ABSTRACT
I don’t believe such a puritanical and philistine politics was right then; part of its legacy can be seen in the curious collocation of eight named media which, if not quite gratuitous, seems to be based on little more than the opportunist notion that if the word Media is repeated often and firmly enough it may be taken to constitute
a subject area. I don’t underestimate the importance of inculcating a ‘critical understanding of the media’, but they are not homogeneous; corralling them into an already crowded curriculum must result either in superficial study or in the selection of optional choices-that, of course, could mean that film, or television, or radio (any of them), might simply disappear. The assumption that all these media are equally important will not be questioned here, but the assumption that an education in any one must be comparable to, or even synonymous with, any others is false. How has the situation arisen in which ‘the art form of the first half of our century’, in John Berger’s words, has been assimilated into such a heterogeneous selection of media? A partial answer can be found in my essay in Living Powers, which includes a chronological account of significant educational developments, but I think the question is better served if we recall something of the mood of the time when Berger was writing.3
