I saw it in The Progressive last month. I was encouraged that it exists somewhere. I'm distressed that it doesn't exist in thousands of places.
El Paso (TX) Leadership Academy teaches more than 200 students in grades 6-8. It's opening its first high school this fall.
"Our goal from the start was not to run a school," wrote Omar Yanar, its founder. "Rather, we set out to form a civil rights organization. It sounds like a radical idea because it is."
The Academy's purpose, at least one of its purposes, is to challenge racial inequity and systemic racism in all curricula. And that includes studying the media.
"Starting in eighth grade, our students are taught to be responsible consumers of news," writes Yanar. "We study the use of propaganda, news as entertainment, and responsible sourcing."
What a breath of fresh air! Someone's trying to drill down into media instead of merely accepting it at face value! It's about time!
In El Paso, Texas, there will be at least a few hundred students who won't be manipulated by the first thing that crosses their paths. They're more likely to evolve into responsible adults--responsible citizens--who will make careful judgments about who gets to serve them in their communities.
They won't be as easily fooled by people who twist meanings and advance cliches that don't mean much. Most importantly, they'll take a minute to see where information, or misinformation, comes from, and learn to winnow out sense from nonsense.
They'll see who's honestly trying to get to the truth of matters and who is automatically discounting some other side. And they won't be as likely to succumb to fear mongering.
Our schools need this kind of education very badly. Education itself is under attack for reasons connected to contrived bias when very little of it exists.
Critical Race Theory is a thing, for example, but a college item of potential controversy. In a sense, that's what college is for--to discuss challenging concepts and come to an accommodation with them. It had certainly not penetrated inside our high schools and middle schools. In thirty years of teaching mostly U.S. history, for instance, I had never heard of it--and I was constantly absorbing magazines, newspapers, and books to keep current with relevant thinking and enhance my never-completed self-education.
The claim that high schools have been affected is exactly the kind of paranoid nonsense that must be countered, but administrators and teachers alike have now been unfairly assailed because of it. (I'm kind of glad I'm retired now, but then not glad.) The reactionary media surge that has accompanied it is a perfect example of how misinformation gets piled upon itself, creating entities that should never see the light of day.
It's exactly the kind of item that a media studies concentration would and should address and analyze. The kids need to know the background of these bogus charges and from where they originated.
Almost no one wants kids to think that America has always been a bad place. It certainly has for some, and that has to be said, but there are also built-in mechanisms present in our laws and culture for them to legitimately create hope that things can get better. If you must say the first, you also have to say the latter. But it's also clear that we haven't been headed in a good direction for some time. Some of these mechanisms aren't working. That, too, must be said.
Media studies in our schools would go a long way in re-establishing some stability to kids' thinking and outlook. We might be able to leave this country in a much better spot than it now is. Increasingly, it looks as if there's nowhere to go but up, and nothing else to do but try to go there. Some people in El Paso, at least, have that figured out--and in a state where so much else is wrong.
Be well. Be careful. If you haven't gotten a Covid shot yet, get Moderna--it works better. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
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