Sure, there are a couple Youtube channels (Cocomelon is a notable example) that offer well-animated videos with nursery rhymes. Some of their videos even have important themes like sharing, honesty, and patience. However, many of these quality channels have a very limited range of topics that they produce videos for, leaving a large gap that is often filled by lower-quality channels.
Because there are no videos, about, say, cars from the good channels, other channels of poorer quality are churning out content to meet that demand and attract a larger number of viewers. The videos are full of flashing neon colors, and tend to focus on one specific thing. A couple also try to include descriptions like color or shapes, but they are wildly inaccurate. Not only would they teach young children that green was yellow, they taught it in different languages! These videos are available in several countries, many of them non-English-speaking, as creators try to appeal to a broader audience. As a result, they include gibberish and sound effects instead of speech. What little intelligible language that is spoken in these shoddily-produced videos is usually not English, making it paradoxically useless to the majority of its demographic.
All of this creates a problem: there is a limited amount of quality content in a limited number of topics and genres, and the content that tries to replace or supplement it is inaccurate, addictive, and absurd. So how do we solve that problem?
Books. I have a younger brother, so I've been reading a couple of his books. From Maisy to Animals 123, children's books have that range in topic and consistency of quality that the online alternatives have yet to catch up with. I can't deny that technology is a massive step in the right direction for many fields and subjects, but we still need to wait a while before it can offer the same benefits children's books can.
-Zhaoxin
This is really interesting. I could see a future where early children's education heavily includes technology like Youtube. I do not think it will totally dominate, seeing as children's books have been very popular for a while. I think the medium that the parents grew up with will impact how they teach their children, if you grew up with many fairy tails, you would probably teach some of those to your child. It will be interesting to see how it changes in the future as more people who grew up with technology affecting their education become parents.
ReplyDeleteThough I do think books is better than YT videos, I must disagree with you that technology can't replace books. I think your argument here was more of: "Reading is better than watching"(which I agree with), but a lot of books are also online, and not only are they easier to access, most online books are cheaper than the physical copies. However I must admit the only downsides to using electronics that early on is over-reliance and it could also cause damage to the eyes.
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