The thought of bestowing upon media the responsibility of educating the people seems to be a great idea. After all, literature as a vehicle for education has been effective only for a certain social class: only the people who actually had the time to read were the ones who benefited. Ordinary workers usually worked almost all hours of the day, and were too tired to read once they got home. Hence, the elite were generally the ones who got an education out of literature. Media’s pervasiveness and accessibility removes such barriers between rich and poor, making education available to all who want it.

            Media is also able to spice up otherwise boring topics by using audiovisual techniques, and is able to capture and captivate its audience more. This is unlike literature, which challenges people to invest a great amount of time to look at words on a page and turn them into pictures in one’s mind. People who are unimaginative or lack visualization skills then become bored quickly and miss the learning the literature has to offer. It is not so with media, which can make learning more visually appealing and more fun.

            However, there are greater disadvantages to giving media full responsibility over education. For one, there are certain considerations that are not as important to literature as they are to media: space and time constraints, profit, and popularity and ratings, among others. The content of media can thus be limited according to such considerations. This is a disadvantage because while literature has the time and space to fully expound on thoughts and ideas, media has a quick pace that allows for a lot of information to be given, but does not allow the audience enough time to absorb all the information and even dictates to the audience how much time they should take to absorb everything. It’s almost as though media tells its audience, “You may get it or not, but either way we’re moving on to the next bit of information.” Learning takes time and patience. Media cannot afford that luxury most of the time.

            Media not only dictates how much time the audience has to absorb the information, it also dictates what information should be processed and how. While literature gives its audience free rein over its imagination, media supplies its audience with the images and sounds they should be seeing and hearing. This is a disadvantage because continuing education relies largely on curiosity and creativity, both of which media takes away through its spoon-feeding of information. Media makes it too easy for the youth to access information, so much that most children no longer know how to find information in an encyclopedia or use the library because everything to them is just one click away. Media, then, does not cultivate nor stimulate one’s imagination and creativity the way literature does, nor does it foster the diligence and discipline that literature is able to instill.

            Finally, media is too transient to be relied on for education. Media’s allure largely relies on novelty: people are interested when it’s something new. Thus, media always tries to be fresh and innovative, and we see how much evolution and development media has undergone. This makes it harder for people to return to certain lessons they have acquired from various forms of media: can one readily return to a television show that has taught a valuable lesson in life? How diligent are websites in archiving their information, and how many are not updated and end up in oblivion as broken links? How much microfilm does one have to go through just to find information written in a newspaper fifty years ago? Education then becomes just as temporary and fleeting as its vehicle. This is much unlike literature’s timeless quality: lessons from Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and so many other people who have been dead for more than a hundred years still live on. Hence, media cannot be expected to bear the full responsibility for education for the simple reason that the nature of media does not accommodate the longevity that education needs for it to be passed on to future generations.

            This is why as much as media is here to stay, it cannot possibly bear the entire burden of educating society and future generations. What it can do is become a supplement to literature: it can help stimulate the mind and the senses, make learning more pleasurable, and give more people access to education. But literature simply cannot fade into oblivion because too much is lost when that happens: imagination, creativity, discipline, diligence, timelessness.

            Future generations just cannot afford to lose all that.