How is visual language going to affect education?
REH. There are already many schools in which students develop multimedia reports. As I’ve said, I think the communications curriculum is in for a major change. We have just started working with one school district to create a high school curriculum for visual language. Most often, we hear educators bemoan the pervasiveness of the visual culture. They attribute to TV the decline in reading ability. They blame TV for the decrease in analytic ability, and students’ poor writing skills. I do not want to dispute these data; I agree that the sheer weight of time that students spend immersed in television, computer games, and other visual distractions keeps them from other educational activities. But TV is not the visual language that I am describing. I dispute any idea that visual language contributes in a negative way to literacy. On the contrary, integrating visual language into the schools will enable students to think in more complex ways and to make better decisions through more skillfu
