ANAmericaneducational psychologist suggests that the habit of television channel hopping lowers children's ability to learn, giving them the false impression that knowledge can be gathered in bite-sized chunks without context or application. Her recommendation is that parents ensure their children watch entire programmes from beginning to end, with no skipping about to see what's on the other side.

Quite apart from the fact that the learned lady hasn't noticed that if the programme is The Simpsons, then no child will go near the channel changer, nor indeed speak, move or breathe for its duration, I'm not entirely sure if her central thesis is correct. Channel hopping transforms a viewer into their own content editor, and occasionally the results have more impact than any of the individual programmes.

Last week I endured a gruelling documentary on BBC4 concerning Aids sufferers in Africa and the impact on their children. I stayed with it until the portrayal of their grinding poverty and hardship, culminating in an eight-yearold orphaned boy howling with unspeakable grief to his impassive 10year-old sister who is now in sole charge of them both and can neither afford to feed her brother nor send him to school, broke my heart so profoundly that I had to admit cowardice and turn over.

The random switch led straight into a piece of Christmas advertising that's sufficiently stomach-churningly repugnant and offensive on its own, but was rendered almost demonic by the juxtaposition of what had shared the screen only seconds before. The ad was for the supermarket chain Morrisons, which this Christmas is inviting us to behave in the same way as the characters portrayed in its commercial. These people are unable to close their fridges because they are too crammed full of rich food, unable to close their car boots because they're too laden with stupid, pointless consumables. They can't get any more presents under their beds for the spoiled brats playing with shiny plastic toys in the next room, and even their garden sheds are piled to the roof with bulk-bought food like survivalists' dugouts in the hills of Montana. Without sounding like some flatulent old bishop on the Radio

4 Today programme's Thought For The Day slot, our educational psychologist might consider that more, rather than less channel hopping to heart-rending documentaries might actually benefit children whose parents aspire to be the Morrison-style of customer.

My hasty switching over from this obscenity took me straight to a Conservative MP being interviewed about his party's plans concerning how best to deal with disruptive pupils, excluded from school and with very little future or prospects. The strategies outlined were desperate measures indeed, and involved spending millions of pounds in herding together troubled, violent and largely illiterate youngsters in designated schools - I believe we used to call them borstals - to give them the "right kind of attention".

Once again, watching any of these three television transmissions on their own means little, but the combination in quick succession made it impossible not to draw parallels and conclusions.

What, you may ask, has the Morrisons' ad got to do with disruptive school pupils, the majority of whom are from low income dysfunctional families with massive problems of their own?

Curiously the answer is to be found in the African Aids documentary.

Poverty, in a society where all are struggling and being poor means dying, demonstrably manifests itself in a desperate ambition to survive, and an understanding that education is the most certain way out. Poverty in a society where most are wealthy by world standards, and being poor means not dying, but simply being unable to participate in the conspicuous consumption being vomited up by everything from television ads to tabloid newspapers carrying pictures of the Beckhams' Pounds20,000 toy fort for their son's Christmas present, manifests itself in little ambition to survive, and a contempt for education as being of no practical use in attaining the consumer durables being held up as so crucial to existence.

Now, although this is all stating the bleeding obvious, curiously there seems to be very little evidence in any political manifesto that politicians recognise we are fighting this particular battle, not just against the poverty and deprivation that leads to disruptive and hopeless youths, but also against a polarised society whose views and aspirations have become nightmarishly warped since Thatcher so skilfully created the benefit underclass.

How do the Conservatives imagine a teenager, brought up by a family in which four generations have never worked, who sees their status as being judged solely by material gain, and who has suffered a total absence of unconditional love from any single adult, will find salvation in a school full of equally damaged and directionless youths?

We will simply be wasting our money. Nothing we can do in our lifetime will heal the materialistic obsessions of Western life that Morrisons' advertisement so gleefully celebrates, but the channel hopping suggested one short-term alternative idea to expensive and pointless neo-borstals.

Imagine if expellees were given the choice between the Conservative-style boot camp, and a year in Africa, working and living in the poorest areas in the world, overseen by voluntary agencies like Medecins Sans Frontieres, or Save The Children. The former would be as unattractive to the disruptive youth as it would be expensive to the taxpayer, whereas the latter would undoubtedly change the life of any teenager forever, never mind one who has barely left his or her own city.

Of course such schemes are daydreams and can never happen.

Damaged families are keener on exercising their rights rather than their responsibilities, and to them, packing Jordan and Romeo off to Africa might have the distinct colonial whiff of 19th-century felon ships to Australia rather than being seen as the opportunity of a lifetime. But recognising that disturbed youngsters wrestle as much with the moral and spiritual vacuum of modern British life as with the practical difficulties of poverty is not something we should ever be ashamed of acknowledging, nor politicians ever shy of addressing.