Rahul

PASSIVE LEARNING FROM TELEVISION'

BY HERBERT E . KRUGMAN AND EUGENE L. HARTLEY

ing motivation, practice, achievement. Here, the authors focus on "passive"

Learning is generally conceived as active and purposive behavior, involv.

HEN WE speak about the processes of learning we usually talk about motivation, practice, achievement, new skills or insights attained-we usually talk, that is, about learning as active and purposive behavior. AVe think of it as the province of school and classroom . We know that there are other, more passive kinds of learning, but we focus less on these, in part because they are presumed to be less effective, in part because they have been less noticeable-at least un=til the rise of the mass media, especially the electronic media . Much. of what is taught by the mass media does involve passive learning, and especially so among young television viewers. This type of learning presents a difficult evaluation problem since the passively learned material is almost by definition unrelated to immediate needs or situations. If it were, the learning would be more than passive. Critics of television recognize that later events or situations may trigger what has been passively learned and lain dormant . They have therefore been concerned about the content, especially the violent content of television that may be shown to children. However, few have asked how the child learns such content at the time of exposure, or how this may be different in process or consequence from 9 Paper delivered at the annual conference of the World Association for Public Opinion Research, Amsterdam, September 1-g, 1969 .

v

learning, on what is "caught" rather than "taught," and on the processes by which such learning may take place. Passive learning is typically effortless, responsive to animated stimuli, amenable to artificial aid to relaxation, and characterized bv an absence of resistance to what is learned, thus opening up possibilities that, depending on...