My Back Pages: TV or Not TV

Ranging from questions about the best way to use computers in the classroom to the pros and cons of social networking and the use of cell phones in school, the use and misuse of technology is a perennial debate in education circles. In fact, similar questions were asked in generations past about another game-changing technological advance: the television.

In November 1970, Donald W. Nylin asked "TV or Not TV: What Is the Question?" (PDF) in the pages of Educational Leadership. In the article, educational television is described as being the potential cure for several problems, including teacher shortages, individual differences in students, and teacher quality.

Nylin recognizes that educational television is, in many ways, far from an ideal method of teaching students. He says that its one-way communication method, moving at a fixed speed, is "diametrically opposed to what we know about how children learn." He also explains that these issues must be remedied for educational television to become anywhere near what it was hyped to be.

To what extent have current educational technologies addressed the problems inherent in the educational television of 1970? Is the Internet bringing us substantially closer to the vision of those who almost four decades ago saw TV as a revolutionary instructional device?

In "My Back Pages," we look at important issues through the historical lens of the Educational Leadership archives. ASCD members have access to EL issues from 1943 to the present in the myASCD Online Library.