receivers in the midst of the cacophony unless they have been weaned off it by sensible
parents and teachers and re-directed towards the healthy pursuit of reading. In Britain
in 1993, the Secretary of State for Education and Prince Charles made appeals to
parents and teachers to get children to turn off television sets.
Specialist children’s radio, television and film programmes are caught up in this
crossfire and so, like Ruth Adam above, practitioners and even critics frequently put
themselves in an awkward position. It is as if they are saying, yes, too much radio/
television/film is a bad thing but we produce quality programmes and if we didn’t
children would only be watching rubbish. Leaving aside the aesthetic and value
judgements made, this neatly sidesteps the role children’s productions play in helping to
produce the viewers, film-goers and listeners of those other apparently awful
programmes either now or in the future. That is to say, listening to the radio and
watching visual productions are as much learnt activities as reading.
Because we say that learning to read takes place within an obviously pedagogical
context, the process is measured, assessed and seen as ‘work’ both by teachers and
children. On the other hand, listening and viewing are not taught to very young children.
Children are simply and usually exposed to many hours of transmission. By the time
they are articulating their wishes and desires, we hear from most of them that they know
and understand large amounts of what they receive. It seems at first glance that in fact
there was nothing to learn; watching television or listening to the radio is ‘natural’, and—
more significantly—this is because these media are apparently ‘real’.
On closer examination, none of this is the case. Taking the visual media first, the
processes of cutting from one person or from one scene to another; the moving of
cameras within one shot (panning, crabbing, tilting, zooming); the use of framing (close-
ups, mid-shots, wide-shots) all have to be learnt to be understood. Consider the
simplest: Jane is talking to Jill. A film-maker does not have to show Jane and Jill in the
same frame talking. We will understand that they are talking to each other if in shot one
Jane stands on the right side of a frame and looks left (with Jill not present in the
frame) followed by shot two of Jill standing on the left side of a frame and looking right
(with Jane not present in the frame). In actual fact it is not necessary for the two
characters to have met for us to believe that a ‘conversation’ is taking place. Notice here
that the camera does not even imitate the action of the human eye, panning from one
person to the other. The film (that is, the editor) cuts from one person to the other from
two stretches of film or video intermixed. Yet, when this happens we are quite happy to
call this ‘real’ or ‘naturalistic’ (especially if various, but arbitrary, elements, are adopted
like contemporary clothes or non-standard dialects). But it is also clear that for children
to make sense of these and hundreds of other visual conventions, they have to learn
them in order to buy the idea, as here, that two people are ‘really’ talking to each other.
But of course, if all that children were doing when learning to read was learning
letters, and all that children were doing when they were learning visual media
was learning how shots work, we would be describing fairly impoverished processes.
Every watching act involves many learnings and many incorporations of the already
learnt. Consider a popular children’s series set around two main characters —The Lone
Ranger. If the Lone Ranger or his assistant do not appear in the first minute or so, we
are not usually perturbed, nor do we think that the wrong film has been tagged on to
THE CONTEXT OF CHILDREN’S LITERATURE 525