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.
Their Education Begins Here 