TV, Scool, and Natural Feedback Circuits

Gatto writes in his Chapter, The Camino de Santiago, on p. 91 of Weapons of Mass Education:

"Feedback
Let me confess from the start I'm on the board of advisors of an organization called TV-Free America.  As a school teacher I found that the kids who drove me crazy were always big TV watchers.  Their behaviour 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 my stealing time children needed to write their own stories, television - like school itself - had dwarfed their spirits.  When computers came along, I saw they often made the problem worse.  Potentially, they were a better deal, because of the capacity to offer interactivity, but a majority of users I saw wallowed in porno, games spent playing against programs, not other people, and many spectator pursuits which required only consumption, not actively committed behavior.
     Even with the internet I saw how easy it was to cross the line into a passive state unless good disciplin was exercised, and I knew from experience how hard that was ot come by."

After realizing that preaching about TV's negative effects to kids wouldn't work,  Gatto writes, " Relief would have to come from a different quarter; if these things were truly as bad as I believed, if they diminished the intellect and corrupted the character as I felt, a solution would have to be found in the natural proclivity of the young to move around physically, not sit, before we suppress that urge with confinement to seats in school and with commercial blandishments to watch performers rather than to perform oneself.
     The master mechanism at work to cause harm was a suppression of natural feedback circuits which allow us to learn from our mistakes.  Somebody trying to learn to sail alone in a small boat will inevitably tack too far left and too far right when sailing into the wind, when the destination is straight ahead, but practice will correct that beginner's error because feedback will instruct the sailor's reaction and judgment.  In the area of mastering speech, with all its complex rhythms of syntax, and myriad notes and tones of diction, the most crucial variable is time spent in practice.  And in both instances the more challenging the situation, the quicker that competence is reached"
     "The absolute necessity for feedback from everywhere in taking an education (even from one's enemies) forced me to look closely at how rigidly students were ordered about - in a way which made little use of their innate ability to grow through feedback.  My guess was that by restoring this natural biological circuitry, the hideous displays of media-sickened behavior among my students would decline.  And the guess proved right."

Gatto goes on to describe some of his Guerrilla Curriculum, for example, sending them out on expeditions, where they could be face to face with reality, challenged by the nerve-wracking and exhilarating waters of real life... READ IT!

The bottom line is that most TV and most schooling encourages passivity, and in it's pre-packaged, factory style production of consumers of disconnected knowledge bits and stuff to buy, limits our natural born abilities to use feedback, learn from experience, self-correct, and enjoy challenging ourselves. 

Yep, Yep, Yep!