Education Quote by Tahar Ben Jelloun

Television, in Ben Jelloun's framing, is not a guilty pleasure or a cultural sideshow; it is power in a box, and pretending otherwise is a luxury reserved for people who already control the narrative. The line lands with a poet's pragmatism: he doesn't romanticize the medium, he conscripts it. "Impossible to disregard" reads like a warning aimed at intellectuals and artists who treat mass media as inherently debased. If you abandon TV, you don't preserve purity; you cede territory.

The verb choices matter. "Use it" signals agency, an insistence that television is not destiny but a tool. "Learn to work in it" goes further, implying craft, compromise, and fluency in an industrial language: timing, image, repetition, audience. A poet acknowledging that is subversive in itself, because it rejects the old hierarchy where literature is lofty and television is low. He is arguing for translation, not surrender.

Then comes the real thesis: "express new values in it". This is the cultural politics hiding in plain sight. Values are not private beliefs; they're social defaults, absorbed through story, spectacle, and who gets to appear human on-screen. For a Moroccan writer long attentive to migration, identity, and postcolonial friction, television is the arena where modernity gets rehearsed nightly - sometimes as stereotype, sometimes as possibility. His intent is not to bless TV but to demand that artists infiltrate it, bend its reach toward pluralism, dignity, and new imaginaries before the medium hardens into someone else's permanent script.