Education TV didn't pan out.

Let me begin with a disclaimer: I have nothing against Polkaroo. And if there were a Steve Paikin fan club, I'd join.

But still, TVO is a mystery to me. It costs the Ontario ministry of education $45 million a year and the province recently announced it will give TVO another $25 million over four years to convert it to digital formats and replace old equipment. TVO also announced it will expand its programming for children -- more Polkaroo -- and cancel its popular Studio 2 current-affairs program.

When these changes were announced two weeks ago, only the cancellation of Studio 2 caused a stir. Both opposition parties agreed that modernizing TVO's equipment is a good use of $25 million.

I found that discussion -- or rather, that non-discussion -- a little odd. The money TVO gets isn't big by television standards, but it is enough to hire hundreds more teachers, buy a small mountain of textbooks, or fund any number of other worthwhile initiatives. Surely it's worth asking whether TVO should exist at all.

To answer that, we have to recall TVO's origins.

The station's first broadcast aired in September 1970, shortly after Sesame Street first appeared on PBS. That's not a coincidence. Those years were filled with excited buzz about how television would revolutionize education. The new medium would spawn a generation "infinitely more sophisticated" than any that had gone before, wrote Pierre Berton in 1968.

It was never more than a daydream. "There are some nice examples of things that have happened on television over the years that have been very positive, and there's a lot of examples of the opposite. But very few of them are due to television itself," says Richard Clark, professor of educational psychology and technology at the University of Southern California.
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Television didn't revolutionize education. It didn't even deliver a unique value.

And that's the story with education technology in general, Mr. Clark says. From radio to computers, research has consistently found it doesn't add much. A good learning program works however it's presented. A bad one doesn't, whether it's broadcast, webcast or delivered at the front of a classroom. "The medium is not the message," Mr. Clark says, with apologies to Marshall McLuhan.

Mr. Clark isn't opposed to using television in education. He just doesn't see it adding anything special, so the question of whether TV should be involved in this or that circumstance is strictly "an economic issue." Is $45 million a year spent on Polkaroo the most cost-effective way to do what we want to do in education? Does it accomplish more than $45 million a year spent on new teachers? Or textbooks? Or outreach for at-risk children? Or any other idea on the table?

Of course, TVO also spends part of its money on civic-minded programming for adults such as The Agenda (the replacement for Studio 2). But again, the question is one of cost-effectiveness, and television is a very pricey medium. Steve Paikin's salary alone would almost cover the cost of publishing a modest magazine. Why spend money on television rather than other media if there's nothing special about television and the money would go further elsewhere? Sorry, Steve, it just doesn't make sense.

And that's to say nothing of the British murder mysteries, old movies and other stuff TVO airs that has zero civic value and can be obtained from countless other sources. Why spend tax dollars on that? And come to think of it, why are we paying Polkaroo when Elmo is all over the airwaves? I'm all for competition, but I'm not entirely sure that lovable puppets struggling for market share is vital to children learning to count to 10.
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A few history lessons might be a better investment. "You know the saying, 'people who don't know history are condemned to repeat it?'" Mr. Clark asks. "That's never more true than with technology."

The same cycle has played out for more than 100 years, he says. "Each new technology that comes in, people have a sense that it's going to solve a lot of problems and there grows up around it a great enthusiasm. And that generally stays around for a while until advocates of these technologies begin to realize they don't solve problems. And then a new technology comes along and a new group collects around the technology and the pattern repeats itself."

Another part of the cycle is bureaucratic adaptation. The hype about TV revolutionizing education died long ago, but TVO lived on by keeping a low profile and finding a market niche that had nothing to do with its original mandate. But now a new technology craze has arrived, bringing with it a new way to justify TVO's existence.

The Internet will be a major part of the new TVO, promises Lisa de Wilde, the chief executive officer. "While television will remain an important medium for TVO, the days of defining ourselves as only a broadcaster are past."

Polkaroo lives.

You can contact Dan Gardner at the Ottawa Citizen.
E-mail: dgardner@thecitizen.canwest.com

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