They don’t call it the idiot box for nothing. Three studies suggest that watching too much TV makes you stupid, at least as measured by school grades and test scores.
In the longest-running study, Bob Hancox’s team at the University of Otago in New Zealand monitored the television-viewing habits of 1000 children at two-year intervals from the ages of 5 to 15, and compared them with their academic achievements at age 26. Children who watched the least TV between ages 5 and 11 were the most likely to graduate from university, while those who watched the most TV at ages 13 to 15 were most likely…
