Is Educational Television an Oxymoron?

Vietnam

Vietnam: A Television History

Vietnam: A Television History
Something has got to give in the world of education.

Tuition at many private universities now exceeds $50,000 a year.  That’s $200,000 for a BA.

Is it worth it?

A lot of people are starting to say no.

Or maybe not.

They’re looking for alternatives, and a very popular alternative is the notion of an ‘online’ education.

So now you see an explosion of online universities, from Liberty to Phoenix to Kaplan (these are the people who used to do the SAT reviews).

Everyone is piling onto what Forbes Magazine calls a trillion dollar business.

I’m sure that’s right.  That is, I am sure it is going to be a trillion dollar business.  The question is, is it going to be what everyone seems to think it is going to be – that is, a kind of online version of what a University education is – except online.

This is much like newspapers and magazine migrating to the web and taking their architecure with them.  If the history of  online tells us anything so far, it tells us that linear old world models don’t translate.

So maybe it’s time to start thinking about education in a totally different way – one informed by the world of media that surrounds us, as opposed to trying to jam a 19th century classroom model into 21st century technology.

The structure of public education in the US and the UK was created in the late 19th Century.  The idea was not so much educating, per se, as training rural children to work in the factories that the Industrial Revolution had given rise to.  Schooling was based upon creating good factory workers:  Arrive on time.  Change shifts when the bell rings. Do the task you have been assigned. Complete it in the time given.  Get your rewards (a good grade). Don’t question authority.  Rise through the ranks.  Pass the tests.  Follow the rules.  Make the products.

It was this model that survives to this day. But who is to say that this is the right way to educate a nation?

Maybe there is another way entirely.

The video above is from Vietnam: A Television History, a 1988 PBS series (American Experience) based on Stanley Karnow’s oustanding bookVietnam: A History.

The book is practically a verbatim script for the TV series.  Both excellent.

And both enormously ‘educational’.  (And that is not a deragatory word).

The average American and European now spends a mind-boggling 5 hours a day, every day, watching television.

Even with the arrival of the web, our commitment to TV has only increased.  And of course, in very little time, there is going to be no difference between the two.

At the University of Texas at Austin, PhD candidates are required to complete 30 hours of classroom instruction (along with their dissertation) get their doctorate.

You could do it in a week….

By the time the averge American or European reaches 30 (but why stop there), they have watched an estimated 45,000 hours of television.

That’s a LOT of instruction – or could be.

Of course, not all of it has to be ‘educational’, but suppose only 1% of it was.  That would still mean 450 hours devote to ‘learning’ something.

Could television do it?

I think so.

Of course, it would require some re-thinking about ‘what television is’, but based on what I see on most cable channels, this would be no bad thing.

Most viewers go back to the same program, night after night, or week after week.  If you watch the news then you probably tune into the same nightly news program every  night.

The irony is that those shows are done without a ‘curriculum’.  If they know that the same people are going to watch every night, night after night, sometimes for years, then the programs could map out where they wanted to ‘take’ the viewers in terms of ‘teaching’ them something.  After a few years, regular viewers could be world-class experts in, say, the history of the Middle East.

Of course, networks with names like The Learning Channel or The History Channel could actually devote themselves to having people ‘learn’ something from their content.

Education doesn’t have to stop at the age of 18 or 21.  And it doesn’t have to be limited to a fixed number of classroom hours. In a non-linear world, networks like The Learning Channel or The History Channel or PBS or Discovery could devote a percentage of their programming – both linear and nonlinear, to actually doing ‘learning’ or ‘history’.

And if they did, and made it compelling, wouldn’t we all be better off?

And better educated.

Honey Boo Boo is not going to help us stay out of the next Vietnam, but maybe knowing something about what happend last time will keep us from making the same mistake twice… or three times.

Copyright Michael Rosenblum 2013