The Future of Media Literacy Education
Media literacy education invites a slew of nonprofit organizations and consultancies into the public school system, many of whom may have their own political agendas.
In the age of TikTok, teen depression, and information overload, parents and lawmakers have increasingly turned to K-12 schools to teach students how to navigate our media environment. Eighteen states have legislated media literacy standards for schools, with New Jersey among the most recent to join the movement. But given our nation's actual literacy problems, lawmakers are naive to imagine that another public school program will improve students' ability to traverse media misinformation.
Proponents say media literacy education gives students the ability to analyze and evaluate the media they consume. Most would likely see no problem with teaching students internet etiquette and proper online research practices. But media literacy advocates don't stop there—they actively design curricula to inculcate students with progressive ideology, using their position as arbiters of "reliable sources" to turn students against alternative viewpoints.
Basic literacy skills would address the concerns of media literacy just fine as students would understand narratives, motives, and rhetoric. Yet schools do a terrible job in this area. Among many other factors, the replacement of phonics education with inferior alternatives has led to a prolonged decline in literacy. Two-thirds of eighth graders can't read at grade level. If students already struggle with basic reading comprehension, teaching them tips and tricks to spot fake news only gives them a set of biased heuristics that they will inevitably misapply.
Chicago Public Schools (CPS) demonstrates how extreme these programs can be. The district will teach K-12 students "critical media literacy," using a Marxist lens to critique so-called "power structures"—in other words, fixating on the relationships between arbitrarily-defined "oppressor" and "oppressed" groups. In 2022, CPS budgeted $10,000 (the actual expense was later reduced to $3,000) for a "progressive" education consultant "rooted in … social justice and anti-racism practices" to help develop media literacy curriculum for high school students.
Project Look Sharp, an upstate New York nonprofit which specializes in "constructivist media decoding" on topics like environmental justice and social justice, charges between $1,000 and $1,800 for media literacy professional development workshops for teachers. Wide Angle Youth Media, an organization which views media literacy as a way to "promote social justice," lists Baltimore City Public Schools as a client.
Chicago may be at the forefront of critical media literacy education, but academics and advocates want this to become the new normal. One academic paper positively referenced in CPS emails states that it is "deeply problematic" if instruction only teaches students to be careful and polite online. That's because such teaching doesn't address the inherent "ills within our culture such as racism, misogyny, and heterosexism." Another paper claims that instruction should focus on the more complex task of teaching students to understand the motives behind content using "critical lenses." Basic literacy skills would fulfill students' abilities to recognize narratives and motives, all while avoiding political bias.
Media literacy education invites a slew of nonprofit organizations and consultancies into the public school system, many of which have their own political agendas. The National Association for Media Literacy Education held 17 sessions on critical media literacy in its 2021 conference. Common Sense Media, which offers digital literacy lessons to over 70 percent of schools in the U.S., advocates for limiting children's exposure to vaguely defined "hatred" and "racism" online by giving the government more authority to moderate online content, which will inevitably lead to ideologically-based decisions.
These organizations allow their biases to directly enter the classroom by providing ready-made curricula and materials for teachers to use. KQED, an NPR affiliate which partners with many California schools to offer media literacy instructional materials, provides several resources for teachers and students to use to learn about the Black Lives Matter movement and American policing. KQED asks teachers, "How do we address the systemic nature of racism and police violence?" One resource on addressing bias leads to a video on "Microassaults, microinsults, and microinvalidations." Another article leads to a lesson which misleadingly attempts to claim that American policing was primarily developed to deal with slavery. An article for teachers, "The Urgent Need for Anti-Racist Education" provides resources to "help teachers challenge white supremacy in themselves, in schools and in classrooms."
Street Law offers a lesson plan that provides examples of satire, news, opinion, and erroneous news. The organization provides articles from right-wing sources, such as The American Conservative and Newsmax, as examples of biased and unreliable news. Meanwhile, it uses a Washington Post piece as a model of real news. Do left-wing outlets never get things wrong or publish intentional distortions? Of course they do. Helping students discern truth requires leveling with them about the fallibility of right and left media sources, as well as legacy outlets that seem to be in the center: In 2021, The Washington Post retracted portions of two stories regarding the Steele dossier. In what may feel like ancient history to some students, the vaunted paper once had to famously retract an entirely fabricated feature that won a Pulitzer prize.
Media literacy advocates claim these lessons are apolitical. Illinois Media Literacy Coalition President Yonty Friesem, who helped write the state's media literacy law, argues that critical media literacy isn't political because conservatives could use these practices to challenge progressives in power. Yet if Friesem and others like him support challenging progressive media, why don't they easily include such examples?
Furthermore, education psychology research on transfer of learning has long failed to find strong evidence that students can apply knowledge from the classroom to different contexts. When school districts like CPS only seek counsel from "progressive" educators, media literacy advocates naturally invite bias into their lessons. Students may not think that deeply about the distinctions between media outlets, especially outside of class. But they will attach positive and negative associations to certain news outlets if they receive this kind of instruction consistently.
