their own activities, they might take a ride together to watch the sunset. Or they might take a walk together (remember feet?) and see the neighborhood with fresh, new eyes.

With free time and no TV, children and adults might rediscover reading. There is more entertainment in a good book that in a month of typical TV programming. Educators report that the generation growing up with television can barely write sentence, even at the college level. Writing is often learned from reading. A more literate generation could be a product of the quiet hour.

A different form of reading might be done, as it was in the past: reading aloud. Few pastimes bring a family closer together than gathering around and listening to mother or father read a good story. The quiet hour could become the story hour. When the quiet hour ends, the TV networks might even be forced to come up with better shows in order to get us back from our newly discovered activities.

At first glance, the idea of an hour without TV seems radical. What will parents do without electronic baby-sitter? How will we spent the time? But it is not radical at all. It has been only twenty-five years since television came to control American free time. Those of us thirty-five or older can remember childhoods without television, spent partly with radio - which at least involved the listener's imagination - but also with reading, learning, talking, playing games, inventing new activities. It wasn't that difficult. Honest. The truth is we had a ball.

• radical: believing or expressing the belief that there should be great or extreme social or political change. 激进的，偏激的。
• baby-sitter: 代人照看孩子的人，保姆。
• have a ball: to enjoy yourself very much. 玩得开心。