The Most Malleable of Minds: Evolution in Educational Broadcasting

This chapter places early schools and adult education broadcasts in their wider institutional contexts and outlines how anti-evolution groups contested content on evolution for children. The chapter highlights the diversity of approaches adopted by media producers across both TV and radio in educational content on evolution and contrasts them against the narrative approach favoured in mainstream productions for a general audience as introduced in the previous chapters. Finishing with the BBC-Open University partnership launched in 1971, the chapter argues that while pedagogical best practices limited the space for grand narratives in educational broadcasts on evolution, the experimental space afforded educational broadcasters created many devices, which later crossed over to more reductive mainstream content on the subject.