Honig tunes out

National Review, July 6, 1992

TEACHERS TRIED to broaden the perspective of the baby-boom generation by having their classes watch the first walk on the moon, Bobby Kennedys funeral, Nixon's inaugural. If the pimply audiences also saw an ad or two for Tide or Alka Seltzer--well, nobody hyperventilated over the peril to students' gray matter and morals.

But then we didn't have California's current schools superintendent to instruct us on the evils of televised commercialism in the classroom. In those days, only Khrnshchev tried to protect people from free enterprise. Today, Bill Honig is waging holy war on Channel One, the Whittle Communications public-affairs show (which carries commercials) for high schools. A Santa Clara County judge recently rejected Honig's request for an injunction against a San Jose high school that has hooked up to Channel One, but a trial on the superintendent's lawsuit goes forward beginning September 2.

To hear Honig tell it, the dispute is about lofty principle. The very integrity of the public schools is threatened by a private firm's fevered profit motive. Channel One is a crafty enterprise. Sure, it's transmitted free (to about 7.1 million students in public and private high schools in 45 states). Yes, Whittle also provides, at no cost, satellite dishes, VCRs, color TVs, along with wiring for cable. But the bargain is a Faustian one--schools provide an audience not just for Channel One's ten minutes of current-events programming, but for two minutes of commercials (the ads bring in about $630,000 daily to Whittle).

Therein lies the "moral problem," Honig sniffs. 'We are paid to educate our children, not to sell access to their minds."

If you're having trouble following his logic, you're not alone. Newspapers carry ads, after all; should they also be banished from classrooms? What about Newsweek, Time, U.S. News, all of which offer fourcolor lures for products and services?

Bill Honig's blue-nosing shortchanges students, to judge from the experience where schools have hooked up to Channel One (15 public schools have defied Honig and signed on, joining more than seventy California parochial-school subscribers). "The teachers in my school use Channel One to bring home the importance of current events," said Candace Cline of Firebaugh High School in Fresno County. "The academic pluses of the program far outweigh the negative of advertising," said Principal Kathryn Hennigan of Rosary, a 550-girl high school operated by the Orange County Roman Catholic Diocese. The executive director of the National Alliance of Black School Educators called Channel One an "opportunity to bump many schools from the havenot category closer to the haves," because of the TV equipment supplied by Whittle.

Kids are already exposed to ads everywhere they turn. They have learned to treat them skeptically. At a legislative hearing on the issue a few months ago, a host of students showed up to protest that they have more sense than the superintendent gives them credit for. "I'm not going to run out of school and spend $60 on a pair of shoes" just because of Channel One, testified one L.A. high-school student.

Why all the ethical angst over advertising? Usually Bill Honig has his tin cup out, begging higher taxes for the schools system. Yet here is a chance to boost classroom resources at no cost-and he balks. Could his motives have less to do with morality than with power? Channel One, after all, represents an intrusion of outside interests onto the turf of professional educators. California's school bureaucrats might not have much in the way of performance to show for their iron grip over instructional policies--considering test-score trends, they certainly can't boast that Quality is Job One . ...but at least they get to revel in power for its own sake. That's what makes Channel One dangerous. It wasn't conceived inside the educationist community; it wasn't midwiled by grad-school study groups and seminars of PhD experts on scholastic fads. And it carries the seeds of more sweeping private-sector initiatives in education down the line.

Is it any wonder that control freaks in the public schools' bureaucracy are fighting back?