The University has a clear obligation to its students that isn’t being fulfilled.
Required courses aren’t unusual to any of the schools here. These exist to help ensure students have a basic grasp in general areas like math, science and the ?humanities.
Most colleges would defend that there is an importance to fostering a love of learning even outside one’s field of study. It behooves the University to claim it produces well-rounded students who can face the modern world with newly acquired skills.
So why doesn’t IU have a media literacy course ?mandatory for all students?
How can the school say in good conscience its graduates are competitively prepared for the outside world when operating effectively in said world today demands an informed grasp of media literacy?
Students are also required to have — laughably little — exposure to foreign languages. As it turns out, media might as well be a foreign ?language to many of us.
In the fall of my freshman year, I had the privilege of taking the paradigm-shattering C205: Introduction to Communication and Culture. The class, taught by the brilliant Robert Terrill, helps students understand that most of us are prone to looking through communication rather than actually looking closely and critically at communication.
We like to think all media is, or at least should be, impartial and that the medium never affects the message. After C205, you realize how this superficial way of thinking is ?essentially voluntary ?ignorance.
We certainly have classes that encourage critical thinking, but the demand for a public that can better analyze media is too immediate a need to not have a class ?specifically about applying critical thinking to the vast media landscape.
Students would be able to dissect an argument with their parents or landlord, reduce a commercial down to its movable rhetorical parts and distill a politician’s speech and point out the bologna. They’d be able to realize how sexist that music video is, how ludicrously patriotic that movie was or how all news sources are going to have some degree of ?unavoidable bias.
Maybe you’re the type that says college is just about getting a job. With the rate the media surface area is expanding in our digital age, jobs with obligatory media literacy are being created left and right.
Think about those being left in the dust. Think about that uncle who really believes that picture of Sarah Palin riding a narwhal like an Arctic Circle rodeo queen is real. You don’t want to be him.
Media literacy should be brought to public schools as well, but that won’t happen quickly or widely enough. Colleges need to do their part to equip their students with at least the most basic and helpful skills when understanding the world of media.
We’re now home to the Media School, so why shouldn’t we be a leader in this collegiate shift? Media literate college students are better students, better citizens, better consumers and better people.
The lack of media literacy in our country is a startling problem. IU should be part of the solution.
gmleeds@indiana.edu