Legislators who are concerned about online misinformation may wonder if the focus on the programs' ideological biases is disproportionate. But the evidence on whether media literacy actually changes behavior is also weak. Common Sense Media has not once evaluated the effectiveness of its programs, despite offering media literacy lessons since 2010. A study that looked at media literacy education in elementary school children, like most papers on media literacy, failed to look at behavioral outcomes. Another study that looked at a media literacy intervention for adult Facebook users found small effects on participants' beliefs in false headlines, which declined to almost zero in a matter of weeks.
The urge to "do something" in the face of fear is impeding our ability to evaluate the costs of such programs. So far, the evidence shows almost no benefits. It does, however, show significant costs monetarily and ideologically.
Policy makers would be better served by reforming core curricula to improve literacy rates. Children with sufficient reading skills can then be allowed to make their own decisions about which media they should trust.
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Would they learn how to identify when the media is lying about things like Hunter's laptop?
Will they lean to look for the "fine print" that says we don't have evidence of, while the media is touting it as evidence? Will they understand the implication of not having evidence? Or will they take the media's version that it is evidence even when the source says otherwise?
Even Greek Mythology continues to inform us on current events, amazingly. For example, the story of the Trojan Horse. I mean, how could Troy refuse to accept a tribute to The Gods from the defeated Greek invaders? How could any good human argue against "educating" our children? Never mind that EVERY contact between a teacher and a child represents another opportunity for the socialists to propagandize, social(ist)ize and manipulate society in the culture wars?
This is the standard Authoritarian streak that has sadly become the foundation for most Leftist political thought. At the heart of every measure is the desire to move away from individual discovery to Experts empowered with the Authority to tell you what is true.
People will always make mistakes. People will always disagree on what is proper or wrong to do. This includes individual children, their parents, their teachers and self appointed Top Men. These conflicts cannot be reconciled through debate.
Let me say that again: Our differences of opinion on what is true, false, right or wrong will never be reconciled through debate. Authoritarians want to end debate by ceding the decision to Experts. Libertarians want to end the debate about the debate by rendering the decision down to the person with the rights.
A Top Man and a Parent may have differing opinions on how a kid will learn to read. Or how they will learn math. As we have seen from the Phonics/Whole Language debacle, the Experts are no paragon of accuracy. They are often wrong.
Part of the libertarian message is the humility to know that you cannot solve for the “correct” answer- especially if you are dictating policy for many, perhaps millions, of people. So if you are possibly going to be wrong, then we should limit the cost of your mistake as much as possible. That means investing the decision as closely to the rights-holder as possible.
In the case of Schools, that is largely the Parents. Teachers have born none of the cost of being wrong about reading skills. They will bear none of the cost of being wrong about media literacy. The children, and therefore their trustee parents, are the ones who should be making these decisions. The ideal way to do that is by giving maximum control to parents in their schools via maximum school choice. Until then, our Public Schools should be making parents the first class citizen in all decisions related to the school.
This is an excellent analysis – thanks! There seems to me to be only one solution to the unavoidable disagreements you describe: total elimination of all quasi-governmental, tax-funded educational institutions. No tax funds should ever go to education of the general public. The guardians of children should provide for their education in any way they prefer.
Yup. And this is the clear distinction I have been making in previous debates. The moral wrong is TAKING decisions from an individual and putting them in the hands of a collective governance. It is NOT those individuals then reasserting their rights as a part of the collective governance.
Education is a perfect example. Parents and children have the right to decide which education will be consumed. But the government has said, "We will instead nationalize 90% of this market, and you can make consumptive decisions for that market via elected representatives.”
So absent this Government decree, the Parent enjoyed the right to say, “My kids only have 6 hours a day to learn, so I want that time occupied by Math, Reading and History, even if that means we don’t have time for Woke Studies. I want them reading Socrates, not Transy McActivist.”
But government’s decision to nationalize the market has subrogated that right. If Parents don’t want their kids exposed to Transy McActivist, their only recourse is to use the collective governance to make that consumptive choice. Because that is the immoral system that has been put in place.
And yet, we have seen TONS of articles from “libertarians” claiming that the real moral crime was when the Parent exercised their consumptive right to not include Transy McActivist’s books in the school. Let’s be clear that NO SCHOOL LIBRARY has 100% of all books. So someone is going to decide what is in it. And all these “libertarians” had no complaint when unelected librarians and teachers were putting Transy McActivist’s books in the school. Not once. It was only when parents- using the only recourse available to them- exercised their consumptive right to define what wouldn’t be consumed, that “libertarians” on this site balked.
It is clear that the moral evil was the government nationalizing these consumptive decisions. Full stop. If a person tries to exercise their rights to not consume something, it isn’t a ban. It isn’t anti freedom. It is doing their best in a system that already implements bans and is already anti freedom. Instead of perpetuating the Kulture Warz, libertarians should be spending their time teaching people that rejecting the “quasi-governmental” system is the only pro liberty option.
"So if you are possibly going to be wrong, then we should limit the cost of your mistake as much as possible."
And if it's right it will spread.
Yes good point.
As we have seen from the Phonics/Whole Language debacle, the Experts are no paragon of accuracy. They are often wrong.
Yup.
