Nowadays,watching television has become a more valuable mean in learning skills than reading books; in other fields of learning, however, I disagree that the watching television has a equal value with reading books; on the contrary, reading books is still much more important than watching television.
To begin with, reading books is better than watching television because it provides an active learning for learners while the latter is a passive one. The difference of these two kinds of learning originates from the disparity that books is a static medium, whereas television program is a dynamic medium. Consequently, book readers can control the speed and the interval of their leaning activity: they can stop to think freely if they want, and continue their reading at any time. In contrast, TV views cannot control the rhythm of the process; they have to follow the program passively, lacking much free time of thinking. In US, Japan, Canada, and other developed countries where watching television is a very common thing among the public, there is rising a deep concern about the indulging of children in TV programs, which would prevent to some extend the mental growth of children; many parents refuse to install cable TV in their houses because they are worrying that their kid would become more passive and more stupid if watching too many programs. In a word, active learning is cherished by the modern education, and reading book can achieve this goal while watching TV cannot.
Moreover, reading books is better than watching television because it can learn much more knowledge than the latter does. Understandably, books have existed as a medium of recording knowledge of the world for thousands of years, whereas television is not only a modern invention existing for no more than half a century. Therefore, the number of knowledge in books greatly exceeds that in TV cassettes. We can find so many books in all fields of academic efforts: humanities, social sciences, and...