Welcome back to the wasteland!
Been a crazy February, and March isn't looking to slow down. Here's hoping the weather does, at the very least. I'm still working slowly on various projects and dealing with some annoying real life things, but I'm also still thinking about topics to discuss with you all.
And today's is a good one, so let's get right to it.
Recently, one of the topics that has been running through my head (to the point it became a topic on my podcast), is the subject of Edutainment. It's more about how the definition of Edutainment has stayed the same over the years, but its perception since I was a kid has changed, and not for the better. What was once seen as a joke is now taken seriously, and it has made entertainment and art as a whole considerably worse and less inspiring. I don't think anyone can deny this with a straight face: Edutainment is lame, but now we insist it's not..
The reason for this change is still quite unclear to me, though it's undeniable that a shift exists, at least with those around my age and slightly younger. At some point we came under the delusion that Edutainment was not only extremely effective (it isn't), but it's also worth defending and reshaping entertainment around (it's not).
But there is no reason for this silly belief. Edutainment is a perversion of both entertainment and education, taking the worst parts of both without offering anything in return to make up for its deficiencies. An invention of the 20th century in an attempt to subvert the mass media landscape, all Edutainment has ever done is fail and leave no mark on the minds of its viewers beyond mockery and a neutering of both Entertainment and Education. It just doesn't work.
The reason for this is because both Entertainment and Education exist to do different things, and cannot be crossed over with the other in a satisfying way. Of course this does not mean you cannot be entertained while learning or learn something from entertainment, but that those are secondary to the primary reason said things exist in the first place. You can't prioritize both. It's simply impossible.
Entertainment exists to entertain, it is primarily for leisure. It is meant to allow the audience to relax and unwind, to allow the audience to rest in the place they have chosen to lay their head down. Art exists to allow the patron to appreciate a slice of reality from an angle they might not have expected. There is a sense of trust between the artist, the art, and patron, that involves both understanding and like-mindedness. They all come together to connect for a wider purpose for everyone involved.
No one engages in art and entertainment to be educated: they come to be enlightened. There is a very subtle, but important, difference here. Enlightening means to be shown a world apart and yet close to the one we live in and seeing a new side of it. It does not mean teaching or lecturing the audience about a specific subject. This difference is not as appreciated these days, but it's still reality, and one of the reasons the audience trusts the mainstream industry less and less.
We have lost the original point of what we're doing.
Education, on the other hand, exists to instruct and teach. It requires a very specific type of relationship between the two parties, one above the other. This cannot be an equal relationship where one gives and one takes: it involves one side deliberately speaking down to another party in order to educate them on the subject the student agreed on in order to be there in the first place. This is why so many kids don't learn much in school: they not only didn't agree to this relationship, they also aren't looking to learn in the first place. Education only works when the relationship is agreed upon and the student and instructor are engaged and on the same page. It cannot work otherwise.
This is the opposite of how art and entertainment works. One is done on even ground, the other is not. It's a fundamental difference which precludes any sort of mashup from working, and they clearly do not from any example we have seen over the past decade especially.
Edutainment dilutes entertainment by making its focus on that unequal partnership with the audience. It also dilutes education by masking it in a fog of entertainment and blunting any point that is supposed to have been gotten across through learning. In essence you're getting entertainment without the wonder and mystery, and you're getting education without the focus and clearcut language and relationship between a student and teacher. You are getting the worst version of both at the same time.
And everybody knows this.
This is why obvious propaganda like Captain Planet was a punchline among all the kids when it came out. Everyone knew what it was and it was terrible at doing what it wanted to do. The lessons were unsubtle and not very clever, and the entertainment value was stunted so that those kids wouldn't get the wrong impression of violence or adventure as anything but controlled and neutered. Neither of these approaches satiate childhood wonder.
It was much like how Peggy Charren and her ACT group forced educational content into kids shows and was never not a punchline in the schoolyard. Remember the GI Joe lessons at the end of episodes? The ones that had nothing to do with the show and were crammed in? That was because of her and her ilk. If you don't remember that then there is also the Sonic Sez segments in the Sonic cartoon which had marvelous lessons such as "Don't climb into the dryer" which is as ridiculous as it sounds. You can also find them on YouTube with a comment section filled with people laughing at them, some of which weren't even around when said shows aired.
This is how you know they failed at what they were doing.
All this aside, an other issue is that this lame moralizing occurs while at the same time executives and parent groups keep dictating what sorts of "lessons" shows should be taught to the kids, thereby affecting the creation of these series from people that had nothing to do with their creation. Again, all this was supposedly for kids but no kids liked them and they were always treated as lame punching bags, which is how they stayed for decades.
But recently that changed as the people now in charge of the entertainment industry have decided they want to lecture the customers in everything, because they see themselves as above those they are supposed to entertain. It doesn't matter what gets put out, if it has the correct message then it is considered a net good and anyone against what they are doing, for whatever reason, must be a Bad Person. There is simply no other explanation for this madness. This would be like if those parent councils browbeat all the kids back in the day who made fun of Captain Planet for being lame: Who cares if it's lame, it's right!
The thing is, it actually doesn't matter if it's right or not: it has failed as entertainment. It has focused on the lecturing first and left the entertainment a distant second in consideration, and the audience can tell. This approach is a dead end, and it's why no one in charge of these industries can produce anything of value that connects with a wider audience anymore. They can't do this because their priorities are backwards and they have no intention of being humble and realizing that.
This doesn't mean you can't "say something" in art and entertainment. It's more that what you say is meant to be baked in to the piece you're creating. The themes and meaning come from the story the artist has to tell. It comes from the music, the art, the creation, itself. This is how you sometimes get interpretations of pieces not originally intended by the creator. It isn't because either party is wrong but because they see reality from different angles and are able to come together over the piece and find new wrinkles in it together. Regardless, it is impossible to create art without meaning, but it is possible to miss the meaning in the creation process. This is because the primary importance is in the creation: not the intended meanings.
Another way to put it is that education is about learning what you can and can't do when learning about a subject; entertainment is about seeing all the subject has to offer. They are entirely different approaches that cannot mix together.
Edutainment is one of the worst and most embarrassing failures of the 20th century and it is one that has no business carrying over in the 21st. No one learns anything from it, and no one is entertained by it, and yet we pretend it is successful when both the least imaginative and most didactic people are the ones who push for it, thereby proving its failure right out of the gate. If this is the kind of people edutainment produces then it's clearly well past its expiration date.
Instead, let's strive to improve both the dismal state of modern education and create a new ecosystem for art and entertainment. They both need it instead of us constantly hiding behind a failed mutation that has no place in today's climate.
And maybe we can finally leave the failures of the past behind us. We can finally have those better ways we were promised long ago. We're well past due for a new golden age of art and entertainment. Let's make it, together!
That's all for this week! See you all next time!
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