Comment by rauljara | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rauljara | Hacker News Reader

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First: it is a single course, and it does not appear to be a required one. No one is being made to study it. Students are being given the option of studying it.

Second: All manner of art is studied in college, from novels, to sculpture, to film. TV is but another genre, and while it an unfortunate history of being a "low art", a lot of recent tv definitely rises to level of a lot of the films that are studied in college today.

That being said, I'm a little leery of the context in which the show is being studied. The course is on urban inequality. Even though the wire is very well researched, it's still fiction. If you want to talk about the realities on which the wire is based, why not study those realities directly? Why let an intricately plotted work of fiction serve as your primary window into that world? I'd be fine with showing some scenes from the Wire in a course on urban inequality, but I'd really hate to give students the impression that the Wire is the final authority on what life in Baltimore is like.

" I'd be fine with showing some scenes from the Wire in a course on urban inequality, but I'd really hate to give students the impression that the Wire is the final authority on what life in Baltimore is like."

Hopefully, students will be smart enough to realize that "The Wire" is a work of fiction (as you and others have pointed out). However, the difficult thing about teaching just from research and theory is that it is extremely difficult to gain a concrete understanding without a concrete presentation.

When I was going through the teacher education program in college, we read a lot of (what I thought were very compelling) scholarly articles explaining how current practices (regarding instruction, assessment, and so on) were flawed and then proposing better practices.

The discussions we had were often of the "Okay, I see what the author is saying" variety, but ended up with very little actionable follow-through. I remember getting in trouble for trying to heed the advice of the research ("I don't care what the research says, we're doing it this way and that's final.")

What I am trying to say is that research and statistics are all fine and dandy, but the students at Harvard are mostly white and mostly from reasonably affluent families who live near other reasonably affluent families. Ideally, we could study those realities directly via fieldwork, but that's simply not a possibility for most. So, in lieu of giving these students a completely abstract understanding without any lived experience (even if it is vicarious and fictional), "The Wire" comes in.

Smart enough to realize it's a work of fiction? I often hear college educated people claim "The Jungle" and "The Grapes of Wrath" are historical documentaries.

I've heard the same thing about "The Da Vinci Code". Doesn't necessarily mean that a majority of people hold such a view (that said: a sizable enough minority is not too far from being a majority).

While "The Wire" is fiction, it's based on the book "The Corner", which is not. It was not really written to entertain, and it really is not that entertaining, if you by entertaining you mean "fun to read".

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