It is argued whether televisions can be a handy tool for educational purposes or can merely be utilized for entertainment. This essay agrees with the latter opinion since while there are programs focusing on academic topics, they are just the minority and, thus, can not be relied on as a complete information source.
On the one hand, it is a fact that informative television programs exist. There are channels such as Geography which specialize in producing videos about nature and animals. Information from these videos can be used in schools in various ways. As a result of the effort to bring in people’s attention put in these documentary videos’ production, they will make lessons less boring and tedious, which is essential for students to learn effectively since everything is bounced off your brain once it categorizes something as uninteresting. For example, research found that college students who use documentary videos to assist their studying can memorize almost twice as fast as the ones who don’t.
On the other hand, TV programs might give you incomplete pieces of information. The reason is that producers tend to produce programs related to topics that can be presented in a way that will pique people’s interest, not ones that can be utilized for academic learning. Thus, most of the time when you try to find a program that digs deep into mathematics or physics, you will see none. Therefore, the amount of information you can access through this method is extremely limited, and might be lacking for people to develop a complete understanding of the topic. For instance, while searching for history-related programs is an easy task, you might find it arduous to work on a similar process with mathmetics-related ones.
In conclusion, even if TV might be regarded as helpful in some fields of academic learning such as history, it might be useless or even harmful for people who research other subjects.
