Posted by Andrew Chen on August 16, 19102 at 00:15:46:
Nowadays television has become a part of our daily life, and some people even spend most of their leisure time in watching TV. Not only in the field of entertainment, television also permeates into different aspects of our living. Naturally, television has appeared in schools as well. Nevertheless, I think, according to my personal experience, television has not helped improve standards of education.
Television, of course, owns a lot of advantages. For example, in a biology class a teacher can explain the life habit of an animal clearly with vivid pictures and actual sounds, if there is a set of television in the class together with a suitable tape. However, for the most part, television has not been used as a tool but a substitute of a teacher through my experience.
Considering the fact that television always took the place of a human instructor and ¡°stood¡± in front of a blackboard as a teacher, I disagree that television has made education more efficient. First, a television alone will result in lack of communication. It is a basic ability for a competent teacher to find out whether his students have really understood what he just said and explain the problem again if they had not. Unfortunately, Television is only able to speak a text smoothly and not able to understand student¡¯s need and make a fitting change. Second, a television alone will soon make the class boring. For example, if you have to listen to a long, continuous speech without right to ask question, most probably you will feel dreary. Likewise, television is an extremely dull teacher. Moreover, a television alone will also lead teachers to lose their opportunities to raise their teaching level. Not only do students learn new things from a class, teachers themselves also accumulate the experience from the class, such as which way is more suitable for explaining a certain problem, how students think of this problem and how a class will become more interesting to different kinds of students.
Though television itself is inherently neither helpful nor useless to education, from what have been presented above, I can reach a conclusion that television has not helped improved standards of education because it has been improperly used as substitute of a teacher rather than an assistant means of teaching.