By JOHN RICHARD SCHROCK
There are advantages for pre-school children, and especially those speaking English as a second language, in watching Sesame Street and similar programs. But using television to teach more advanced courses lacks evidence of effectiveness. This has again become an issue since some educational television is hyped as an effective supplement to the online learning that has been a necessary stopgap during this pandemic.
One common image of televised content education is based on programs such as the PBS “NOVA.” But the long-time executive producer of the NOVA program (now just retired) was clear about its educational limitations when interviewed in 1990. NOVA only drew an average of 11–12 million viewers each week. “Studies of NOVA’s audience reveal they are somewhat older, better educated, and better off economically than the nation as a whole...”
She continued: “We don’t see ourselves doing ‘physics’ programs or ‘chemistry’ lessons. We see ourselves involved doing stories that demand an explanation of the science involved in order to make sense.... The decisions we make on each film, however, do not begin with any sense of the film’s value as pedagogy. First, we look for something that will be a good movie.”
“Given that we occasionally produce an almost purely education film, and that we don’t feel these films have a great impact, how do we see our role in bringing science to the American public? We like to think that an entire season or more of NOVA represents a fairly high level of science education and that as a result, the scientific literacy of our audience steadily increases. But even if we could test this thesis, it’s clear that our educational impact is incremental at best. The important issue is not that our audience retains specific facts from any given program. Instead, they should understand that science is a human endeavor that we use to order our material world. If your audience gets a sense of the method and power of science and the limits to that power, then we have done a good job.... Successful television has to recognize that the medium is better suited to entertainment than to pure pedagogy.”
Long before there were personal computers, educational television began to be promoted in the early 1960s with “Continental Classroom” and other courses “on the air.” The mistaken assumption, promoted by Education Schools, was that if you had an expert in a field who was a good speaker, then you could fully replace school teachers with televised broadcasts.
But good teaching for 95 percent of students requires face-to-face, eyeball-to-eyeball communication with a good teacher. With other students also present alongside for support and motivation, all are “in the moment” learning from a teacher they personally know, and WHO ALSO KNOWS THEM!
This is what was missing from that two decades of abysmal televised instruction.
With the arrival of cable and satellites, this format was revived by Whittle Communications that announced in March, 1990 its controversial Channel One with both a Classroom Channel and an Educators` Channel. Some schools bought into the deal since Whittle would provide a satellite dish and as many TV sets and VCRs as the schools needed. It was supposedly “free” but the 12-minute programs contained commercials and schools were required to show them to their students who were a captive audience. Despite making concessions, this system eventually declined.
Today the EdTech Industrial complex is huge. One television that lasts decades in a classroom is now replaced by a laptop or tablet for every student. And marketing that “you can’t teach tomorrow’s students with today’s technology” makes a 2 or 3-year turnover of digital devices mandatory. Meanwhile, substantial and overwhelming research on screen reading and online learning shows it is a very inferior mode of learning for all but a few students. Meanwhile, the cost of the continually evolving equipment and extra IT personnel to maintain it is dramatically diverting funding from teacher’s salaries while requiring continuous re-learning of technical changes that provide no learning advantages for students.
This massive experiment driven by the pandemic has revealed a slowdown in learning that not only causes a gap across all age groups of students, but also shows that we will need to require students to attend school for 14 years to learn what they previously learned in 12 years under face-to-face teaching.
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John Richard Schrock has trained biology teachers for more than 30 years in Kansas. He also has lectured at 27 universities in 20 trips to China. He holds the distinction of “Faculty Emeritus” at Emporia State University.