Write short note : Mass media and education. (1992)
The relationship runs both ways. Mass media is an instrument of formal education, extending the classroom to those the school cannot reach; it is also a rival socialising agency with a curriculum of its own, shaping what counts as knowledge and who is authorised to transmit it.
Media as an educational agency
India’s experiment here is among the oldest in the developing world. The Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (1 August 1975 to 31 July 1976), run jointly by the Indian and American space agencies using the ATS-6 satellite, broadcast four hours daily to some 2,400 villages in twenty districts of six states, in four language groups, covering agriculture, health and family planning, and the training of primary teachers. Evaluations found viewership highest in the early months and the clearest effects in agriculture and family planning. It seeded the national satellite system (1982) and the dedicated education satellite (2004).
That lineage continues through the educational television and radio services launched in 2000, and today through SWAYAM, which had recorded over 5.80 crore course enrolments and 52.88 lakh certifications by January 2026; SWAYAM Prabha’s forty-eight round-the-clock channels; PM eVIDYA (2020); and DIKSHA, with over two crore registered users by March 2026.
Theoretically this tradition rests on Daniel Lerner (The Passing of Traditional Society, 1958), who called media a “mobility multiplier” that cultivates empathy — the capacity to imagine oneself in another’s position — and on Everett Rogers’s Diffusion of Innovations (1962) and Wilbur Schramm’s work for development communication. Rogers himself later conceded the paradigm’s flaws: it assumed a passive receiver and blamed the poor for not adopting.
Media as a parallel and competing educator
- Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s culture industry produces standardised content that manufactures conformity while advertising individuality — the antithesis of critical education.
- Marshall McLuhan’s “the medium is the message” warns that the form reorganises perception irrespective of content: reading and scrolling build different cognitive habits.
- Jürgen Habermas valued media as the public sphere in which private persons reason together, but held that commercial media has refeudalised it into spectacle. Manuel Castells’s mass self-communication restores some agency: the learner becomes a producer.
- ASER 2024 captures the ambivalence precisely: 82.2 per cent of rural 14-16 year olds can operate a smartphone and nearly 90 per cent have household access, yet 57 per cent had used it for study in the preceding week against 76 per cent for social media.
The divide that decides the outcome
Access is stratified, so media reproduces inequality even as it disseminates. Boys’ smartphone ownership (36.2 per cent) exceeds girls’ (26.9 per cent); the telecom regulator reported rural internet penetration of 48.31 per 100 in early 2026 against 126.80 in urban India; an Oxfam India survey during the pandemic found 80 per cent of government-school parents reporting that no education was delivered at all.
Conclusion
Mass media is an agent, not a cause, of educational change: it carries whatever the interests controlling it choose to carry. It democratises knowledge where the state builds public infrastructure, as the satellite experiment and today’s open platforms show, and deepens disparity where access is left to the market.