Edutainment is not education

“Nine o’clock and all is well!” The proclamation of the town crier provided townspeople with two bits of information. One that the time was 9 o’clock, and one that a factual assessment had been made of the public safety in the town. Now, what you deduced from that information became part of your thinking process, and your deduction and evaluation based on your personal education resulted in your next action. If your education, made up of information taken in, life experience and evaluation leads you to a life of crime, 9 o’clock is the time to start being a burglar, “all’s well” tells you there is no diversion you can count on, so the police will be vigilant. If your education, on the other hand, leads you to being a policeman ... well, you get the idea.The problem in America today is that we are given less and less information and more and more opinion. The supposition is that as America dumbs down, as our education levels drop, as our demand of pure news (“Just the facts, ma’am,” as Dragnet cops used to say) diminishes, news information has been increasingly replaced by edutainment, predigested thinking meant to spoon feed the public with learning.Thirty years ago the National Education Association decided that “Sesame Street” was bad for children as it gave them a false sense of what learning is all about. A year later, under tremendous public pressure, they had to recant. But were they actually wrong? Learning should be fun, yes. Learning should be stimulating and permanent. But does learning numbers need to be associated with an image of a Count (“Ha, ha, ha!”)? How will that visualized entertainment affect children later on, when they need to conceptualize numbers in the abstract? We do not know, we are living the experiment. So far, 30 years on, advanced school math accomplishment across the nation has dropped 42 percent (according to MIT).Do we need a gorgeous person presenting pure news bastardized with video cut-aways of distraught parents after a hurricane? Or a phony walking shot of an expert before we get to the talking-head shot of him, sitting in his office with his books as a backdrop, presenting his opinion on what happened? Do we need the knee-jerk reaction from all the world leaders who are now trained, like Pavlov’s dogs, to only speak in clipped sentences, repeating the same media message in sound-bites, in case the edit of the interview is excerpted?Donald Rumsfeld is a perfect example of a politician who refused to play the game. He spoke in long, complicated sentences. He said exactly what he meant, in full context. He was very generous in providing information and, because of the depth of information he did provide, it was always clear what he did not want to talk about, and where the real journalist could find other truths. The problem with Rumsfeld for the media, on all sides of the aisle, was that he did not fit the news edutainment profile, there were no repeated sound-bites where his message was neatly packaged for digestion. So? They interpreted what he said and made up sound-bites. These were usually completely false; disinformation in fact.Why did the media do this, why do they do it still? Because they have made an assumption that Americans are so uneducated, so lacking in any yearning for pure intelligence that they need to be spoon fed information in a palatable form (“Ha, ha, ha!”). In short, the media have turned into purveyors of education, but only their forms of knowledge, experience, information and conjecture to arrive at a colorized version of the facts.When you hear the words “media spin,” ask yourself this: Are they changing the truth or merely showing edutainment, based on their interpretation of facts? And is that not what all the news media, on all sides, are doing in America? Whether it be hurricane coverage or political coverage, there is no town crier anymore, no one who will present the facts and allow you to fit those facts into your life experience, your need for preservation for you and your family.So, how do you cope? Find the news media here and abroad that gives you different sides of the same issue. Rely on your learning, and learn more. Avoid steadfast opinion and belief but reevaluate everything constantly. Life is, after all, a continuing education, hopefully drilled down to factual information.Peter Riva, a former resident of Amenia Union, now lives in New Mexico.