Educational screen & audio-visual guide (c1956-1971])

education Finally, some are even beginning to say that more money is not necessarily the answer to all education's problems. If America can learn that money is not the most eflFective force in our lives, and in the world, we will have gone a long way. But education must stubbornly and courageously believe and teach this if we are to avoid "cheap and dirty" solutions to complex problems. I do not believe that in educational television we have any panacea for education. Put me down as old fashioned if you like; for I do not personally believe that learning can ever be "made easy" in the sense that many people mean. I believe that many of our learning theories are no doubt antiquated. I believe each of us can learn enormously more than we have so far thought possible. Educational television and all sorts of new media can contribute greatly if used rightin an integrated approach— ratiier than elbowing each other aside. But I believe that learning is essentially discipline (mostly self -discipline ) . Just as great sportsmen can find no substitute for rigorous conditioning, body-stretching, painful straining beyond capacity— moving the threshold ever upward— so I believe that good minds and clear, analytic thinking, can be realized only in the same way. I THEREFORE am not particularly interested in "how easy television makes it." I am not even interested in what television does to or for teaching as such. What does it do to and for learning? And by learning I do not mean the amassing of facts or odd bits of information. We are confused enough already. The plethora of "facts" in an unrelated jungle of confusion is a large part of our problem. What can educational television contribute to seeing cause and effect relationships? What can it do to identify and clarify forces? What can it do to develop intelligent and rational decision-making in an age when our rational side is all too often by-passed? It is at this point that I would like to take issue with many who feel that television alone can teach this sort of thing. Only practice under supervision, can do this. I know of no way to ferret the irrational out, and get at the rational basis of a principle, other than discussion. And by this I mean discussion in which the learner— the apprentice or disciple— himself participates. I am not too worried about the fact that "students can't ask questions" of the television teacher. Most of the kinds of questions tnost people are thinking of will not be sorely missed. It is dialogue (in the Socratic sense) that I mean— and that is something which the eflBciency of television in providing demonstrations, or transmitting facts, or providing contact with great teachers, to serve as a basis of such dialogue, can enormously contribute to. Printing did not replace the classroom. Neither did films or radio, thank heaven. Neither, uiJess we lose our sanity, vdll television— at least at those critical ages of students when the young minds are curious and idealistic and needing to be guided and tested and challenged and given rough knocks. Perhaps the advent of television will cause us to study media as media— and cause us to have, finally, courses in all the media to which humans are subjected in our culture. Education has for thirty years sat passively by, arming students to recognize ( and even here imperfectly ) phoniness and irrationality only in the print media. The offense (commercial and manipulative uses of these media) in electronic media has gotten far ahead of the defense (the listener or viewer). Education has too long been blind to this responsibility. It can no longer be. It must, finally, take an overall view of what happens to the students when placed in contact with other mindsthrough whatever media is used. Here, too, there is evidence that such an awakening is occurring. I believe that the entrance of educational television on the stage of education has been so dramatic and has brought with it both so many promises and so many threats, depending on the persons or groups who judge it, that it is, right now, causing the hardest look at education itself that has been given it since perhaps the days of Rousseau— and his efforts to equip his imaginary student, Emile, to meet the problems of the world he would have to live in. This, in fact, may turn out to be educational television's greatest contribution. But the wise uses to which television must be put, must be tempered uses: uses tempered by an awareness of its great power, and its great dangers, as well as its great promise. How well these uses emerge depend in large part on the courage, imagination, integrity, and effort that all of us— who claim or aspire to exert influence in its uses —display in these exciting days and years. Educational Screen and Audiovisual Guide — December, 1959 ^7