My Back Pages: Mass Media Literacy (1971)

As today's students are inundated with more information than ever before, are schools adequately teaching media literacy? In 1971, Castelle G. Gentry and Margaret Shallcross, of the University of Toledo, Ohio, share their concerns about the increasing amount of mass media—in particular, the considerable time children spend watching television—and what they feel is schools' lack of attention to information literacy.

Read the article: Mass Media Instruction: A Missing Link? (PDF)

"We still operate as if the school, the church, and the home are the only sources of information and values," Gentry and Shallcross write. In ominous italics, they warn that except for a few schools, "no one in education is attempting to train children or adults to interpret the mass media." 

Their description of the future of news reporting is a fascinating read for its combination of prescience and quaint language: "it can be expected that the . . . time-consuming means of newspaper delivery will not long continue. The technology for delivering the news through a number of possible homeowned readout machines via telephones lines exist now. . . ." It was only December of last year that Detroit newspapers decided to stop home delivery several days a week, a landmark event in the industry.

Inarguably, the rush of media toward students has only accelerated, and the task for schools to equip students with the media literacy necessary for the 21st century has become both more complicated and more imperative.

In your opinion, have schools adapted and kept pace to ensure that students are media literate? Or have Gentry and Shallcross's fears gone largely unheeded?

In "My Back Pages," we look at important issues through the historical lens of the Educational Leadership archives. ASCD members have access to EL issues from 1943 to the present by signing in at www.ascd.org.