Page 4-Saturday, September 8, 1979-The Michigan Daily How TV made Americans nbe .tyAtE ranrdI Ninety Years of Editorial Freedom lose faith in education Vol. LXXXX, No. 3 News Phone: 764-0552 Edited and managed by students at the University of Michigan Justice for nationalists p OLITICAL TERRORISM .has al- was been harshly punished in the United . States from the days of the revolution till the conviction of Patricia Hearst. The men running the nation's legal system have always considered that crime to be the wor- st-betraying America is un- forgivable. To teach a lesson to those contem- plating that action, political and civic leaders have called for severe penalties against anyone caught or participating in terrorist activities. If you commit a terrorist act, you had better be ready to pay for it. That philosophy has gone too far, resulting in unfairly long and harsh penalties for activists in terrorist plots while other crimes were treated much too leniently. But finally a president has steered from that policy and freed four Puerto Ricans involved in anti-American plots during the 1950s. President Carter recently commuted the sentences of a Puerto Rican nationalist who attempted to assassinate President Truman in 1950 and of three others who sprayed gun- fire from a gallery overlooking the House of Representative in 1954, wounding five Cdngressmen. At the time, the incident produced quite an uproar in this country. Americans were in the anti-terrorist mood. With the awesome figure of Joseph McCarthy on .television every night, citizens didn't trust anyone and reacted bitterly when activists tried to upset the nation's fragile balance. The four Puerto Rican nationalists were equally upset but for different reasons. They wanted independence for their territory. And they were willing to do anything for their homeland. At the time of the attacks, the United States Congress had the power to repeal laws made by the island's legislature and a number of important officials governing the territory were appointed by the President rather than elected by the people of Puerto Rico. That's not to say these goals for greater independence justify the terrorist acts committed during that decade. They don';t and it was proper justice for the nationalists to be sent to prison to pay for their crimes. But not for 25 years. As efforts were being made to gain the release of the nationalists, many in this country said they hadn't served enough time and that the specific crimes defied another chance in life. Others warned that their release would encourage terrorism and would con- stitute a menace to public safety. But would a 25-year prison sentence for terrorisi tell would-be attackers that the United States is lenient toward terrorists? Will it convince those now in the plotting stage that the U.S. would be nicer the second time around? Of course not. Ask Patty Hearst, Ben Chavis and so many others. Furthermore, the four nationalists are now in their late 50s or 60s-hardly a threat to the security of the United States. They have spent more than enough time in prison and Jimmy Carter should be praised for finally doing what other presidents were afraid to do. Forget about readin', ritin', and 'rithmetic. In the modern alphabet of television fiction, at least, "School days" are more likely to mean racism, rape and riot. In a society which once placed its main hope for the future in education, the popularuconcep- tion of schools today has deteriorated into a violent night- mare. THE DETERIORATION is nowhere, so plain as on network television, where schoolrooms have long provided grist for fic- tional comedy and drama. Whether or not television helps shapeor merely reflects the at- titudes and social mores of society is a subject of endless debate. But what is clear from even a cursory review of the last two decades of television fiction is that Americans' faith in the redeeming power of schools is at an all time low. "Happy Days" Even at its mildest, this loss of faith is evident in a pronounced skepticism about the value of schooling. "Happy Days," for in- stance, has produced a leading idol for adolescent Ameirica in the drop-out "Fonzie," whose street-acquired horse sense bails naive student buddies out of jam after jam. But behind this nostalgic fantasy about life in the Fifties is a hard-edged assum- ption from the Seventies: Schools no longer deliver practical retur- ns. Street smarts are worth more than school smarts. "WELCOME BACK, KOT- TER," which was recently can- celled, rested on darker comic premises, derived from the image of a collapsing social order made familiar by mass media treatment of New York City and other urban centers. While nostalgia reserves room for in- nocence in "Happy Days," the "sweat hogs" of teacher Gabe Kotter are anything but innocent. Their Black, Puerto Rican, Jewish and Italian jokes touch a raw nerve, the unresolved fears of a society quite ill at ease with its ethnic variety. Kotter's classroom has less to do with learning thani~tloeswith a ner- vous struggle for survival in the melting pot. "White Shadow" The latest addition to tele- vision's 25-year history of school programs is "White Shadow," a dramatic series highly regarded among educators for its sym- pathetic portrayal of a white basketball coach in a predominantly Black and Chicano Los Angeles high school. Although