Edutainment

I really hate edutainment. The main reason is that edutainment is very deceptive in that it creates a false sense of learning and authority.

Ultimately, the main purpose of edutainment is to entertain people, not educate them. This is the fundamental flaw in edutainment. If you delude people by presenting the content in a more entertaining way, then they aren't learning the subject out of a desire or necessity (with this case, it is just news, which shouldn't be entertaining because if learning it is necessary, then it should be taken seriously) to learn it - instead they do it for mere entertainment. Furthermore, by tying education's success to how entertaining it is, you create an evolutionary force that selects for the "fittest" media, the one that is most entertaining (since there isn't a known way of quantifying educational success AFAIK). Thus under no regulation (given the scale/diversity of edutainment, it would be impossible to regulate), it is inevitable that edutainment creators will begin to sacrifice education for entertainment. This degeneration of an ideal (like education) by a selection force under no regulation is explored more here [1]. For example, as YouTube can't regulate educational quality and rewards videos for views and likes, videos that entertain at the expense of education will be promoted and spread more than videos that focus solely on education. Thus channels that focus solely on education will have a much harder time sustaining itself amidst the other, more entertaining content.

This focus on entertainment also brings into question the information they give us. A benefit to traditional education like with school and textbooks is that those are created and often scutinized by experts. This can't be the case for edutainment. Naturally, edutainment creators will want to have diverse and a lot of content to appeal to the most people. This makes it impossible to have experts in that area as there are too many content areas and too little time to produce content that can parallel things like textbooks or the actual research papers. Furthermore, by focusing on making it entertaining, nuance is necessarily excluded to make the topic simplier. This could give the viewer a misconception of the topic. The nature of this format can also mislead, as the curation of content and sources present a more unified view of the topic, when it may not be that certain. When you search to learn a topic by yourself, you expose yourself to every perspective of that topic. This can't be true for edutainment, as the content is culled by a smaller team than the sources. Moreover, edutainment tends to be less engaging as traditional sources. Textbooks, school, research papers, etc. tend to engage the reader as we have exercises, homework, quizes, linearity/dependence of content on past content etc. Thus critical thinking and true understanding of the topic just can't be there.

While I don't think that we should try to make learning as dull as possible (as this could misrepresent the field), I don't think a focus on presentation or entertainment should be made. Even in schools, a focus on this could mislead people, as seen in the Dr. Fox effect [2].

[1] https://listed.to/@vt/33797/competition
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Fox_effect