 | A Plea for Media Literacy in our Nation's Schools
By David Shaw
We are, all of us, awash in media. Television. Movies.
The Internet. Billboards. Newspapers. Magazines. Radio. Newsletters.
Individually and collectively, we spend more time with more media than
ever before — an average of 10.5 hours a day, about 25% of that time using
two media simultaneously, according to a recent study of "Middletown, USA"
by the University of South Carolina.
Children in particular have
become media–obsessed. Another recent study, this one by the Kaiser Family
Foundation, found that 68% of kids 2 and younger spend an average of two
hours a day in front of a screen, either television or computer. Children
under 6 spend as much time in front of a screen as they do playing outside
— and three times as much as they spend reading or being read
to.
Those numbers don't decline as the children grow older. Douglas
Rushkoff, a professor of media culture at New York University, has coined
the term "screen–agers" to convey the depth of this
inundation.
Moreover, yet another study — the 2003 Roper Youth
Report — shows that kids ages 8 to 17 have 10% more say now than they did
a year ago in their families' media purchases: magazines, newspapers,
music, DVDs.
Young people use the media primarily for
entertainment and recreation, not for information and education. But news
is ubiquitous — headlines, snippets, bulletins, crawls — and the very fact
that young people spend so much time with media that have the potential to
inform and educate gives our schools an enormous opportunity (and
obligation) to teach new and increasingly valuable skills.
The
opportunity goes beyond just helping children make sense of the news, of
course. On the Internet in particular, a single click takes them into
worlds at once forbidden and fascinating, sites with hidden (and
not–so–hidden) agendas and pop–up commercial messages that don't even
require a click.
Consider today's column a plea for media literacy
classes in our nation's schools.
We live in increasingly complex
times, and unless we teach our children how to read about, watch,
interpret, understand and analyze the day's events, we risk raising a
generation of civic illiterates, political ignoramuses and uncritical
consumers, vulnerable not only to crackpot ideas, faulty reasoning and
putative despots but fraudulent sales pitches and misleading advertising
claims.
Teaching media literacy is, in a sense, teaching critical
thinking, and it should "start early, with simple activities in preschool,
and continue through high school," says Tessa Jolls, president and CEO of
the Santa Monica–based Center for Media Literacy, which provides guidance
and curricula for school districts interested in taking on this most
challenging task.
"The Internet caused a sea change in what kids
need and how teachers should teach and in what parents want for their
kids," says Elizabeth Thoman, who founded the center four years ago. "The
Internet has changed our understanding of how kids are learning, in every
sense of that term, and now instead of parents worrying about their kids
watching too many commercials on Saturday morning cartoons, there is this
much larger issue of all the images and messages that come pouring in over
the Internet."
Education transformation
Thoman, Jolls and their center draw their
inspiration, in part, from the writings of the late David Berlo, a noted
communications scholar and the former president of Illinois State
University. Berlo believed that the transformation of our culture from an
Industrial Age to an Information Age required a similar transformation in
education.
"Most of what we have called formal education has been
intended to imprint on the human mind all of the information that we might
need for a lifetime," he wrote in 1975. But the simultaneous explosion in
information and technology mean that "for the first time in history," it
is no longer either possible or necessary to store all available
information within the human brain, and Berlo argued that education must
adjust accordingly.
"Education needs to be geared toward the
handling of data rather than the accumulation of data," he
wrote. "Humankind needs to be taught how to process
information."
Kids today are confronted with "every conceivable
content," Jolls says. "I want them to have the tools and skills to make
good decisions for themselves on the media messages they see.
"For
teenagers, that might start with learning to evaluate commercial messages
so they can buy a car intelligently. But with the right instruction, that
could ultimately lead to applying moral criteria in looking at violence or
pornography, learning what's healthy and moral as well as what's practical
and useful."
Jolls is not suggesting that educators abandon the 3
Rs in favor of some New Age gobbledygook or religious teaching — only that
media literacy be incorporated in the teaching of existing subjects.
She and Thoman and their staff of six have developed the MediaLit Kit(tm),a detailed
curriculum for doing just that. The essence of their approach is what
they call the "five key questions" students should learn to ask about
every media message they see:
• "Who created the
message?
• "What techniques are used to attract my
attention?
• "What lifestyles, values and points of view are
presented in or omitted from the message?
• "Why was this
message sent?
• "How might different people understand the
message differently from me?"
"If we could teach kids to routinely
apply those questions to every message that comes at them," Thoman says,
"they would be much more sophisticated and understanding — and empowered,
because they would then be able to make distinctions and judgments about
their lives and the world around them."
Some roadblocks
That all seems obvious. But Jolls, Thoman and others
in the national Alliance for a Media Literate America have run into a few
problems in trying to sell their arguments. One is that education in
America is very structured, resistant to change, and media literacy is not
an accepted course in the formal canon, not part of what is known as the
"K–12 standards."
With school budgets tight everywhere, it's
difficult to introduce programs or classes or hire more teachers to
administer those programs and teach those classes.
Advocates of
media literacy education say the solution is to incorporate that subject
in existing classes.
In Pennsylvania schools, for example, a
cross–disciplinary approach to "reading standards" uses the media so
students can "compare information received on television with that
received on radio or in newspapers … discuss the reliability of
information received on Internet sources; explain how film can represent
either accurate versions or fictional versions of the same event, [and]
explain the role of advertisers in the media."
Reading is just one
of many "natural homes for media literacy," Thoman says. "In Canada, it's
required for high school graduation, and it's embedded in the language
arts program. Different aspects of it can be taught as part of social
studies or health or any of a number of other subjects.
"Look at
health, for example. Look at all the media messages kids get in the form
of fast food commercials, stories on obesity and the sedentary lifestyle.
They should be taught how to evaluate those messages and apply them in
their own lives."
But someone has to train the teachers to teach
this material, and that too takes time and money.
"People say,
'Come in and teach us how to do it,' " Thoman says, "but you can't do it
in a day. It takes time."
The economics and politics of the
textbook industry are also hurdles to be overcome.
"The books and
teaching materials we have are supplemental material, not basic texts,"
Thoman says. Adoption of supplemental material requires both lobbying and
extra expenditures.
Despite the obstacles, Jolls and Thoman are
optimistic. They have no statistics on the number of schools now teaching
media literacy, but they say requests for their materials are increasing
significantly, and visits to their Web site (www.medialit.org) have more
than doubled in the past year.
"We're still in missionary mode,"
Thoman says.
It's a mission well worth pursuing — for our children,
for our society and for our future.
Author:
Pulitzer Prize winner David Shaw is the media/technology columnist for the Los Angeles Times.
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