Television is useless for educational purposes

Hi, my name's Aileen, and I'm an addict. No, I've never used heroin, and the taste of alcohol doesn't do anything for me. I'm a television addict.

You see, it all started when I was very small. First, it came in small doses. My mother would put me down as an infant in front of the television for Mr. Rogers and Sesame Street. After all, they were education. It wasn't as if they were doing me any harm or anything. When I got to be about seven, I started doing the stronger stuff — network television — taking in hours of commercial advertising. But that was only a gateway for cable television, which came when I was nine years old. It was all about HBO, Nickelodeon and the cartoon network. It got to the point where I was watching five or six hours of television a day and making it a higher priority than spending time with my friends or getting sleep. Then a miracle occurred — I realized what was happening to me and the people around me, and ever since then I've been on the road to recovery.

That wasn't a dramatization; it's the truth. I was, and still am (once an addict always an addict) hooked on television, and, truth be told, you probably are too. It's one of the most addictive components of life today, and it is destroying life by sucking away our time, energy and very thoughts. These may seem like extreme views, but given the nature of the telling evidence I will shortly present, my perceptions are hardly misguided or groundless.

I don't pretend that television necessarily has to be bad. There are tremendous possibilities for improving society with technology, and this was the main reason television was such an exciting and revolutionary breakthrough from a sociological perspective. Yet in all this time, despite being in the middle of unparalleled (ever, in the history of humanity) wealth and technological development, we have not done so. If, during the best times for the most powerful nation in the history of the world, the United States has not brought about good with the television, there is little reason to believe that anyone ever will, especially since the technology is so firmly in the control of advertising and commercial interests.

None of the proposed good uses of television have even been successfully used in the rather pathetic attempts that have been made. Consider the use of television in the classroom. On the middle-school and high-school level, television is most often used to present movie versions of plays or novels students have already (in theory) read. This creates a redundancy rather than an enrichment of information, while wasting class time. Moreover, this practice creates the impression that television must validate written work. Students can then draw the conclusion that reading isn't worthwhile because any written matter that is worth reading is already on tape and can be ingested faster through television.

Consider also that most attempts at informational programming on television have failed to educate the public in any meaningful way. The "educational" programs most people know are really compromises between education and entertainment rather than real teaching. The programs usually aren't mentally challenging because we are passive when we watch television and uninterested in actively participating in the learning process. The passiveness has nothing to do with what sort of person is watching; television automatically puts its viewers into such a state. Producers of "educational" television must choose between successfully conveying a small amount of mainly obvious information to their audience and conveying a lot of meaningful information at the risk of losing a large chunk of their possible audience. When these producers opt for the former option, they choose topics that are visually interesting and with facts that can be explained simply and concretely. For example, National Geographic documentaries follow the course of sticking with clearly outlined and easily understood information that can be delivered in small doses. Interviews with experts and interesting facts appear on these shows, but they usually are joined with some meaningless visual aspect necessary to keep the viewers interested.

Thus, these benefits become obligations or even liabilities, such as when the dialogue of an interview must be coupled with something— anything — to keep viewers interested. You might argue that this is because the shows are intended for heterogeneous audiences. This only reinforces my argument. If educational programs are produced for mixed audiences, they can't be all that educational for anyone. At school, we are separated into different levels, so why shouldn't we be for television programming? The practical, and probably effective, system is ignored by networks that want to avoid neglecting any block of viewers.

Thus, television has proved itself useless for educational purposes so far. Do you really think it's going to change? So why exactly do we tolerate television?