its concerns run the gamut from teenage pregnancy and drug use to the problems of the handicapped, most "White Shadow" plots turn on racial hostility. Coach Ken Reeves is himself a veteran of reverse bias, a former basketball player who made his name in sports on an otherwise all-Black team. Race con- sciousness is what the series is all about. ALTHOUGH "WHITE SHADOW" holds out the prospect of social salvation for its cooperative central charac- ters-Coach Reeves' boys-its, acute cynicism about other characters is striking. In one episode, a promising player falls. under the temporary influence of a vicious Chicano street gang which quickly abandons him af- ter he is wounded in a brawl. In another, racial tension erupts in- to a fistfight between Reeves and an arrogant Black student who makes an issue of his distaste for the organized rituals of gym class and basketball. Reeves is injured and his authority seriously weakened. This episode has less significance in isolation than it did in the context of the June week which saw it broadcast. For that same week brought respec- tive installments of "Lou Grant" and "Barnaby Jones" in which a pair of demonic Black teenagers rape their English teacher, and By Frank Viviano provides them with the force of generalizations. This is the true source of the medium's social in- fluence: transforming real, if limited developments, into massive, all-encompassing tren- ds. Television has followed a long and escalating course to the present obsession with social con- flict in American education. Although classrooms have never enjoyed the prominence of fron- tier towns, detective offices or police stations as favorite TV set- tings-, over the years they have provided a steady stream of images drawn from and con- tributing to the popular concep- tion of the school. Those good old days Until the mid-Sixties, these images were entirely comic, and located in a tranquil small town' America which was quite unlike the urban environments in which most viewers actually lived. The frivolous crises of "Mr. Peepers," and "Dur Miss Brooks" had nothing at allIto do with an intrusion of concerns from that tension-ridden world. They traded in an uncontrover- very much soft-peddled in "Dobie Gillis." But as the decade progressed and the vast school- aged population produced by the baby boom carried education to the center of Armerican education, schools commanded more serious notice in TV fiction. The change was most apparent in a radical transformation of the setting. In place of the comic small town dream which had dominated the TV picture of school for ten years, new series like "Mr. Novak" and "Room 222" were set in urban high schools, populated by the troubled urban mix of races and ethnic groups. Here the school was society in microcosm, besieged by social problems which expanded graphically on the minor tensions suggested in "Dobie Gillis." HOWEVER, ALONG with the legendary Father Flanagan, the teacher-heroes of Sixties TV em- bodied the belief that there was no such thing as a bad boy. There were only bad paths which kids might be temipted to follow without enlightened guidance and the right environmental circum- stances. While a restless campus, either on TV or in real life, might mirror the failures of the larger society, school itself was viewed as an important instrument for progress, the place where problems were solved. Like many of their viewers,,the liberal writers and producers of television's dramatic series in the Sixties were caught up in the optimistic tide which rose with John Kennedy's election to the presidency and waned painfully through the divisive years of the n Vietnam. War, riots, - assassinations, and increasing t attacks on the record of social s reform. It is from that context-the loss * of faith in social .reform-that today's TV schoolroom has y materialized. The heritage of s liberalism still survives in its , broad outlines. But when the con- e ventional TV image of teachers - emphasizes their victimization is by unsalvageable students,; e liberal motives can only ,ppear,%, . foolish. In a sense, the situation: e recalls a joke that made the - f- rounds in the early Seventies. A s conservative, the punchline went, e is just a liberal who has been c mugged. In the public's media- 1, forged view, it's the liberal school a system which has been mugged, e and the public has accordingly y grown more conservative. "What emerges is a conventional portrait of education in the United States which treats some students as cruel aggressors, most teachers as their victims, and racial violence as the charac- teristic classroom experience." Teddy may or may not A d& tel r S4 TO o , ILL HE OR WO1NT HE?' Should he or shouldn't he? Has he cided to and is not telling, or is he ling us he decided not to?. [t may not have been the nifications on world peace of the LT II debate, but the debate over d Kennedy's future is occupying >re time these days than the number warheads in any midwestern missile silo. ;The latest word is that he won't yet, b4t he might, if, since he won't say he will while not saying he won't. But by saying the other day that his family dqesn't mind if he does, he didn't say, thlat means he will but it allows him to if be wants. Right now, Teddy's intentions to run for the White House are cramped only b the fact that there is already an oc- cupant