Why are other countries so far ahead of the United States in adopting media literacy in their schools?
As Kathleen Tyner writes in Literacy in a Digital World, “International media education programs in Canada, England and Australia have an advantage because they work from a central education ministry that disseminates resources, training and information on a regional or national scale. The downside of the centralized approach is that bad educational ideas can be spread as easily as good ones. Nonetheless, the mechanisms for wide-scale educational change are in place when a centralized national structure serves as a clearinghouse for concepts and resources.” In the United States, on the other hand, there are 50 states and 16,000 independent school districts! Plus private and parochial school systems. No institutional mechanism exists in formal educational structures to promote a national framework for media education or to require, for example, that large educational publishing companies incorporate media literacy into textbooks. This puts the onus of support for media literacy on indiv
