ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION Why teach about the media? There are a number of possible answers to this question, which derive from quite different views of the media and of young people. Yet most arguments for Media Studies begin with two significant assertions. The first concerns the amount of time children spend with the media. Statistics on television viewing, for example, suggest that children today spend more time watching television than they spend in school. If we add to this the amount of time spent watching films, reading comics and magazines, and listening to records, we arrive at figures which typically provoke a mixture of surprise and horror - particularly, perhaps, among teachers, who are likely to feel that their students' time would be far better spent on activities they themselves consider more edifying. The second assertion appears to follow inexorably from the first. If the media are such a major element in children's lives, it seems self-evident that they must exert a very powerful influence on their ways of thinking about the world - and as such, teachers simply cannot afford to ignore them.
