Charles Kenny has an article in Foreign Policy that describes the impact television’s emergence has had on developing nations. I find it interesting for a couple of reasons.
First, it touches on TV’s decades long implementation process. This is not Kenny’s primary concern but there are some relevant details regarding state control, advances in technology (i.e., digital broadcasting), and the necessity of other technologies (i.e., access to electricity) that find there way into his reporting.
Second, the article implies that people seem to be learning from television, but not from the kinds of educational programming that many think will have a substantial positive impact on developing countries.
The soaps in Brazil and India provided images of women who were empowered to make decisions affecting not only childbirth, but a range of household activities. The introduction of cable or satellite services in a village, Jensen and Oster found, goes along with higher girls’ school enrollment rates and increased female autonomy. Within two years of getting cable or satellite, between 45 and 70 percent of the difference between urban and rural areas on these measures disappears. In Brazil, it wasn’t just birthrates that changed as Globo’s signal spread — divorce rates went up, too. There may be something to the boast of one of the directors of the company that owns Afghan Star. When a woman reached the final five this year, the director suggested it would “do more for women’s rights than all the millions of dollars we have spent on public service announcements for women’s rights on TV.”
This is the kind of phenomena that the learning sciences could spend more time thinking about; it is very much about the entanglement of media, culture, and personal change. The kind of change described seems to be a transition in identity brought on by a shift in the media infrastructure. As people see themselves differently they begin to participate in society in ways that are on the whole better for everyone. Kenny then goes on to explain that the effects extend to other areas as well.
TV’s salutary effects extend far beyond reproduction and gender equality. Kids who watch TV out of school, according to a World Bank survey of young people in the shantytowns of Fortaleza in Brazil, are considerably less likely to consume drugs (or, for that matter, get pregnant). TV’s power to reduce youth drug use was two times larger than having a comparatively well-educated mother. And though they might not be as subtly persuasive as telenovelas or reality shows, well-designed broadcast campaigns can also make a difference. In Ghana, where as few as 4 percent of mothers were found to wash their hands with soap after defecating and less than 1 percent before feeding their children, reported hand-washing rates shot up in response to a broadcast campaign emphasizing that people eat “more than just rice” if preparers don’t wash their hands properly before dinner.
Indeed, TV is its own kind of education — and rather than clash with schooling, as years of parental nagging would suggest, it can even enhance it. U.S. kids with access to a TV signal in the 1950s, for instance — think toddlers watching quality educational programming like I Love Lucy — tended to have higher test scores in 1964, according to research by Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro of the University of Chicago. Today, more than 700,000 secondary-school students in remote Mexican villages watch the Telesecundaria program of televised classes. Although students enter the program with below-average test scores in mathematics and language, by graduation they have caught up in math and halved the language-score deficit.
