Television: a challenge and a chance for education
Television for the public is only 17 years old. In 1950 television activities, other than of an experimental nature, had achieved importance for the general public only in France, Great Britain, in the United States and in the U.S.S.R. Today, hardly three years later, it is a practical reality in 24 countries.
No new medium of communication has ever been greeted with such enthusiasm by so many. Yet in one respect the reception of television appears to be different from that of previous media. Experience with radio over 25 years appears to have combined with awareness of the fantastic potentialities of television to provoke, from the outset, some questions and even some alarm. What, people ask, will this new instrument do to us ? Are those who control and direct it conscious of their responsibilities ? It is, perhaps, significant that it is by educators that the voice of warning and even of alarm has been chiefly raised."I don't want kids watching things,"says one educator."I want them doing things. They should be solving problems, modelling in clay, making things at a work bench, experimenting in chemistry, throwing a ball, playing a trombone, skinning a squirrel. They should be learning skills, skills, skills. Watching is one of the best ways of learning, but not if you just stay and watch. You should see the pattern and then go out and do it."
These words, spoken at a national education convention in the United States provoked quick and angry response from the chief announcer of a television station."Having spent some time in the TV field, and also having in my home a four-year-old daughter who is vitally interested in television, I would like to enlighten you about the so-called watching and not doing habits formed by the children I have come in contact with. They form the habit of being moral citizens, believing that truth and right will triumph over evil, falsehood and wrong. They learn to grow straight in body and mind, they learn in many instances the meaning of the golden rule ! I believe that people like yourself who berate television, all the time saying that it is not bad, then attempting to prove that it is, are doing a great deal of bad for the country, and especially for the children. If enough of the so-called intellectuals of the nation pan, attack and criticize TV or attempt to dabble in fields not their own, I believe that it will do immeasurable harm to the television industry as a whole and thereby rob the public and the children of one form of educational entertainment."
But the fears and anxieties of educators persist despite such angry denunciation. The former Chancellor of the University of Chicago thus reads the future."Under the impact of television I can contemplate a time in America when people can neither read nor write and will be no better than the forms of plant life."
Another educator thinks that television may prove as"dangerous to culture as the atom bomb is to civilization." On the other hand, a senator of the U. S. sees in television the possibilities of a "great public forum and a real means of furthering government of and by the people."
Some parents share the anxieties of some educators."It's not healthy,"one says,"the way Johnny plays. All day it's machine guns, murder, and gangs. You can't tell me kids don't get those deas from radio, TV and the movies." For other parents television is a godsend."TV keeps the children from getting under foot.""TV keeps Billy off the streets. It's a built-in baby sitter."And so it goes. Opinion, conflicting and sometimes self-contradictory, but opinion. Much of it, everywhere.
The concern, if not the alarm, of parents is justified by a fact of which few of them, probably, are aware. For television marks the high point of a curve in the development of mass communication, which has proved as steady as it it remarkable. Each new medium invented has tended to embrace a younger group of devotees. Newspapers, olde5t of our four modern giants of mass communication, are read mainly by adults. Then came the cinema. The cinema, in the United States at least, is predominantly an adolescent pastime. Radio, next, absorbed the pre-adolescent child. With the advent of television, mass communication appears destined to absorb us from the cradle to the gravetelevision is viewed with rapt attention by infants.
Last century John Ruskin was asked by a group of journalists to comment on what at the time was a triumph of technology-the completion of a cable line from England to India. Ruskin offered no comment, but posed them the question :"What have you to say to India ?"
What, we may likewise ask. will television have to say to us ? Those in charge of television in the U.S. in Britain and elsewhere, are conscious of the portentous undertaking on which they are embarked. Educators in the U. S., who were laggard and half-hearted in availing themselves of radio's resources, have been quick to grasp the cultural significance of this newcomer on the mass communication scene.
In the sense that all experience is educational all television programmes are educational. But the educational intention of television varies, and will vary, from country to country and in accordance with the nature and purposes of the organizations and institutions operating television stations and producing television programmes.
Programmes range from education in a very broad sense and with a heavy sugar coating to'formal instruction under classroom conditions.
There can be no question that, in the matter of educational telecasting, there are'those who ! have rushed in where angels fear to tread. Television is not an unmixed blessing. It is a two-edged sword. Every technological advance does not automatically spell progress. Without the exercise of great intelligence and true conscience, it may, indeed, prove a curse. Faith and enthusiasm have been the keynote of developments in educational television thus far. The condition of further effective advances in this field is caution-great deliberation, more careful and extensive testing and, above all, concern with standards.
Television is developing fast everywhere. Its expansion thus far is as nothing to its likely development over the next 10 years. This images it the more important to take stock of the present situation and of the short past which is already rich in evidence, in examples of intelligent experiment, and in clues to the future development of this latest of the media of mass communication.
