Chapter 16 : Education and the Mass Media

The Development of Schooling

  Education in its modern form, involving the instruction of pupils within specially designated school premises, began to emerge with the spread of printed materials and higher levels of literacy. Knowledge could be retained, reproduced, and consumed by more people in more places. With industrialization, work became more specialized, and knowledge was increasingly acquired in more abstract rather than practical ways-the skills of reading, writing, and calculating.

Education and Inequality

  The expansion of education in the twentieth century has been closely tied to perceived needs for a literate and disciplined work force. Although reformers have seen education for all as a means of reducing inequalities, its impact in this respect is fairly limited. Education tends to express and reaffirm existing inequalities more than it acts to change them.

  The formal school curriculum is only one part of a more general process of social reproduction influenced by many informal aspects of learning, education, and school settings. The hidden curriculum plays a significant role in such reproduction.

  Because intelligence is difficult to define, there has been a great deal of controversy about the subject. Some argue that genes determine one's IQ; others believe that social influences determine it. The weight of the evidence appears to be on the side of those arguing for social and cultural influences. A major controversy about IQ has developed as a result of the book The Bell Curve . The book claims that races differ in terms of their average level of inherited intelligence. Critics reject this thesis completely.

Communication and the Mass Media

  The mass media have come to play a fundamental role in modern society. The mass media are media of communication-newspapers, magazines, television, radio, movies, videos, CDs, DVDs, and other forms-that reach mass audiences. The influence of the mass media on our lives is profound. The media not only provide entertainment, but provide and shape much of the information that we utilize in our daily lives.

  A range of different theories of media and popular culture have been developed. McLuhan argued that media influence society more in terms of how they communicate than what they communicate. In McLuhan's words, "the medium is the message": TV, for example, influences people's behavior and attitudes because it is so different in nature from other media, such as newspapers or books.

  Other important theorists include Habermas, Baudrillard, and Thompson. Habermas points to the role of the media in creating a public sphere -a sphere of public opinion and public debate. Baudrillard has been strongly influenced by McLuhan. He believes that new media, particularly television, actually change the "reality" we experience. Thompson argues that the mass media have created a new form of social interaction- mediated quasi-interaction -that is more limited, narrow, and one-way than everyday social interaction.

Technological Change, Media, and Education

  The sense today of inhabiting one world is in large part a result of the international scope of media of communication. A world information order -an international system of the production, distribution, and consumption of informational goods-has come into being. Given the paramount position of the industrial countries in the world information order, many believe that the developing countries are subject to a new form of media imperialism.

  Recent years have seen the emergence of multimedia, linked to the development of the Internet. Multimedia refers to the combination on a single medium of what used to be different media needing different technologies, so that a CD-ROM, for example, can carry both visuals and sound and be played on a computer. Many claims have been made about the likely social effects of these developments, but it is still too early to judge how far these will be borne out.

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