The Education Gap

THE EDUCATION GAP

The Ventura County Star is a superb newspaper, and the three Pulse articles published on Sunday July 9, 2000, on using movies in the classroom were extremely pertinent.

Regrettably, however, none of these articles addressed any of the serious academic issues involved in the area of media literacy and cognitive development theory. Each article addressed the subject as if they were the first to deal with the question of using movies in the classroom.

Not so. When I was the director of the TV Center at City University of New York, in the late 1970s, I was doing research in this area for an Annenberg Institute Program at Temple University, and there were already thousands of studies on how to equip students to be media literate and the influence of the mass media in different stages of cognitive develop­ment. The National Institute of Mental Health had gathered many of these studies. Re­nowned media researcher Robert Morse had shown definitively that the very medium of television caused cognitive dissidence and could aggravate Attention Deficit Disorder.

Courses such as Television Awareness Training, Growing with Television and exhaus­tive film studies programs at major universities clearly showed at that time how to help children to be media literate and how to use the media effectively in the classroom. Harvard, among many others, became a leader in these areas. City University of New York’s Sunrise Semester, which had been broadcasting since the 1940s, had solved many of the problems with distant learning. By the late 1970s, media literacy courses had been taught in many Western European countries for many years partly in reaction to the over­powering presence of Hollywood movies, television and music. Soon after I retired from C.U.N.Y, the State of New Mexico decided to institute media literacy classes throughout the state.

Given that all this was available in the late 1970s, one wonders why the Pulse articles by practicing teachers in the July 9th edition of The Star seem to have no awareness of the 50 years of theory, practice and research which would answer many of the questions and issues that the articles raised. This means either that the media literacy education estab­lishment has not gotten the word out (a disappointment to those of us who have been involved for over 30 years), or that California schools have not bothered to adequately equip their teachers in this area. In either case, this is a defect which must be remedied.

Children, especially teenagers, are the largest consumers of the mass media and enter­tainment. They are more at home in virtual neighborhoods, communicating by email with someone thousands of miles away, than they are with their next-door neighbors. Schools and teachers need to be equipped to deal with media literacy during each stage of our children’s cognitive development.

One could only hope that by addressing these issues in depth, future articles in The Star will encourage California schools to do just that.