Including online video in the definition of television, it seems indisputable that young people today spend a much greater proportion of their time in front of televisions than their parents did. The thinking goes that if we’re going to accept this as the new norm, then we should do our best to ensure the shows kids watch are at least productive or educational.
The problem lies therein: kids would rather fall asleep than watch “fun” educational programs. Bright, shiny role models and “informative programming” are a dead end. So... what to do?
The solution must be to take existing programming that young people, particularly children, do love and watch, and make them that little bit more educational without changing their content. Whilst that may sound like an impossibility, there is an easy solution.
Subtitling
Sticking subtitles on every children’s TV channel, and every online show targeted at children, would improve literacy. Using subtitling to improve literacy in this fashion is known as “Same Language Subtitling”.
The brainchild of Brij Kothari, in a Mumbai study the technique was shown to significantly improve literacy rates, in particular amongst less affluent communities. A Nielsen study demonstrated that the ability of schoolchildren to read a “simple Hindi paragraph” jumped from 25% to 56% “when exposed to subtitling for 30 minutes a week”. In an increasingly educated global human capital market, simply shifting the delivery of our children's video content in a way that boosts literacy across the board can improve their future prospects.
A Call To Content Providers
But it's not only the developing world which stands to benefit from nudges like this. Western economies may find themselves more competitive as well, with outcomes of the least well off in our socieites improved the most (as in Kothari's study). There's also a commercial incentive for video platform providers: enforcing subtitling may make platforms more attractive in the eyes of parents, reducing social stigma around prolonged content consumption, and recasting their services as educationally healthy.