Quality Extends a Hand to Profit

Almost 40 years ago, when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik into orbit as mankind’s first successful venture into outer space, a stunned and humbled America launched a powerful national reform of its math and science curriculum. Now America faces a new threat--a fiendishly volatile global economic environment in which some of our competitors are educating their future work forces more effectively than we are. This is why a generation of kids who read less, have diminishing attention spans and exhibit poor study habits won’t do anything for California’s prospects, or America’s.

Television is such a pervasive medium and our kids watch so much of it--no less than 21 hours a week per average U.S. kid--that violent, brainless programming, underwritten by advertisers intent on nabbing young consumers, can undercut even our best educators’ best efforts. But at Stanford last week, the Children Now national conference, with Machiavellian shrewdness, decided to emphasize the potentially positive value of TV. To that end, it engineered the rather remarkable feat of bringing together under one civilized roof some of America’s leading youth advertisers as well as educators and programmers. The conference was an honest attempt to find the hallowed common ground between the need of advertisers to peddle their products to the widest possible children’s audience and the need of children for the best possible overall educational environment. Will it work? If effort counts, it could.

A key speaker at the Children Watching Television conference was the estimable Geraldine Laybourne, the new president of Disney/ABC cable networks. Laybourne is in a powerful position to effect change. Her years as the head of Nickelodeon left that cable network with more than 40% of the children’s viewing audience (the network is now more watched than CNN, MTV or ESPN). Best of all, a good deal of Nickelodeon’s children’s programming is deemed to have actual educational content, for which, among other reasons, Laybourne has been named to the Broadcasting & Cable Hall of Fame.

It is Laybourne’s view that advertisers and programmers, as responsible citizens, must forge an alliance to improve the quality of TV for children. They have to get more good children’s shows on the air and more of the bad off. She knows that not only can watching adult TV rob children of their childhood, but children’s TV, watched excessively or indiscriminately, can rob them of a good education by taking time away from their studies or filling their heads with violence or other junk. The Stanford conference drove home the point that advertisers’ interest in selling their products to kids on TV just cannot be considered incompatible with the need to exploit the broad educational value of the medium.

If children are going to drench themselves in so much TV, America needs to give them consistently better television. It is that simple, because there is a hitch with the oft-heard plea for more parental control over kids’ box time: According to experts, no more than half of parents exercise any significant control over their kids’ TV habits during their early formative years. Since too many children tend to watch TV until their eyes fall out, the programmers and the big-bucks advertisers who support the programmers must face up to how important better TV is to America’s future.

By bringing together the nation’s leading children’s TV advertisers--including General Mills, Pizza Hut, the Gap, Levi Strauss, Nike, Microsoft and McDonald’s--the advocacy group Children Now, based in Oakland, was able to get the corporate responsibility issue on the table. Rather than isolating profit-craving advertisers as an enemy who should be simply and summarily shot, the conference warmly invited key figures into the high-minded tent. The result was often rivetingly honest. “Our business is to make money,” one big-time advertiser complained. “It’s not our business to educate children.” They should make it their business, of course. Corporate America now spends more than $700 million a year hawking products on kids’ shows. Leaving aside the moral-responsibility argument, corporate leaders have a vested economic interest in not helping turn out a future work force that looks, talks and thinks like the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. Why not use the immense leverage of their advertising budgets in a way that’s in everyone’s interest?

But there actually may be hope here. After the three-day Stanford conference, I got the sense that several of the big-name advertisers left convinced that they had to do something. I also got the sense that Laybourne was thinking about a possible new children’s educational cable network out of the world-trend-setting Disney shop. Both would be welcome developments indeed.

At yet another thought-provoking conference last week--the mammoth Milken Family National Education Conference in Los Angeles--Delaine Eastin, California’s superintendent of public instruction, framed the issue very well indeed: “Let’s understand how the world has changed. You’re not competing against the kids across town,” she said. “You’re competing against kids in Japan and China and India and Germany.” If America stops producing a competitively educated labor force, kids in other countries will wind up with the best jobs the world has to offer. That would be America’s ultimate betrayal of its young. And the nail in the coffin of our superpower economy.