Rai Scuola and that TV channel that can no longer teach anything

Let’s start with an anecdote – or rather, an illustrative episode that may well have some edifying undertones. Some time ago, one of my pupils – who had always just about scraped a pass – suddenly produced a well-structured and very precise answer to a test on the Enlightenment. When questioned on the same subject a few weeks later, he demonstrated a rather in-depth understanding of it, and certainly far better than his knowledge of the other topics covered in that particular test or throughout the school year. What had happened? Far from having conjured up the ghost of Franco Venturi in a séance, the boy in question had studied the Enlightenment using ten-minute videos that I’d uploaded to YouTube during the Covid pandemic. The paradoxical result was therefore that the very same subject, explained by the very same person, proved more effective via a screen than in person.

This thought occurred to me upon learning of the forthcoming closure of Rai Scuola, which on digital terrestrial channel 57 is to be replaced by a programme showcasing local excellence and village festivals. On this matter, Enrico Bucci expressed his views in "Il Foglio" in a highly informed and entirely convincing manner; I have nothing to add to his article. Whilst the closure of Rai Scuola is certainly ill-advised, I am more concerned – thinking of the many cases similar to that of my pupil – with asking whether television today is truly a useful vehicle for learning, if not, indeed, the ideal way to reach a vast audience that is potentially – and perhaps unwittingly – eager to learn something.

The pupil I told you about did not know the Enlightenment well enough to realise that it was precisely in the 18th century that, for the first time, certain educators began presenting content to learners via illustrated plates which, however, rather than being bound into a book as was customary, were placed inside a cube-shaped box that served as a sort of multi-panel frame. Without realising it, those educators had invented educational television, having realised two things: that attention is best captured by a screen (in the broadest sense) capable of isolating content from the rest of the world; and that the tedium of lessons can be combated through the judicious use of the unusual and variety.

Rai Scuola has been complying with the first of these requirements since well before it was called Rai Scuola. Without even mentioning “Non è mai troppo tardi”, through which Maestro Manzi attempted to teach the Italian masses – who were still struggling with reading, writing and arithmetic – to read, write and do maths; and leaving aside its predecessor “Telescuola”, which in 1958 launched with the ambitious project of providing supplementary education courses for those living in areas without secondary schools, it suffices to recall that in the 1990s, Rai’s late-night programming rivalled the racy programmes on local channels with its lecture-style lessons on trigonometry or the historical geography of the ancient world – though it must be acknowledged that, with hindsight, it is difficult to tell whether the aim was to keep the population awake or to provide an effective antidote to insomnia. There were even those who recorded the lectures at night and watched the videotapes the following afternoon or evening, in a rudimentary attempt at a video podcast that made up for the lack of opportunity to attend those same lectures in a university lecture theatre.

The great merit of Rai Scuola was therefore to provide a framework for educational content – an oasis of learning that previously stood apart from a context lacking in stimuli (the lack of secondary schools, which the old ‘Telescuola’ programme used to compensate for) and which now, instead, offers a refuge from a context where stimuli are excessive, allowing pupils to focus for a quarter of an hour or half an hour on a topic of their own interest, without being distracted by constant notifications or the excessive workload that parents impose on their children for fear that they will grow up without any hobbies. Where the internet has, however, partly fallen short is perhaps the other aspect: combating boredom with novelty, as eighteenth-century educators did by turning the cube; not because of the scientific quality of the programmes, but due to the intrinsic structure of the medium itself.

Television was the main source of information for the masses from roughly the late 1950s to the late 1990s. I am not referring solely to news programmes; I mean precisely the transmission of implicit information concerning speech, behaviour and dress. ‘The telly said so’ was the assertion used to confirm the truth of something: just as television assured viewers through entertainment that they would be entertained, through films that they would see exactly what had been shown at the cinema, and through news programmes that they would have a front-row seat to unfolding events, so too, through educational programmes, it conveyed to them certified, sound and, broadly speaking, essential knowledge. The success of Rai Scuola and similar initiatives was, in fact, to be measured in terms of credibility, rather than in terms of a inevitably meagre audience.

What has changed, however, is the status of truth. Accustomed to a television that lies or deceives, viewers have shifted the focus of their beliefs to other media; this does not mean that these are more reliable than television – as demonstrated by the fact that many people fall for fabricated news stories and give credence to doctored images – but rather that television is no longer regarded as the benchmark of truth, with serious consequences for the acquisition of knowledge. A television that is not trusted is a television that cannot teach anything. Worse still, it is a medium that bores, since, having been supplanted by other forms of communication, it has lost its initial sense of novelty and variety, ultimately having the same effect – a detrimental one, in Italy – as the usual books. The result is that, nowadays, suggesting to someone that they watch a TV programme to learn something is tantamount to telling my aforementioned pupil to stop watching my videos and come and listen to my live lesson. In which I say exactly the same things, but I’m incredibly boring.