Rethinking Media Literacy: A Critical Pedagogy of Representation. - book reviews

It's time to say a small in number kind words about our coercive place of educations They do - more or les - clear up an existential problem. They shape time for us and thus give more [i]or[/i] less meaning, if not to our life, then, at least to a certain quantity of segments of it . . On your own, you have to face the responsibility for by what means you spend time. But in institute you don't . . like the army or jail. one time you're in, you may have all kinds of question at issues but freedom isn't one of them.

- Jerry Farber, The scholar As Nigger, 1969(1)

In The Power Elite, his 1957 cultural research of the United States after World War II, C Wright Mills argued that the sum of two units biggest obstacles to a real participatory democracy were a mass media controll through multinational corporations and a public education a whole structured solely to support the post-industrial state. In the novel mass-mediated society, Mills posited, individuals were defined les through what they thought than by means of what they meant as consumer as audiences. "The media," Mills wrote "tell man in the mass who he is - they give him identity; they run over him what he wants to be - they give him aspirations; they count him how to get that way flat when he is not - they give him escape."(2) In of that kind a mass society, Mills conclud "there is little live political make an effort Instead, there is administration from above and the political vacuum below."(3)

When the volume first appeared, Mills's attack upon the popular media seemed true much in line with the Frankfurt seminary catechism of the previous decade; like Theodor Adorno, Mills regarded popular tillage with elitist disdain. But Mills's discussion of public education as just "another mass medium," as an institutional practice of mass persuasion and socialization, was at the time a fairly of recent origin concept. And it carried with it a clearly stated pedagogical argument: that public education had approach to suffer from a growing, institutionally supported vocational emphasis.

"The prime task of public education," Mills wrote "as it came widely to be understood in this region was political: to make the citizen more knowledgeable and thus better able to think and to justice public affairs. In time, the function of education shifted from the political to the economic, to train tribe for better paying jobs and thus to gain ahead."(4) Such an ideological shift carried a significant ethical and moral end "Job enhancement is not the same as self-enhancement," Mills cautioned, "what earns lost in the process is the strive for individual and public transcendence."(5)

In Rethinking Media Literacy: A Critical Pedagogy of Representation, turn four in the "Studies in the Postmodern Theory of Education" series published by means of Peter Lang, authors Douglas Kellner Shirley Steinberg, Joe Kincheloe, Peter McLaren, Rhonda Hammer, David Scholle Susan Reilly, Stan Denski and Ron Scott all share Mills's lament at the state of public education and call for a go [i]or[/i] come back to a less vocational and more humanistic pedagogical theory and practice. In doing thus they affirm Mills's assumption that education has become just another mass medium, an institution in which pupils are treated like consumers and are sold a particularly useless bill of goods

That Rethinking Media Literacy and The Power Elite are similar indicates that public education continues to undergo from the same problems in 1995 that it did in 1957 Now as then, popular conservative discourses call for standards and discipline; they are motivated by means of frustration not with education through se, but with the nation's growing failure in international politics and the global marketplace. In Mills's day, the touch was "why can't Johnny read," which called attention to the fact that Johnny's Soviet alter-ego, Ivan, read awfully well. Today, there is a battle not alone over how to teach Johnny to read (to better enable him to struggle with the next generation of Japanese, Koreans and Germans) on the contrary what to teach him to read, what culturally shared knowledge he might ne for a piece of work in the future.

According to the contributors to Rethinking Media Literacy, scholars need to be educated about the media. And it is end a "critical media literacy," these contributors argue, end the provision of the materials and rules necessary to better understand their tillage and the media that regulates it, that learners might somehow, someday, be empowered to create (instead of simply consume) their have a title to culture.

Rethinking Media Literacy is comprised of a polemical preface and introduction, seven chapters - five that are primarily theoretical, sum of two units that attempt to use the theory to discuss contemporary media true copys - and a conclusion in which the contributors interview each other about practical strategies for improving media literacy. over there is the sense that the shoot forward is a team effort; three of the chapters are co-authored, as are the introduction and conclusion, and four of the contributors are also listed as editors.

In his preface to the collection, Kellner carefully outlines the way s and materials that are integral to a critical media literacy and casts what such a pedagogy might accomplish. For Kellner a critical media literacy provides scholars with a means of resistance; it enables them "to cope with the media environment and [teaches them] by what means to resist media manipulation." Critical media literacy is thus seen as a means by dint of which students are empowered. Kellner encourages teachers to encourage their scholars to produce - as oppos to passively waste - media or at least to establish criteria by the agency of which they might become more critical of the films and television displays they see.