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Johnson's educational use of TV is based on something called Prime Time School Television (PTST), a Chicago-based, nonprofit organization that prepares TV-related study guides. And PTST illustrates the general principle of prime-time teaching: use the screen to get students' attention, then engage their intelligence with questions, study guides and sometimes scripts read as homework. Thereafter, Archie Bunker's layoff from his job on the loading dock can be used to prompt a class discussion of unemployment. An arrest by Starsky and Hutch helps illustrate constitutional guarantees like that of a suspect's right to counsel. The approach is being applied by different companies in slightly different ways. The CBS Television Reading Program helps student TV watchers to sharpen their logic and their language skills by providing "enrichment guides" (script and discussion questions) for special shows. It is now used by more than 4 million students. The New York-based publisher of a booklet series, Teachers Guides to Television, does not offer scripts but presents detailed assignments. (For Battlestar Galactica suggested reading is Jules Verne, and studying the astronomy of Ptolemy and Kepler.) The same company also prepares outlines for parent-child discussions of TV shows. "A fictional story offers a family the chance to discuss matters that are otherwise difficult to bring up," observes Guides Editor Gloria Kirshner.
PTST, which distributes 200,000 monthly study guides to such serious TV productions as Eleanor and Franklin, Masterpiece Theater and Between the Wars, set out two years ago to transmute even the most mindless network shows into learning aids. The first piece of alchemy was making cops-and-robbers shows the cornerstone of a curriculum package. Columbo episodes serve as lessons on literary elements: dramatic character, plot development, conflict and resolution. Students taking law and criminal-justice courses use a "constitutional-awareness chart" to determine whether Baretta has illegally roughed up a suspect. Armed with their study guides, students quickly become sensitive to the way television can distort reality. "All big-city cops are not as glamorous as Kojak," says Lori Kaufman, 14, of Lucas, Kans.