there, complicated by the fact that the current occupant is of Teddy's own party, and if there's one thing Teddy is not, he's not one to split a par- ty. And since the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue has made it p4rfectly clear that he likes his job there, Teddy, who everyone agrees wants to, probably won't, although he probably could if he would but he wbn't. But then again, he could be tempted. He could be tempted if a certain current pattern holds that shows the current White House resident getting less and less popular, while Teddy con- sistently holds his own. Polls change, and five months before the first primary could reverse the current numbers, so all he can do is wait, but the longer he waits the more he has to lose, since even loyalists grow im- patient. Some would say that the loyalists have already grown impatient, and that the draft-Kennedy movements were running out of steam, and, thus, the carefully timed announcement that Teddy's family no longer objects to Teddy running. Of course that doesn't mean he'll run, and, of course it ' Fonda and Tom Hayden, and a rock singer who reportedly admitted snor- ting cocaine. But then Jimmy's top aide Hamhas been accused of snorting cocaine, although he denies it, and Jimmy's former drug advisor Peter Bourne who resigned was also accused of snorting cocaine, although he denied that too. So if cocaine becomes a cam- paign issue, Teddy appear to be the only one to have kept his nose clean. But then the other school of thought has it that people who want Teddy and don't want Jimmy might vote for Jerry to make Jimmy withdraw from the race so Teddy will get in, since everyone knows Teddy won't run if Jimmy is running and winning while he might run if Jimmy is running and Jerry is winning, since then Teddy could say he was saving the party. If that sounds like a case of deja 4u, it comes from the election in 1968, when an unpopular Southern president was challenged in the primaries by a dissident in his own party, who got a lot of votes from a lot of people who really wanted to tempt another Kennedy into running. So the question now becomes, how long can Teddy wait. If he waits too long, until Jerry is beating Jimmy, Jerry may have enough delegates to win the nomination on the first ballot before Teddy even gets a chance to run. But if Teddy goes too early, while Jimmy is still what the pundits call a "viable candidate," Teddy, not Jerry, will be the one accused on splitting up the party by challenging an incumbent president. The other factor that may influence Teddy is whatever happens in the other party across town, the Ron and John and George and Howard and Bob and Phil show. If Ron is winning in the other party, and the polls show Jimmy can beat Ronny, then Teddy would have no reason to split the party. But if Ronny is winning in the other party, and the polls show Jimmy may have a rough time beating him, Teddy can private eyes are sent to investigate a rash of faculty beatings. In each case, the students respon- sible are utterly malevolent, har- dened criminals immune to the sensitive encouragement of a teacher or the civilizing potential of a school. What emerges is a conven- tional portrait of education in the United States which treats some students as cruel aggressors, most teachers as their victims, and racial violence as the characteristic classroom ex- perience. THESE THEMES do, of cour- se, reflect real trends in the real world. But the mirror is distor- ted, selective. The image is often founded in an incestuous ex- change between mass journalism and mass entertainment. In a recent interview, "White Shadow" creator Ken Howard explained that his story ideas came from "the popular press," and in all probability, so do the majority of TV plots. As a result, events which may receive publicity in the first place by vir- tue of their uniqueness-their newsworthiness-merge into dramatic fiction, where television's taste for repetition sial brand of humor resting or stock comedy characters: ab- sent-minded professors, smar alec kids, man-chasing spinster and reluctant suitors. THE 1959 DEBUT of "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis' marked an important, if only gradual step towards reality. It: chief character was a student rather than a teacher, and one whose life was a prophetic bat tleground for value system: which would be locked in mor( serious combat afew years, later Dobie Gillis was caught in the middle of an ideological tug-of war. On one side were the force of a demanding, inflexibli establishment-his workaholi father, a wealthy socialite pa] the greedy, beautiful Thali Menninger. On the other sid were the advocates of an earl version of the politics o liberation-the beatnik Maynari Krebs, his supportive teacher Mr. Pomfrit, and the homely bu understanding Zelda Gilroy. Th conflicts these social force provided were symbolized eac week in the opening image o Dobie, pondering his fate in fror of a statue of The Thinker. Real social tensions were sti d at e s h nt ill a.. ' _ _.. _ _ l f ' " ,- --... -- e , " ,. i w . , 4 t om i S +a A, "' r 'n om... '' f - :, . .. . . .. , ; r+ 1 t t . ! y i : Frank Vivano has a doe- - torate in American Studies and taught television at the University. He is the author of . the forthcoming book 'Prevailing Images: Television and American Life, 1947-1979."