Education: Dulling Effect

Many an educator’s imagination has been tickled by the idea that radio would some day become the most powerful medium at his command. A few rash professors predicted that it would supplant lectures and textbooks in the colleges.

For such dreams a group of Harvard psychologists last week had some cold water. Experiments on both students and adults had convinced them of the superiority of the printed page as a medium of education. As between radio and lectures they found that: “Radio has a somewhat dulling effect on the higher mental processes of the listener. He is definitely less critical, less analytical, more passively receptive when listening to the radio than when he is face-to-face with the speaker.”