Page 95 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

EDUTAINMENT

sacrificed for the sake of ratings. But several truths were lost in that
rhetoric.

. First, education itself has always been communicative as well as
content-rich: the very term ‘education’ means ‘drawing out’ in
Latin, referring to the Socratic method of teaching by drawing
truth out through dialogue (not shovelling truth in via examinable
‘facts’).
. Second, throughout the mass-broadcasting era, entertainment has
had an educative function. Films, popular newspapers and
magazines mastered the technique of conveying information that
people weren’t previously interested in – often straightforwardly
educative information about the state of the world, wonders of
nature, the human condition, the costs and benefits of progress, etc.
They used appealing visual and verbal techniques, circulation-
boosting games and competitions, and attractive personalities, to
win viewers, readers and listeners, and to persuade them to attend
to things they didn’t like.
. Third, education is itself a mass medium, and has been so at
primary level since the nineteenth century. With the advent of
lifelong learning, even tertiary education aspired not merely to mass
coverage of the population, but to universal coverage. It became
impossible not to use these techniques, even where they had been
resisted previously.
. Fourth, once the challenge of universal education was accepted, the
‘law’ of aberrant decoding kicked in. Educators could not safely
assume any shared code, or prior knowledge, among students. Like
the universal entertainment media, they delivered texts of high
redundancy (predictable information), with strong plot lines and
characterisation, using charismatic presenters, in order to gather the
diverse population within the fold, so as to teach them.

Naturally, the media could do this best when they took a good
educator and made them into good television. In the sphere of cultural
criticism, it all began with John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (Berger, 1972),
although Berger’s series was in part a ‘reply’ to Lord Kenneth Clark’s
earlier and widely lauded series Civilisation. British TV has maintained
an excellent record of edutainment: David Attenborough on all things
living, Robert Hughes on art (an Australian living in the US, Hughes
made several series for British TV), John Romer on archaeology,
Howard Goodall’s Big Bang on music, Patrick Moore on astronomy,
Delia Smith on cooking. Americans cover their own history well – the

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