Education in a televisual society.

Great Debates
1

Everyone bemoans the decline in educational standards and performance, and rightly so, since this decline is real and since its consequences could be significant (in an unpleasant sort of way. I don’t want my fellow cretins at SUNY Albany running a hot dog stand, let alone a government). The most commonly peddled solution is to raise standards (on teachers as well as students) and enforce them strictly, but does this solution really follow from logic? Why is it logical to assume that performance has declined because standards were lowered, and illogical to assume that standards were lowered in response to declining performance? If the latter were in fact true, then raising standards would only exacerbate the problem.

Naturally, this is an issue that requires lots of research (and I’m just the guy to not do it), but it is a commonly held theory that our society has fundamentally changed the way in which information is received and processed (or, at the very least, it has changed the medium by which info is gotten). Newspapers and books, not more than 40-50 years ago, were the primary source of information for westerners. Today, television has far surpassed the printed word as the means for promulgation to the masses. This is true everywhere but in schools. Children are taught in ways that are completely contradictory to every other aspect of their intellectual culture and, it’s subtle, but I don’t think they like it.

So my question is this: Should we meet children half way? Should we find ways of making the audio-visual experience the centerpiece of schooling, or at least a significant supplement to traditional book-learning?

If your answer is “no,” then you will probably have to show why books are, inherently, better communication and educational devices than television. I don’t see that they are, but this is not a field I’ve done a lot of work in. I guess that’s all for now. I look forward to being enlightened.

2

Seems like the internet meets the kids halfway, where you a tv monitor screen and access to all the text you could want. Seems like a lot of kids are pretty net-savvy.

And John Carrado makes this point in another thread.

Quote>>>>>>
Remember how, in the late '80’s/early '90’s, the refrain was “American kids can’t find the U.S. on the map!”? Absolutely true. Less than 50% of American students were able to correctly circle the U.S. on a map during a geography test.

Of course, what they didn’t tell you was that 98% of the students had identified the continental U.S., and that half of those students either forgot or misidentified Hawaii and Alaska. The stories always seemed to imply that half of Americans students were looking at, oh, Africa and trying to figure out if Madagascar was New England or Texas.

Then there was a beautiful Newsweek article I read in the early '90’s bemoaning U.S. kid’s scores on a certain test when compared with Japanese kid’s scores. In the next-to-last paragraph came the statement ‘Of course, the difference in scores may be in part that the U.S. chooses a proportional representation of its students to take the test, while Japan has only its top students take that test.’ I nearly screamed when I read that. ‘You’re saying that Japan’s best students are beating out our average students, and it’s some kind of crisis? Cripes, the best Kurdistanian students could probably beat our average students! What the hell does that prove?’

So maybe the problem is not that clear- cut after all.

3

Probably should have just posted this link instead of copying the whole thing.

4

Without television, and shows like “Ricki Lake” how on earth would we know to use phrases such as “my bad”?
Just pullin’ your chain there a little, spooje. :wink:
I for, one, learn a lot from TV. And from reading.
Peace,
mangeorge