The fallacy of “Educational Television”

Logically, if “educational television” actually worked, right now we’d be living in a country of geniuses. After all, this year marks half a century since Sesame Street debuted. It has been followed by a countless number of other shows meant to capture the imagination and the intellect of the preschool set, help them get a “jump start” on school, instill in them a lifelong love of learning, and erase class divides by exposing children who may come from disadvantaged backgrounds some of the vocabulary and concepts children of “privilege” take for granted. In short, educational television was supposed to boost kids’ intellect. Instead, we see the opposite; for example, men born in 1975 score, on average, five points above men born in 1991.

In itself, the concept of educational television isn’t a bad one, after all, small children have brains that are capable of taking in and learning all sorts of things. Part of the rationale for educational television in the first place was to help expose children in underprivileged situations to ideas and concepts that they might not encounter at home, which is an admirable goal.

However, this in itself, is probably part of the issue. Kids are smart, but they also realize what is important to the adults around them. If a child has been plopped in front of a television set to watch “educational” programming, but there is no connection between this and the world in which the child lives, if there is no practical application to this knowledge, it basically goes in one ear and out the other. This is true whether you have the ‘old school’ shows such as Sesame Street or the ‘new generation’ educational shows which started with Blue’s Clues, which try to engage children by asking them questions directly and pausing, thereby encouraging the child to answer the question to the television.

The show Blaze and the Monster Machines tries to take this ‘new generation’ approach a step further; not only do they ask children questions during the show, a la Blue’s Clues, but they hope to prepare small children for STEM class readiness by introducing not only math concepts such as addition and subtraction, but also more advanced science and technology principles.

This, again, isn’t bad, but the pure truth of the matter is that regardless of the number of times your preschooler may be able to sing the song about adhesion (I kid you not), it’s not going to stick (pun intended) unless there’s some reinforcement that the child is getting at home.

Kids who are going to learn things early need to be able to talk about the things that they are learning for it to mean anything. Sure, they talk about tools on Blaze, but my little sister, at 4, could name you just about any tool in a normal toolbox, including whether a screwdriver was a flat-head or Phillips, because we saw the tools at home all the time; we saw them used, we saw what made each of them unique, we learned to understand what they did, and we could touch them – they were real to us, and our parents talked about these things with us.

Furthermore, when it came to learning the alphabet, the letters weren’t just squiggly lines that we’d see occasionally on Sesame Street, we had magnetic letters to play around with, my mom would point out letters and signs even when we were tiny (S-T-O-P spells stop. It’s a stop sign. It’s there to tell people to stop. It is red. It is in the shape of an octagon…) They are fundamentals that link the world of more abstract concepts – letters and sounds and language – to the concrete world around us to help us understand the order of the world that we live in.

For that reason, it’s amazingly important for parents to talk to their kids about all these things. It’s important for parents to know what their kids are being exposed to and offer explanations, to expand upon what’s been presented, or give kids a chance to touch and feel things for themselves. Very small children, in particular, really enjoy having mom or dad or someone watch television with them. It may not always be possible, but because I very often did, I often had an idea where seemingly “off the wall” questions came from. This very night, before going to bed, Leander started asking me questions concerning turtles crossing roads. After listening to him and trying to understand the questioning more, I remembered, vaguely, an episode of Paw Patrol that dealt with this very issue. I asked him, “Did you see this on Paw Patrol?” He got a huge grin on his face, because he understood that I knew what he was talking about, and replied, “Yeah.” And because I now knew why he was asking me these questions, I was better able to give him answers that were appropriate to the situation and his age level. Had I never paid attention to the show, though, I would have been much more inclined to say, “What? Why are you talking about turtles now? Just go to sleep, okay?” (Then he probably would have annoyed me with another three minutes, at least, of trying to make me understand that he was concerned about turtles crossing the road until the point where I’d be saying, “ENOUGH ABOUT THE TURTLES, GO TO SLEEP!”)

With all the hand-wringing about children and screen-time (and I’m not saying that it’s not an issue) I do have to wonder if there would be any correlation to a child’s test achievement as it relates to the screen-time of the parent (at least at home) or simply the achievement as it relates to the amount of time a child has to talk to family members who live in the house, because I firmly believe that even watching the silliest cartoons and being able to point out ‘real’ and ‘make-believe’ to a two- or three-year-old probably does more for their intellectual development than parking them in front of the most well-intentioned “educational television” with the child never to hear the word “inertia” again until high school. For this reason, it is no wonder that “educational television” has been an incredible failure, because after all the money that has been poured into it for so many years, it still comes down to parents and families to provide the structure that makes it possible for kids to learn well.

Teaching all the Time

If there’s one thing that is constantly amazing, it’s the creativity (and hard work) a lot of “YouTubers” put into their videos. Some of these things, I would have never have imagined even exist. For example, after watching some amazing falling domino videos, I, with Leander (4) came across this:

Basically, this YouTuber puts together marble races and “games” of different sorts, tapes them, puts in a few “special effects” and posts them to YouTube, and the results are strangely fascinating.

However, me being the “geek” that I am, I ended talking with Leander, then Asher (7) about stuff in the video.

I get it; some people might accuse me of trying to suck all the fun out of fun by making things “educational”, but I am trying all the time to make them realize that the things that we talk about in school have practical applications, and I try to foster those connections in their heads. I firmly believe that when kids (and even adults) make solid connections between information and application, learning becomes a much easier process.

