Electronic media, particularly television, influence children to develop composite, plastic personalities striving after unreal goals, but the teacher can help children identify and develop rational goals and role models without completely abandoning media. Television has influenced children, and many adults, to create personalities assembled from various media images and to believe that the world portrayed by media is real. Everyone is led to believe that they are equal to everyone else. This advanced state of democratization brought about by the pervasiveness of the electronic media has resulted in the virtual vanishing of the hero-model from our culture. Teachers and schools can begin to help children develop rational goals and role models by abandoning their exclusive monopoly on education, dissolving the artificial barrier between classroom and community, and ceasing to pretend that equality of opportunity can be linked directly to equality of achievement. Rather than purchasing equipment designed to present, record or test the kind of factual data normally associated with the sequential and linear approach to learning, schools should equip children with essential survival skills of reading and writing. The unique language of communication in film should be used for the potential good of students rather than the system e.g., to enable them to explore some of the seminal experiences of their lives and thereby become enriched. (CWM)