Television – a Great Danger

Television has become one of the great dangers to humanity. It could have been a great bliss, a great blessing. It could have been tremendously useful as education.

According to me, all television stations should belong to the universities, to the colleges, to the schools. And they should have programs which educate people. No advertisements — that is not education, that is mis-education, that is exploitation. They should teach people history, geography … Small children who cannot get it through language, will be easily interested in learning history, in learning geography, in learning other kinds of subjects. Sciences, literature, fiction, poetry, painting … all kinds of arts can be brought to children of all grades.

So there must be television stations for small children, and then there should be some for the college graduates. And there should be television to the highest grade, postgraduate and research people. Professors have to be continuously made aware of all new kinds of discoveries, otherwise they are lagging behind, almost twenty years behind. They studied twenty years ago when they were in their postgraduate classes, but that knowledge has become out of date. To update professors will be very easy with television. To bring students tremendous interest in all kinds of subjects, in whatever they are interested … If they are interested in music, they can be taught music, musical instruments. If they are interested in painting, they can be taught painting, sculpture. They can be taught meditation. All kinds of possibilities are there, once television is taken out of the hands of the exploiters, and out of the hands of the religious preachers. And then these children will prove Sigmund Freud’s hypothesis absolutely. […]

Small children are watching television because they know the language of pictures and color. Their world consists of pictures. That is why in children’s books first you have to print a big picture. If you want to teach them what a mango is you have to put a big picture of a mango. Saliva comes first; then comes the word ‘mango’. Looking at the picture, the child starts feeling to eat it, and the picture becomes associated by and by with the word ‘mango’. As the child grows, the mango picture becomes smaller and smaller and smaller. In the university, pictures completely disappear from the books; words become very small, longer, complicated, and sentences become complex. Now the child has moved from pictorial language to an alphabetical language — to words from pictures.”

Osho, I Celebrate Myself: God Is No Where, Life Is Now Here, Ch 6

Credit Neelamber