Educational entertainment (also referred to by the portmanteau neologismedutainment) is content designed to educate and to entertain. It includes content that is primarily educational but has incidental entertainment value, and content that is mostly entertaining but contains educational value. It has been used by governments in various countries to disseminate information via television, including soap operas or telenovelas to have an impact on viewers' opinions and behaviors.
It can be argued that educational entertainment has existed for millennia in the form of parables and fables that promoted social change. In Christianity, for example, Jesus Christ used parables extensively to convey his moral messages. As Matthew 13:34 and Mark 4:34 report: "He did not say anything [to the crowd] without using a parable." The canonical gospels contain 33 parables, excluding allegories or proverbial expressions. Christ invoked imagery from the environment and daily life of the people of the time, including the food and drink they consumed (e.g. leaven, wine), the birds and animals they saw or domesticated (sheep), the vegetation (wheat, fig trees, lillies), the clothes people wore (wedding dress, patching old garments), the jobs they worked in (fishing, shepherding), even the currency (the denarius ). Some scholars, such as C.F. Burney, claim that Christ leveraged poetry to make his teachings enjoyable and memorable. The Old Testament certainly has a poetic nucleus, and likewise poetic devices like parallelism can be detected in the Gospels. But because all the earliest canonical gospels are Greek translations, this caim is yet to ascertained. Whatever the case, Christ's parables are among the best-known, and many of their expressions entered everyday usage the world over.