On politics in the classroom

After attending a college where it was standard practice for professors to move beyond sharing their political opinions to punishing students who disagreed, I am admittedly oversensitive to this issue. But the readings we did a while back, on teaching kids how to use digital media to express their political opinions, and even some of the readings on media literacy, made me a little wary. There is a balance we need to strike between empowering kids to understand media messages and voice their own opinions, and convincing kids to believe the same things we do.

It can be tricky. On some level, teaching media literacy is in itself a subversive action. We’re teaching kids to think critically about information provided by the government, the media, corporations: sources that plenty of their parents trust without question. Learning to ask those questions is a vital skill, and one that kids are not likely to pick up on their own. Even so, it’s not without controversy. There are plenty of adults who would prefer that children believe what they’re told. There is, after all, a great deal of money at stake.

So it’s important, I think, to make certain that we teach kids how to make these evaluations and judgments on their own, without asserting that our own views on the subject are right. Rheingold’s goal seems like a good one: “What if teachers could help students discover what they really care about, then show them how to use digital media to learn more and to persuade others?” Helping kids refine and articulate their views, and teaching them how to share those views in interesting, attention-getting ways – that’s all well and good. This stuff, though, concerns me more:

Finally, American youth are particularly susceptible to being influenced by corporate-funded mass culture, which is aimed directly at them even though it reaches a global audience. For that very reason, they have special leverage over media corporations, especially if they act cooperatively. It is not an exaggeration to say that youth civic engagement in the United States could benefit democracy around the world if youth-led associations challenged mass culture.

I agree, right? But this is a political opinion. Where do we draw the line between teaching media literacy skills and performing our own indoctrination? Is it really the place of schools or teachers to encourage kids to “challenge” mass culture, above and beyond just analyzing it? I don’t know. It seems like a difficult line to walk, anyway.

On the other side: for my annotated bibliography, I looked at copyright issues and youth, and while researching that topic, I ended up looking through a bunch of pro-corporate propaganda aimed at kids. The good news is, a lot of schools are teaching kids about copyright law in a responsible way: they're giving kids information about how they can and can't use other people's intellectual property, with plenty of emphasis placed on the fair use doctrine and on finding Creative Commons-licensed or public domain materials.

The bad news - there is always bad news - is that plenty of schools aren't. The MPAA and the RIAA, among other corporate interest groups, have created lesson plans that boil down to, “If you didn’t pay for it, you stole it.” That’s obviously not true. These lessons ignore the intricacies and vagaries of copyright law in the real world. Rather than introduce a complicated subject, like fair use, these interest groups ignore it entirely, even though it has a huge impact on the way we think about and interact with copyrighted materials.

Worryingly, plenty of schools are using these lesson plans. California now requires most schools to teach kids about copyright law. (Whether or not this is more worthwhile than teaching them, say, math or English or music theory is up for debate.) Teachers, most of whom are pressed for time as it is, sometimes see these professionally produced, thorough lesson plans as an easy option. And so corporate interests continue to insinuate their way into our schools. And of course, the reason I find this so upsetting is that I do not think that the political positions of some corporate entity have any place in the classroom, where they are presented by teachers and other adults in positions of authority, and are less likely to be questioned by the young people who hear them.

So while teaching kids the realities of copyright law – how it impacts them, what exceptions they may be able to take advantage of, how to find materials that are freely available – is absolutely important, we have to be careful. Advocating for a change in copyright law, reasonable as it may be, probably isn’t something we should be doing in the classroom. (On our own time, or as an institution…that’s a different story. Advocating for copyright law reform seems like a perfectly reasonable thing for libraries and librarians to do.)

Anyway. Teaching media literacy skills can be a really empowering thing. Teaching kids about the ways copyright law can work for them, or the ways they can work around it, is also good. We just have to make sure that kids are empowered to take their media literacy toolbox and go out in the world to figure things out for themselves.