ritual denunciation of television. Although the medium was deemed 'a useful adjunct' to teaching, its overall influence was considered disastrous and it was blamed for a decline in the reading ability of children. As always, words/books were rated more highly than images/television. British high culture has valued literature above the other arts for centuries. But is Dickens inherently more important than Turner because be wrote novels instead of painting pictures? Is a banal romantic novel more significant than a routine TV soap opera just because it is a book?

Given that television is the most powerful and popular medium of communication of the present age, the time has come for schools to give as much emphasis to theories of visual grammar as to theories verbal grammar. If the literacy of children is falling, what about their ability to decode still images and sequences of images? Perhaps that skill is increasing as a result of years of exposure to photographs, advertising billboards, films and television? Shouldn't schools now be testing visual literacy? This could be done via photo-montage exercises, video shooting and

No one would wish to deny that much of the output of television is escapist trivia, but there are also many worthwhile programmes. Think of the plethora of environmental series that have appeared recently. I for one feel these programmes have deepened my knowledge of this vital subject. Think too of science series such asEquinox, the investigative social documentaries, and the Open University arts programmes. Some of these programmes are quite demanding. Perhaps British children avoid serious programmes but their domestic TV diet is surely the responsibility of parents not teachers.

Given the vividness of coloured, moving images and the time, money and research that underpins news, documentary, art and drama programmes, it is extremely difficult for teachers in the classroom to compete. Arguably, aside from parents, television has become the main educator in our society. The only sensible response seems to be for teachers to use television programmes as visual aids but also to make the medium itself a subject for critical analysis so than its institutions, technology and visual rhetoric can be better understood. In other words, schools should aim to produce more informed, critical and discriminating viewers. Presumably, this is the role of media studies departments in secondary schools.

Watching television is often characterised as a passive activity compared to reading, but the sequences of images on television and in films involve gaps, condensations of time, shifts of location and viewpoint, parallel narratives, etc., that require mental work on the part of the viewer if sense is to be made of them. Again,

the relentless flow of television is said to militate against pauses for reflection and re-reading that books permit. This charge had some validity before that advent of the home video recorder. But now the latter enables viewers to press the pause button and to replay programmes. Books are also said to stimulate the imagination because the reader has to supply the images that go with the words. Is this received wisdom correct? Are there not as many pre-digested books as TV programmes? If someone with a feeble imagination reads a poor text then the mental experience gained may we11 be inferior to that provided by a masterpiece of the cinema directed by Eisenstein or Hitchcock.

Furthermore, the supposed opposition between words and images needs to be questioned. Media such as advertising, theatre, film and television are in fact multi- media: imagery is normally accompanied by words and, in some cases, music. (Even many books are illustrated.) In the 1950s British children were criticised for consuming American horror comics. Defenders of such comics pointed out that some strips contained as many as 2000 words! Watching television may not involve much reading but it certainly involves exposure to linguistic expression. Suppose the worst happened and reading died out altogether. Would this mean a time without culture? No, because there have been many cultures in the history of the world that have been oral. In these cultures memory becomes a highly developed faculty.

Arguably, language and images are simply two types of sign. These signs overlap to a considerable extent. For example, metaphors and similes can be found in both, so a study of visual signs can be just as instructive as a study of written language.