I don’t unqualifiedly support this view. Literature and television are different media, and one is not intrinsically superior to the other. The old educator’s cliché is that literature always trumps other media, but that’s too pat and simple to be accurate.
Literature is the better medium for the development of language skills. Writing skills and, naturally, reading comprehension skills can be helped by reading. I would not recommend using literary fiction as a guide to learning better writing (unless one is learning how to write fiction, of course), because literary fiction writing is too idiosyncratic and, frankly, if a student in a writing class started writing his essay in the style of Charles Dickens or John Steinbeck, he’ll likely earn himself “Ds” instead of “As.”
But I’m drifting from my main point, which is that learning is about mindset, not medium. Literature is a medium with didactic value; television and film can also be media with equal or, in some contexts, greater didactic value. To spurn one in favor of the other is, I find, unproductive.
Case in point: when I was in the 7th Grade, I read Dickens’ A TALE OF TWO CITIES for the first time in an advanced reading class. In a class of 35 students, nobody came into or finished the novel with a better intuitive grasp of plot, character development, symbolism, setting, or theme than I did. I totally dominated that class in a way I never thought I could (this being my first experience with “classic” literature, and going in intimidated like any other 7th Grader would). Did I ace the class because I was “smarter” than the other students? Hell, no! There were at least ten students in that class who had better grades/higher scores than I had (not in that class, necessarily, but overall). Was it because I’d read more books than they had? No – I did my share of reading, but I knew of at least a half dozen others who definitely had read more. Why did I have an advantage over these other students? Believe it or not, it’s because I had watched TVB dramas in my youth. In watching these dramas with the guidance of educated adults, I was already skilled in picking out nuances of plot, character, symbolic, and thematic development in fiction. If I saw Charles Dickens using a literary device in A TALE OF TWO CITIES to stress a theme or develop a character, I’d recognize it as something I’d already seen used by scriptwriters in a TVB series (whereas other students, who had no exposure to these dramas or watched them without guidance, were completely clueless and befuddled). As unbelievable and silly as it might sound, watching those TVB dramas actually primed me for a deeper and more intuitive appreciation of literary fiction.
Now I must stress that this is not a proposition for students to abandon reading in favor of watching television. The argument is that any medium can have didactic value with proper guidance. Aimless, unguided reading is not necessarily better than unguided television viewing, and by the same reasoning, guided television/film viewing can have equal value to reading (at least outside of learning the mechanics of language, for which reading is inextricably required). The key, however, is the quality of the guidance provided, not the medium itself. The medium is just an instrument of delivery; the quality of the knowledge gained depends entirely on the guidance.
Here’s another example from my experience to consider: Shakespeare’s dramas were conceived to be acted out on a stage, not read cold off a printed page. Without the tonal aspect of the voices and the visual aspect of the character/actors’ vocal deliveries and stage expressions/actions, a large part of what Shakespeare meant to convey is lost. JULIUS CAESAR, OTHELLO, HAMLET, KING LEAR, and MACBETH were all opaque to me at first when I read them on the printed page, but became immediately transparent when I saw filmed performances of each of them. The lesson here is that there is not inherent didactic virtue in the printed medium; visual and tonal media also have their educational functions that should not be overlooked in favor of some hidebound pedagogical bias towards the printed medium that I feel is more determined by tradition-founded chauvinism than reason, especially as 21st Century students are conditioned from an early age to be visual-learners first.
In sum, my own personal experience as both a student and an educator has provided me reason to distrust the traditional mantra that the printed medium is inherently superior to all other media in didactic value. The difference, again, is in the quality of the guidance, not in the medium.
That said, current program television does indeed suffer from a dreadful paucity of didactic value. That is the fault of the programmers; it is not an intrinsic flaw of the medium.
I disagree. Segregation is not the solution. If anything, it will make the divisions in the community all that more stark and might foster an “us” vs. “them” mentality that we’re looking to avoid.With that being said, perhaps a 'Wuxia literature' and 'Wuxia adaptations' subforum might be a good idea for the Wuxia fiction forum.
I agree on this point. See my remarks above for my reasoning.