Chapter 10 - Teaching As An Amusing Activity
1. What is perplexity?
2. How is it possible to think that television should be the one teaching humans?
3. What is WNET?
4. What does preeminent mean?
5. What will it take for people to realize that television isn't beneficial?
REACTION:
Postman talks about how television is not just entertainment, but its entertainment education. We are not forced to watch tv, so its easy to pay attention. But in the classroom, we are forced to pay attention to the teacher, which makes it harder to pay attention. The reverse psychology of the situation proves that as human beings, we learn what we want to learn. Growing up with the tv conditioned us to think that its normal to learn from tv, and that everything on tv is true. Before television, our ABCs and 123s were taught to us by our parents, not fake puppets on an electronic screen. Television is not necessarily bad, its just a new form of learning. It changes the way our youth learns and acts as a whole.
He makes a really good point saying that by watching tv, you do not have to have any knowledge previous to watching it. It is there to fully inform you and most of the time will leave you learning something totally new. Usually programs can make sense alone. A book on the other hand, would be a lot harder to learn from if you opened it up in the middle and just started reading it, or if you joined a classroom in the middle of the year. It wouldn't make as much sense.
Another thing I just thought of is that with tv, we can become uninterested in a program and just switch the channel, however; in a classroom if we become uninterested, we cant just switch the teacher. Tv has almost conditioned us to feel like if we don't understand right away or if we aren't satisfied to full potential, that we can just give up very easily and just switch because we have 100s of other options. But in reality we realize that it is not right, and it kind of puzzles us for a minute, and it gives us 1million thoughts to think about that maybe would have never existed if it wasn't for the discourse of television subconsciously training us to think and feel that way. Most people don't have the mental capacity to make these realizations, hence that is something that TV cannot teach you.
People start to create tv shows that are educational, but have a twist of entertainment. It is kind of cool though, because filming things that 99% of mankind can't and probably will never experience, we can just watch it directly on a television while lying in our beds.
Visual media used to be for enhancing student curriculum, now it is a given part of every curriculum. No matter what subject it is, no matter what school you are at, and no matter who you are with.
Literally quoted in this book by some lady, it said " learning increases when information is presented in a dramatic setting, and that television can do this better than any other medium." The fact that someone could even think that shocks me, let alone be quoted and implemented in a book. But that is how quick, addicting and effective television was becoming. It was like nothing we've ever seen before, literally.
Just because people are paying attention to tv doesn't mean they are learning. It has been proven that you are more likely to remember what you read than you are to remember something you saw on tv.
Yes you can learn from tv, but it is proposing the medium that it is entertaining. This puts a block in our mind that if whatever we are doing is not entertaining, then it must not be learning. Its just completely backwards.
He makes an amazing point at the end that because our minds were trained to be entertained as we learn, we will automatically expect and look for every other aspect of our lives in the exact same way. In other words, we treat life as one big joke. lol but seriously.
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