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<title> TV during school-time? </title>
In the following essay I would like to discuss the complex relation between television and education. Why do both teachers and students find TV such a good complement to other forms of educational methods? Do they? How is TV really used by teachers in their teaching, and to what extent? Is it possible to presume that TV slowly is sneaking its way into modern education to finally reach a dominant position? In this text I will first look at the positive sides of TV in school, then turn to the negative sides and finish off with a comparison between two specific cases of teachers and their habits of using TV in their daily teaching.
	 TV is really a good complement if you do not use it too much. It brings variation and a more vivid touch to ordinary teaching. To some extent it helps you to remember better because you associate easier to something if you have experienced it with more senses than just hearing about it: variation is a handy pedagogic instrument to use when teaching. If you want to, for example, illustrate an astronomical event, nothing can really be compared with the three-dimensional image of the event. If we look at it from a psychological aspect, we find that since TV generally is connected with amusement, used in school it helps to make learning fun. The human brain is probably created in such a way that it accepts data easier if we find them interesting or if they are served to us in an interesting way. Finally we have the rather worn-out cliché that a picture tells us more than a thousand words.
	 The biggest risks, as I see it, is to incorporate television at too large an extent in education. Too much of anything becomes boring and ceases to stimulate its listener soon enough. The problem with televised lessons is that they often have a tendency to have a popular scientific touch, and are often very categorical. The narrator is also often very persuasive and enthusiastic and leaves us in no doubt of his or her accuracy on the subject in hand. With a linkman as your tutor, you lose the chance of asking questions or being critical and receiving a direct, appropriate response. But, on the other hand, we now take for granted that everything shown on TV is true, and therefor perhaps do not feel the need of questioning the content of the TV-shows. Does TV rob us of our ability to be critical? Everything is served us, we do not have to bother about being creative or using our imagination. If not used and developed, creativity will vanish by and by. Soon enough we will not be able to take in information from anything else than from a TV-screen. We will not be capable of focusing our attention on anything or anyone more than for a short period of time thanks to the quickly changing scenarios of television. 
	 A descriptive example of some bad usage of TV in school is actually taken from my own time in high-school. I had a teacher in nature science who always performed his lessons in the exact same manner. He brought in a TV-set, put in a cassette and let us watch a recorded episode of a TV-series called "Vetenskapens Värld" (The world of Science). Certainly a great show, constructed to be exciting and fun with a very engaging narrator, but perhaps not the accurate thing to base an entire education of serious nature science on. My teacher seated himself in a chair in the front row, soon sound asleep, snoring a little.
	 The other example is also taken from "my world". I have asked a secondary school teacher (who happens to be my mother) what she thinks about TV in teaching, and how she uses it. Her answer was that she was very much in favour of TV in education. She thought it to be a very good complement in her teaching, and she could not find a single subject in which TV would not work. She uses TV fairly regular, about once a week. The only bad thing she had to say about it was that the TV-set has a magnetic effect in the sense that the children's concentration is drawn to it, whether it is on or not. 
	 My conclusion is that TV can be an excellent complement to everyday teaching, but must be used in the right dose, not too much. If used in the right way, pupils see it as a kind of reward, and automatically enjoy or take interest in whatever is on. As a teacher, you have to be very careful to what amount you use TV, since it has become one of the most acknowledged spare-time hobbies children have nowadays, and is therefor watched too much anyway. Television cannot be a complement to human tuition. My personal beliefs are that TV has the cunning potential to become too dominant in our lives in the future. Not just in the educational aspect, but in several other areas as well, and that scares me.
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