Two of my three broodlings effectively taught themselves how to read before school using their own methods that most closely align with "whole language" methodologies. Experts tell me "whole language" has been discredited (Who's doing the crediting/credentialing here?) and that phonics is *the* science-backed method.
No disagreement that if you need to get 100 random kids to appear as though they were functional readers by objective and testable criteria, phonics is the way to go. I'm thoroughly unconvinced of the pre-eminence of phonics in generating the next William Shakespeare, Alexander Dumas, or Albert Einstein. And even if it did generate one or two more Shakespeares, it seems tailor-made to generating 98 other people limited to consuming words that people like Ibrahim X. Kendi put in grammatically-correct order; or to puzzle over why a more verbose sentence doesn't plainly read as "A well-regulated Militia [...] shall not be infringed."
Not to say "Not even once" or "Nowhere, ever." to phonics, just that the debate about "scientific backed" phonics is like a debate over "scientific backed" declarative programming (what the computer is supposed to do) obsoleting the discredited imperative programming (how the computer is supposed to do something) paradigm. Some people's brains work like processor registers pointing at memory addresses, others work like abstract hash maps pointing at data structures.
How will they be able to spot propaganda if we don't indoctrinate them!
lawmakers have increasingly turned to K-12 schools to teach students how to navigate our media environment.
This will be a complete waste of time and money, like everything else with government run k-12 schools.
[media literacy education 101]
Abstinence is the best policy.
[/media literacy education 101]
Only say gay.
But then they may grow up to be wrongthinkers who believe in crazy things like personal freedom, free speech, and worst of all, that free market competition is better than centrally planned Socialism. *shudders*
Media literacy education invites a slew of nonprofit organizations and consultancies into the public school system, many of whom may have their own political agendas.
Really? Tell me more!
"the government is going to teach and train our kids about 'media literacy'"!!!! what a fucking joke. who thinks this is anything ohter than jumping ahead on indoctrination for kids. jesus
Speaking of outside groups shoving their elbows into your children's schools as consultants, I ran across this recently.
I haven't ever posted anything to this person's youtube channel because while I was aware of her, I didn't always find everything she said to be particularly unique. She was just kind of another anti-woke crusader. Not that she was "bad" in any way, I just didn't see anything as particularly illuminating. However, on her substack, she's been doing good work lately with a lot of original research that I think deserves a look. One of her latest entries:
The conference teaching teachers how to queer your kids
Know what the teachers are learning and you'll know what's going on in your childrens' classroom.
I bolded the entries that are of particular interest.
If you're not familiar with any of the academic source material on Queer Theory, this might be perceived by your average Fox News host as "they're trying to make your kids gay!". While there can be a disturbing undercurrent of that (especially within the broader movement to push your kid into trans identity which then leads to no-shit medical interventions) "Queering" is the concept of definitionally changing everything for the purposes of disruption of the "capitalist/patriarchal/cis/white" systems, which at some vague point leads to a [neo]-Marxist revolution, blah blah blah.
one of my personal favs ... the privilege institute
https://www.theprivilegeinstitute.com/about
"How and why we use diverse children’s books to decolonize our classroom libraries by creating “mirrors and windows” into the lives and identities of our students"
This is the point I was hammering home above. A library cannot have infinite books. And kids cannot be exposed to infinite information. So when a teacher, librarian, or other activist chooses to include a set of books, they are functionally banning whatever books they have replaced. But for some reason "Reason" only got their knickers in a knot when OTHER people exercised the same power.
This isn't just about books. Some of this information is straight up replacing well understood scientific information.
Here is a google drive of teaching materials supplied by activists at genderinclassrooms DOT com:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Zw7nHffu0Edn2wT3hxmh6c3AnpbQtUEA
Showcase of Natural Genders actually tries to deny sexual dimorphism by using vague claptrap like “they have girl bodies that look like boy bodies” - There is no science to back this up or even explain what they mean. For example it appears that they are saying that male deer, because they lose antlers each year, spend time looking like females. This is absurd, and has nothing to do with gender expression. It also says Red Kangaroo males have a pouch. This is just plain not true according to any research I have seen.
Sexual dimorphism is a thing. Teachers pushing this bad science as truth are essentially "banning" real scientific facts. But for some reason, it isn't worth libertarian scorn unless parents push back and scream, "Oh no you don't!"
Media is consumed for entertainment purposes.
There is zero meaningful incentive to be "correct."
So why would I waste effort in learning to consume media correctly and how would I know if I were?
Chicago Public Schools (CPS) demonstrates how extreme these programs can be. The district will teach K-12 students "critical media literacy," using a Marxist lens to critique so-called "power structures"—in other words, fixating on the relationships between arbitrarily-defined "oppressor" and "oppressed" groups.
This shouldn't be a shock to anyone when you consider that actual Marxists run the schools and even elected one of theirs as mayor (Brandon Johnson). The Marxists within CPS and Local 1 began their assent over a decade ago in the schools, and now have seized almost all the reins of power within Chicago itself.
Long watch, but well worth it to understand the CTU, CPS, Chicago, and the future of the Democratic Party - Local 1: The Rise of America's Most Powerful Teachers Union: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbQ81mGucvs
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