Should Media Literacy Be Focused On School-Based K-12 Educational Environments?
A fair amount of scholarly and popular writing in media literacy makes little reference to schools, children, teachers or public education (Messaris, 1995; Silverblatt, 1996; Bianculli, 1992), and a number of scholars and educators have pointed out the need for media literacy skills to be developed in the home by parents (Axelrod, 1997). Schools are, paradoxically, both the most radical and the most conservative of social institutions (Postman, 1972; Maehr and Midgely, 1996), and schools have been notoriously silent on defining an appropriate relationship between the schools’ mission and the role of media and information (Sizer, 1995). As mentioned earlier, the diversity of purposes, goals and outcomes for media literacy education naturally limits the effectiveness of work in schools. Media literacy initiatives have been most successful in school communities where teachers, parents and students have a shared, common vision about their love-hate relationship with media culture. The most
