Education by Radio (1937)

BRITISH BROADCASTING CORPORATION, according to The Listener for Jan¬ uary 20, 1937, is making an experiment to see if it is possible to find out what the listening public thinks of radio dramatic productions. Two hun¬ dred people have been asked to listen with special care for about two months. They are being sent a list of questions about each production and an analysis of the answers will be made. The listen¬ ers chosen are of all types and from all parts of the country and it is hoped that the replies will reflect the ordinary man’s reasons for enjoying or not enjoying a radio play. * I ^HE COMMITTEE has on hand a limited supply of the following free publications: Tyler, Tracy F. An Appraisal of Radio Broad¬ casting in the Land-Grant Colleges and State Uni¬ versities. Tyler, Tracy F. Some Interpretations and Con¬ clusions of the Land-Grant Radio Survey. Requests will be honored in the order in which they are received. Address them to the National Committee on Education by Radio, Room 308, One Madison Avenue, New York, N. Y. 'Y\/’ALD0 abbot, director of broadcasting ’ ' service. University of Michigan, is the author of a Handbook of Radio Broadcasting, to be published this month by the McGraw-Hill Publishing Company, New York, N. Y. This hand¬ book is written for students and teachers of speech and of broadcasting, for the teacher receiv¬ ing educational programs in the classroom, for those who are in the radio profession, for the radio listener, and for the person who is or who may be a radio speaker or writer. COMMANDER T. A. M. CRAVEN, chief en¬ gineer of the Federal Communications Com¬ mission, who has already made a report on the engineering aspects of the reallocation hearings held last October, is expected to report soon on the testimony concerning the economic and social aspects of broadcasting which was developed in the same hearing. This report will be the first of its kind to be prepared within the Commission. Let freedom ring, a new series of weekly educational radio programs dramatizing the struggle of the human race to win civil liberties, is being presented by the Educational Radio Proj¬ ect of the U. S. Office of Education. “Let Free¬ dom Ring,” the seventh series to be presented over the networks by the Educational Radio Proj¬ ect, began on February 22. Allen miller, director of the University Broadcasting Council of Chicago, has been granted a fellowship by the Rockefeller Founda¬ tion for observation and training in network pro¬ cedure at the NBC studios in New York. In the second place, education, when it goes on the air, wants to be assured of a real opportunity to reach an audience. This is a fundamental problem, so far as chain broadcasting is concerned. Educators, told that they are to have a nationwide network, have checked up to find that their program was being carried by less than a dozen stations. The best report on the experience of educators in the use of networks for educational programs is contained in the pamphlet, 4 Years of Network Broadcasting. It justifies fears which many educators have had with respect to education on the networks. In the third place, educators want for themselves in the use of radio the same kind of freedom which they enjoy in the classroom. This does not mean that they want to be free to follow any whim which may come into their minds. They are not free to do that in their teaching. They are used to subscribing to established policies. A professor of chemistry would not undertake to speak with author¬ ity on matters of psychology. In radio they are willing to accept reasonable limits within which to confine their discussions. However, they expect these limits, once set, to be respected by all parties to the agreement. They expect to feel as secure in the exercise of their rights as are the broadcasters in the exercise of theirs. At the present time such freedom does not exist. The contract under which education is allowed to approach the microphone is largely unilateral. The broadcasters may stop the program at almost any moment on any one of a number of grounds. They may take exception to the script or to particular passages of it. They may take exception to the way in which it is presented. Furthermore, there is no effective recourse against their judgment. Conceding fully that there are countless instances in which the criticism of broadcasters has helped to improve the quality of edu¬ cational programs, educators can produce ample evidence that the broadcasters are not infallible enough to warrant arbitrary power in the exercise of their judgment. One significant and not particu¬ larly subtle bit of evidence comes from a contrast between the often reiterated statement that educators must put more showmanship into their programs and the comments which the officers of the Columbia Broadcasting System had to make when the Republican National Committee asked to buy time for the dramatization of politics. The following quotation appeared early in the correspondence between these two principals: Our reasons for not allowing dramatizations are as follows: Appeals to the electorate should be intellectual and not based on emotion, passion, or prejudice. We recognize that even the oratorical discussion of campaign issues can be to a degree stamped with the aforementioned flaws, but we are convinced that dramatizations would throw the radio campaign almost wholly over to the emo¬ tional side. Then, too, we believe that the dramatic method by its very nature would tend to over-emphasize incidents of minor importance and significance, simply because of the dramatic value. While we realize that no approach to the electorate is absolutely ideal, we believe American voters have long been trained to discriminate among the assertions of orators whereas we do not believe they could discriminate fairly among dramatizations, so that the turn of national issues might well depend on the skill of warring dramatists rather than on the merits of the issue debated.^ It may be that the educational and cultural interests of the nation want from radio more than they have any right to expect and more than they have any possibility of getting. If so, these groups will be the first to make concessions, so long as there is no attempt to make them compromise on the fundamental proposition that broadcasting must constitute a constructive influence and that social values must be paramount in radio. -Education by Radio 7:6. February 1937. ® Columbia Broadcasting System. Political Broadcasts. Kew \ork: CBS. 1935. [ 12 ]