Increasingly in education, the screen will supplement but not supplant the printed word, as it does in work and in leisure. Instead, new media add to the available options.Third, still speaking for Mr Blunkett, I would say that Marshall McLuhan’s famous aphorism – the medium is the message – is wrong. What matters is the message; the means of delivery is, in the final analysis, unimportant. About two-thirds of primary school children read books for fewer than 45 minutes a day on four days a week, especially at bedtime.

Thereafter there is a fall-off until, aged 15 to 17, only 45 per cent do so.Second, history shows that new media hardly ever replace older media The cinema did not extinguish the theatre Television did not put radio out of business. The London School of Economics study finds exactly the same figure In fact, reading for pleasure declines with age. In the Fifties, before TV became a mass medium, American research showed that children read on average for 15 minutes a day. What does he make of the report’s assertion that a print or reading culture as such does not exist among young people? I shall try to reply for him.First, it is questionable whether many young people have ever done much reading. When the researchers asked children and young people what would comprise “a really good day”, they replied: going out to the cinema, going to see friends, or playing sport. In contrast, watching television is widely seen as what you do when you are bored and have nothing better to get on with.Yet six- to-17-year-olds spend on average two-and-a-half hours almost everyday in front of the television screen, to a large extent just filling in time.Next to participate should be David Blunkett, Secretary of State for Education.

Both are his responsibility.The tragedy which everyone round the cabinet table should contemplate is this. Our children are not willing prisoners in their homes, with parents as more or less kindly gaolers. But part of it is explained by planning rules and regulations and part by the inability of local authorities to meet local needs. I am not saying that Mr Prescott can easily make good this lack of facilities. They complain about a lack of cafes, parks, swimming-pools, cinemas, skating-rinks and youth clubs. Nowhere else in Europe are young people so dissatisfied with what is available. Indeed they do; they spend some five hours a day watching TV or video, listening to music, playing computer games, using the PC or reading.At this point, the Prime Minister should turn to Mr Prescott.

For there is a second reason why children spend so much of their free time at home They cannot find affordable and accessible meeting-places. At least the cooped-up young, they sigh, will have something to do. Most parents are more restrictive than they remember from their own youth.
These secondary effects of crime are rarely measured but can outweigh the more obvious results Society always adjusts. Because parents no longer feel that they can let their children play in the street or run off to friends on their own, they spend a surprisingly high proportion of their income on providing media hardware for the home – television sets, videos, games machines, music equipment and PCs – often buying two of each in order to turn their children’s rooms into media laboratories.

He would perceive that parents’ fears that their children could be the victims of crime or become involved with illegal drugs have significantly affected the way they are brought up. About a third of the parents who were questioned said that their children spend “very little” or “none” of their time outside the home or garden without adults around. THE CABINET could profitably spend an entire meeting discussing the findings of a research project by the London School of Economics, published last week: “Children, Young People and the Changing Media Environment” First to speak should be the Home Secretary. It is not the state- sponsored kind that has haunted this century, from which we know that human beings are capable of using the latest scientific advances to pursue a state-sponsored eugenic policy of a horrific kind. Rather, what could now emerge is a privatised form of eugenics in which individual parents choose which children to have, and which to abort.What if such choices are available only to the rich? And if they are available to all, how will those who choose not to abort children suffering from genetic diseases be regarded? Will society be prepared to pay the health care costs if such a child could have been aborted? How will such children see themselves? These are just some of the many questions that arise, quite apart from abortion.The interest of society as a whole demands that we do all we can to foster a society in which every child is a wanted child, in which family life is protected and supported, in which sexual intimacy is revered as the point at which life and love meet, and in which each and every human life, from the moment of conception, is respected and protected.. But we seem to be on the verge of the possibility of parents choosing what they regard as the best children to have.What this could unleash is the spectre of eugenics. It is said to be some years before such treatment could be a practical reality, but we are continually being surprised by the pace of science and technology.What is already a reality, however, is the selective abortion of foetuses.