So, back to the video. One of the things I pointed out was the flags. Each country has a flag; I don’t expect my kids right now to recognize many, but as the world now has “become smaller”, realizing that other countries exist and learning something about them is important. With Leander, just getting him to understand that the flags represent something is good; with Asher, he understands this, but it was also interesting how he was pulling for certain teams (the US and Japan, to be precise).

Next, there are concepts of gravity and inertia. I just touched upon gravity with Asher, he’s heard of it before, certainly, but when I asked him why the marbles were moving, he didn’t come up with the word immediately. Also, we talked a little about how the marbles end up on different paths, and that it tends to be fairly random, but what path the marble goes down greatly affects the speed of the marble.

No, I’m not asking them to plot probabilities or anything, but even from very early on, I want them to learn that what they see has a foundation in science; that the way things act and react isn’t “magic”, some alchemy of daily life, but, for the most part is a place where, when one understands how things work, is generally predictable.

Not only this, but this “mini-tournament” also demonstrates the manner in which a lot of sporting tournaments are run, complete with “3rd place round” . As adults, a lot of these things seem like second nature, but for kids, they do have to see it happen a few times before they understand what is going on.

Now, for your watching pleasure, a demonstration of art which is dependent on the predictability of gravity and the laws of physics.

So what are we paying teachers for?

Watching kids’ programming, the airwaves are filled with ads for the website ABC Mouse.com. It looks like a neat concept, though my kids have never tried it. In various ads, there are different testimonials, mainly from parents, about how the website has made it fun for their kids to learn and how it has gotten them ready for kindergarten, etc. That’s all fine and good. The ads that bother me, though, are those with testimonials from experienced kindergarten teachers who say that by introducing the program into their classrooms, that the kids test scores have all risen dramatically. This may be the cynic in me, but the thought that comes to mind is, “Well, if it just takes a website to improve these kids’ education so much, why in the world are the kids going to school in the first place? What were you, as a teacher, failing to do, that a website could improve their education so much?”

I’ve been holding on to this study for awhile, wanting to comment on it, but as always, it seems like there is very little time to do this in. It comes from the Johns Hopkins School of Education, and is one of the very few studies focusing on public school students above grade level. Noting that there have been very few studies that look at this, one of the things the researchers endeavored to do first of all was to estimate how many public school students are at least one grade level ahead in math and reading.

Their estimate is shocking. Very roundly, they estimate that somewhere around 30% of kids in public schools are at least one grade level ahead. And while many school districts have “gifted” and “accelerated” programs, they also conclude that a lot of these kids are “invisible”, meaning that they really aren’t getting an education to fit their needs.

Really good teachers can teach kids at multiple levels in the same classroom. However, most do not, and as their performances are based on how many kids are at least *at* grade level (when there are performance-based systems), there is absolutely no incentive for the typical teacher to do anything with these kids. And, as Americans, we are stuck with the “social promotion” grade level scheme, there isn’t a whole lot of incentive for kids who are ahead to work very hard, because they won’t be rewarded for it.

Circling back to the first point in this post, I think it is amazing when parents take the initiative to teach their children all kinds of things before they start school, whether it be through a website or not. Little brains are capable of learning so much in these first years. However, I don’t see the point of getting a kid “ready for school” if the intention, in some way, is to get them far enough ahead that the teachers can be complacent about actually teaching them anything when they do get to school.

The early stages of learning at home

Tabitha, being 5 in September, would normally be in kindergarten. Her brother Asher would be in “K-4”, if he were in school (and mind you, these days, there is plenty of pressure to send them off early.) However, Tabitha is reading, doing addition and subtraction, and has known thing like letters, shapes, colors, numbers for ages. She’s also learning about geography and fundamentals of science.

One thing, though, that I have noticed is that she’s a fairly lazy student. I don’t say this in a bad way, because bright kids are often lazy, and one of the reasons that they seem “smart” is that they are always trying to figure out how to make things easy. Tabitha picks up an awful lot, but often when pushed a little, she rebels with the “I don’t want to!” which certainly is always a challenge to parents who are homeschooling.

So how does a somewhat lazy student get to a point where she’d probably be at least a year ahead of her “normal” public school class? We started early.

In saying that we started early, I’m definitely not saying that we started her on the “Baby Mozart” and “Your Baby Can Read” or even “ABC Mouse”. We did none of these things. However, from the time she (and now her brothers) were little, my husband and I talked to them, we read to them, we counted with them, we asked them questions. And once they started comprehending things, we’d change things up a little bit and ask them “silly” stuff, maybe pointing to a dog and asking them “Is that a zebra?” The first few times, it was kind of confusing, but once explained, questions like that usually get them giggling, along with them thinking. (And as they get older, adding in details like “but it has four legs and a tail” and watching them try to explain differences between dogs and zebras is certainly amusing!)

Several years ago, I won a book called Testing for Kindergarten: Simple Strategies to Help Your Child Ace the Tests for: Public School Placement, Private School Admissions, Gifted Program Qualification* by Karen Quinn. Now for most of us, the premise sounds somewhat absurd, because most of us don’t think that we ought to prepare kids for testing that young. In her case, she lived in New York City, and early testing like that is pretty routine in order to get kids spots in highly competitive “gifted” programs in the city’s public and private schools. In her case, the impetus was that her son, having had ear infections for much of his early life, tested so low that he probably would have started school in special ed classes. Knowing that there was nothing wrong with his brain, she was determined to work with him strategically to be able, within the course of about a year’s time, get him testing better than that. She was successful – very successful – in this, and this book, besides having a lot of tips specific to testing for schools, has an awful lot of resources and strategies for parents who just want their kids to be learning things early on. After all, their education begins at home! 🙂

*Amazon affiliate link