Educational Standards and Media Literacy
Part 2: Significance of Standards
Standards are important because, as knowledge explodes in today's Information Age, schooling no longer needs to be about knowledge acquisition but rather knowledge processing. As David Berlo reminds us:
"For the first time in human history, two related propositions are true. One, it no longer is possible to store within the human brain all of the information that a human needs: i.e. we can no longer rely on ourselves as a memory bank. Second, it no longer is necessary to store within the human brain all of the information that humans need; i.e. we are obsolete as a memory bank...Education (therefore) needs to be geared toward the handling of data rather than the accumulation of data."
The standards movement, then is not so much about teaching specific content as it is about teaching skills. Skills to know how to access the right information when you need it; skills to analyze and evaluate what you find; skills to formulate questions to clarify your search; skills to summarize and integrate what you conclude and then, skills to communicate it – clearly – to someone else.
Whether a child is enrolled in a public, private or parochial school, a rural, urban or home school, standards identify the set of skills commonly agreed upon and democratically arrived at to be "well-educated" as a person, to participate fully as a citizen in a democratic society and to be productive and competent in a chosen work or profession.
Identifying the skills a person needs to be well-educated is one thing; organizing education to enable students to learn to master them is another. Media literacy education, with an inquiry process as its core, provides the bridge over which students can pass to learn the critical skills they'll need to not just survive but thrive as adults in the 21st century.