Page 199 - Culture Society and the Media

CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA 189
confined to affluent urban sectors. But even with radio there were many
problems related to quality of reception, supply of receivers and maintenance.
Many broadcast organizations, finally, found it difficult to infuse the high levels
of talent and resources required to sustain quality of programming over time, in
order to sustain, in turn, listeners’ motivation and the pedagogic impact of the
material transmitted.
Re-interpreting the evidence from a number of early experiments in
educational television, Carnoy (1975) argued that educational television (ETV)
did not provide instruction that was cheaper than alternative methods of
improving education, methods that involved the addition of more trained
teachers to the school system; and that the introduction of ETV did not obviate
the need to retrain teachers. There was a tendency for the educational benefits to
be concentrated in the first year of pupils’ exposure to such programming, and it
was uncertain whether these improvements would extend throughout school life.
Carnoy was doubtful if such improvements would seem significant if compared,
not with traditional educational systems, but with non-ETV innovations in
teaching methods. There was also some doubt, he claimed, whether there was a
high pecuniary rate of return on investment in educational expansion per se:
evidence of the rate of return on increased student attainment indicated that it
was greater at the lower levels of schooling than at higher levels, but there was
no conclusive evidence that this pay-off compared favourably with other public
investments. Nor could it be said that ETV contributed significantly to
equalization of opportunity and income in society: in none of the projects he
examined did he find any features of design or execution that would have
redistributed education itself or the income associated with more schooling.
But the future of broadcasting for education in the ‘developing’ countries is
more likely to rest with radio than with television. Jamison and McAnany (1978)
identified three objectives for radio in relation to formal education: improving
educational quality and relevance; lowering educational costs; and improving
access to education. Examining the strategies available for the achievement of
these objectives, they concluded that only distance learning (replacing teacher
and school) definitely seemed to improve access and reduce cost, but that
improvements in the quality of education were not generally associated with this
strategy. Their findings also suggested that radio was much less likely to be
effective in teaching cognitive skills, work skills and in changing behaviour than
it was likely to be effective in motivating and informing. But unless resources
were made available to enable motivation to be translated into action, the
effective benefit could be negligible.
Katz and Wedell (1975) have argued that ‘extensive’ use of broadcasting is
more likely to be successful than ‘intensive’ use. By ‘extensive’ they refer to
programming that is not associated with formal education, that is received in
private homes in the normal course of broadcast transmissions, and which may
take the form either of informational or entertainment matter, but which is
designed with certain developmental goals in mind. Intensive use of