educational television

Travis Craft
Eng. 101
Professor Nolte
2 June 2014

TV is said to steal the soul and creativity of young minds. I disagree, in my opinion, television has many positive and informational uses. Television is now being used more in school because it is proven that students remember and comprehend better than from a regular class lecture. In Jim Sciutto and Juju Chang’s article, “What Kids Learn From T.V.” They say that the number of children’s programs rose 12 percent in 1999, and the percentage of shows with no educational content fell to 25 percent from 46 percent. Jim Sciutto: “But there’s still a long way to go. LeVAR Burton, Host of PBS’ “Reading Rainbow”: Believes that it can be possible to make a profit and uplift children at the same time. Jim Sciutto says, “A good TV show does less good if the children aren’t watching, so one of the study’s recommendations is to put more children’s TV into prime time, when kids are most likely to be watching.” I agree we need to spend more time on putting the educational television shows on prime time were everyone is watching, mainly the children. If parents made their kids sit down for an hour a day watching the educational show then a lot can be absorbed if repeated 5 times a week. My mom made me watch hooked on phonics when I was little and by the time school came around I was ahead of the learning curve. The show wasn’t bad at all it made us laugh and we got to participate in the quizzes at the end that were also fun and entertaining. Television has always been good for spreading the news of current world events but it is now being used for more educational and informational documentaries. Television is becoming more and more an educational essential for children. Before they start school, children learn many basic and fundamental tools from television. Most kids learn the alphabet and how to count from shows like Sesame Street and Barney. As children get older there are many story-telling shows that either feature stories with good morals or they tell masterpiece stories like Hercules, Hunchback of Notre Dame, etc. Some of these stories are now a part of our culture and children know and understand them because of television. We have a lot of educational programs that help stimulate young minds, like the history channel, discovery channel, travel channel, animal planet; the most effective one for kids is PBS in the morning with all the educational cartoons to keep the child’s young mind into the program. We also have Nick J.R. also having educational cartoons with Dora the Explorer and Bob the Builder. I didn’t get to watch these cartoons growing up, but have seen them as a result of turning them on for my nieces. Barney was my educational cartoon along with Sesame Street. These cartoons paved the way in how we use cartons to educate our children. As people grow older, television, at least for recent generations, plays a large role in socialization. On many sitcoms and talk shows one can learn of problems of today like teenage pregnancy, poverty, drugs. Television also seems to support somewhat decent morals, a very religious person may not think so, but television still follows the good guy hero, bad guy loser theme. From certain shows on TV one can learn what sort of things are socially acceptable for instance fashion, behavior and hobbies. “Television,” an article by Britannica,v 6.0.( 2009). Goes in to detail about the history of educational shows in the early 1950’s. in the early years of television, educational shows were limited to early morning broadcasting. In all major cities there are now educational channels that offer regular college or high school courses and other informational shows. PBS has how-to shows, such as Julia Child’s and the Frugal Gourmet’s cooking instruction, and the home- renovation show This Old House. In my opinion there are many positive things associated with television but you can get too much of a good thing. Now it is up to our discretion whether we are making good uses of T.V. or we are wasting our time in watching those programmes which are not mean for us the students.