Entertainment vs education

11 March 2026 Tags: higher education teaching student expectations entertainment vs education university history scientific literacy learning biomedical sciences National Student Survey pedagogical philosophy

A colleague recently made an observation so precise it hass been rattling around my head ever since: "Students don't understand the difference between education and entertainment. They think when they've had good entertainment, they've had a good lecture – even when there was very little education."

I was reminded of this comment just the other day when I took my ten-year-old son to a show by the Ministry of Science. As theatre, it was superb. Big stage effects, excellent pacing, genuinely funny. My son was thoroughly entertained, as was I, despite having seen many of these demonstrations before at science museums across Europe. The show explicitly encourages photography, which tells you something about its priorities. It is designed to be shared, to look spectacular, to create moments.

And it does. It is excellent entertainment. Watching the Ministry of Science show, I thought: our students would absolutely love this. If every lecture had this production value, our National Student Survey scores would skyrocket.

But in terms of scientific content? Mild to moderate. Nothing particularly surprising. These are effects that have been staples of science outreach for decades – the Heureka in Helsinki, the Technorama in Winterthur, the Christmas lecture tradition that used to pack university lecture halls.

So, would students actually learn anything? Not really.

For my ten-year-old son, the show was genuinely educational. He encountered phenomena he had not seen before, explained at a level he could grasp. For university students studying biomedical sciences? It would be entertainment masquerading as education. Spectacular and enjoyable, but ultimately superficial.

What universities used to be

A few centuries ago, universities operated on fundamentally different principles. The focus was research. Institutions competed to attract the best specialists in each field, who would then pursue their investigations and share findings through lectures and seminars. Students came because they wanted to be there, driven by genuine interest in a particular subject or scholar. It was prestigious to have renowned figures on faculty, and people attended lectures because they were hungry for the latest advances in their field.

This model persisted well into the modern era, particularly in the German research university tradition. Students were self-selected, motivated, and actively choosing to engage with cutting-edge scholarship. The relationship between research and teaching was direct: experts investigated, students came to learn what they'd discovered.

How different the situation is today.

The problem of distance

First, the level of detail representing genuine advances in most scientific fields is now so far removed from foundational knowledge that it cannot be understood without substantial prior study. This is precisely what first-year and second-year lectures attempt to provide: the conceptual scaffolding necessary to even comprehend the problems researchers are currently investigating.

But here is the difficulty: students must learn all these details before they can appreciate what we are actually working on. We can not generate a few well-controlled explosions on stage with dramatic wow factor and call it education. That has been done, repeatedly, and it does not teach students biomedical sciences. It entertains them.

There are exceptions – major breakthroughs that make headlines, paradigm shifts that genuinely excite. But even these often require understanding fine technical details to appreciate their significance. The human genome project sounds impressive. Understanding why long-read sequencing technologies matter for resolving structural variants requires knowing what structural variants are, why short reads can't detect them, and what biological questions this enables us to answer.

The entertainment is easy to deliver. The education requires work.

What we owe students

This is not an argument against entertainment in lectures. A well-placed demonstration, a moment of levity, an unexpected example – these have value. They maintain attention, provide cognitive breaks, make material more memorable. In the UK, experimental lectures face significant health and safety restrictions, but when possible, students genuinely enjoy these elements.

The problem arises when students conflate enjoyment with learning, when they assume that because they were entertained, they were educated. This is particularly concerning for capable students with real potential, those who could genuinely contribute to advancing their field if they develop the necessary foundation.

Learning foundational material is often boring. Sometimes it is downright tedious. Memorizing metabolic pathways, understanding statistical methods, working through molecular mechanisms – none of this has the immediate gratification of a stage demonstration. But it is necessary. Without it, students will never understand what a true scientific breakthrough means in contemporary research.

We do students no favours by pretending otherwise.

The metaphor problem

Here is perhaps the simplest way to frame it: you cannot understand a joke without being proficient in the language it is told in. The learning must come first. Otherwise, the punchline is just noise.

Contemporary scientific research is the punchline. The joke is often extraordinary – elegant, surprising, sometimes genuinely funny in its unexpectedness. But without fluency in the underlying concepts, methods and context it will remain incomprehensible.

We can deliver the punchline with theatrical flair. We can make it visually spectacular. We can ensure students leave feeling entertained. But if we have not taught them the language first, we have failed in our fundamental responsibility. And, I am afraid, there is no way around it: learning new vocabulary of a language is boring. This is not a failure. This is simply part of the process.

Universities were founded on the principle that students came to learn from experts because they wanted to understand what was being discovered. Somewhere along the way, we have shifted to a model where students attend because they need credentials and we are expected to make the experience enjoyable enough to justify their investment.

The challenge for academics today – particularly in the UK's current higher education environment – is remembering that our primary obligation is not to entertain. It is to educate. Even when education is less immediately gratifying than a well-executed stage demonstration.

Even when it does not photograph as well.