Not a Normal Field Trip | Hacker News Reader

Not a Normal Field Trip

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27 pointskelnos10 comments

It really is striking when you stop to enumerate it just how many edutainment shows were running in the 90's. Do those still exist to the same degree?

Yes, but it's moved to apps. The PBS Kids and PBS Kids Games apps are full of high quality edutainment shows and movies. Some vintage, some new.

Not a shill, just a dad with a 5yo who enjoys that I can give my kid a tablet with those apps and not have to worry about what they're watching :)

There's actually a lot of good edu stuff on YouTube these days, many of it made by independent creators.

The problem is, of course, separating the good from the bad. My nephew learned a ton from YouTube (he's 8 now), but it's a lot of work for parents to ensure that the material is good and correct, and actually child-appropriate. (And his parents are both teachers, so they have a bit of a leg up on their ability to evaluate educational quality.)

We homeschool and there are some YouTube channels out there that are high-quality enough that we can use them to outsource / augment some of our subjects, particularly science and history.

Curiosity Stream is a pretty good self-contained service for that kind of stuff. The content is in the way of classic TLC/Discovery/History Channel stuff before those turned into 24/7 reality TV.

Do you have any links for ones they'd recommend?

PBS has good stuff on youtube too (PBS Eons for one example).

i guess you could say... edutainment was bussin

> Still, the kids of MSB were decidedly American (as was their school bus)

An odd critique to level at an American show made for an American audience.

> and Ms. Frizzle reinforced dominant images of teaching as a white women’s profession.

This reflects that in the 1990s, it wasn't automatically offensive simply to not subvert every single trope, since tropes are just based in reality. Especially since we are talking about a cartoon and not a live action show where casting plays 100% of the role in determining a character's color, someone had to explicitly select skin tones for every character. It was decided to make the skin tone of the teacher the color of 80% of the American population[1] as of the 1990 census.

[1] https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1990/...

I'm from a central European country and my mother always made sure to record episodes of the Magic School Bus shown here on TV for me to watch on VHS. No doubt an influential show even beyond the US.

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