The Mass Media and Educational Reform: Simulations of Experience and Dialogue

• In Event: 70.050 - The Media and the Neoliberal Privatization of Education: Understanding, Critiquing, and Resisting Capital's Current Agenda for Education

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to critically analyze the role of mass media in the construction and dissemination of the discourse around educational reform, especially as it concerns the contested relationship of public and private schooling in the United States. I frame this study by combining the perspectives of critical pedagogy (Freire, 2000), media ecology (Strate, 1999), and postmodern social critique (Baudrillard, 1988). Paulo Freire's (2000) pedagogy of the oppressed addresses the linguistic, pedagogical, and power dynamics of educational dialogue. Media ecology, in turn, analyzes media as environments which, as "complex message system [s]...impose on human beings certain ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving" (Postman, 1970). Finally, Jean Baudrillard's postmodern (1988) social analysis explores the function of the mass media and technologically-mediated symbol systems in constructing perspectives of "the social" and "the masses."
Combined and applied creatively, the above perspectives create a theoretical framework that can be used to critically understand the role of mass media in educational discourse. By analyzing not only the content of the messages carried through various media but the forms of those media themselves, this approach helps delineate the educational and dialogic implications of mass communications pertaining to educational and school reform.

Following Norris (2007), I argue that schools and much of today's educational discourse is caught up in a social/mass media environment that, through both form and content, creates mere simulations of real educational and dialogic experiences. Further, I suggest that the mass media's role in such conversations is at least non-democratic and non-educational, if not anti-democratic and educational. I end by asking after the implications of these insights for education reform given the privately-owned nature of the vast majority of mass media constituents.
This study is significant in that it: 1) offers a critical analysis of the impact of mass media on educational discourse, and 2) puts in conversation the often separated fields of educational philosophy and media ecology.

Author

• Dave Wolken