Just posted about media literacy in a postmodern world. Browsed a few of my favorite blogs and found a post from Assorted Stuff about a report from Indiana University indicated that The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is just as substantive as the typical nightly news program.

For me, the most important part comes right at the end: “The 2004 elections saw the highest turnout among voters among age 30 in more than a decade. A 15,000-student study released Sept. 22 by the Knight Foundation and J-Ideas found that young people are turning more than ever to programs like Stewart’s for political information.” Media literacy at work…but how many schools filter The Daily Show website rather than using it to discuss current events?

This is really the bottom line, isn’t it? We’re clearly living in a subjective postmodern world. Yet, the culture of the classroom still reflects an objective modern world. If I have learned anything from my focus on media literacy over the past few months, it is that we simply can’t afford to keep doing that. It doesn’t seem to matter where I turn, there’s an example. This week, it was Gloria Bolger’s column in US News & World Report.

Bolger takes George Allen to task for clearly suffering from a lack of media literacy skills: “But, hey, don’t feel bad for Allen. He said something awfully stupid, at the very least. He also knew he was talking to a guy pointing a camera at him who worked for his opponent. And he’s supposed to be savvy. So no excuses. But here’s the larger point: The new digital technology has completely changed the face of campaigning, so candidates beware.” I just finished Richard Lanham’s book The Electronic Word and he says that electronic text is changing the face of education. Don’t we just have this sense that things are radically different?

Yet, I hear from my contacts in K-12 that electronic text and video have barely touched the classroom. Schools divisions are filtering because that’s what we did in a modern world. We are leaving it up to the kids to teach themselves about the postmodern world.