ABSTRACT
The New Mexico project seeks to solve one of the most vexing problems of the times in this new information age. That is, how to produce critical thinking about the mass media, which dominate the attention and are even said to "construct" the ideas of reality. New Mexico was selected as the pilot state for the first National Media Literacy Project for several reasons. First, it had a racially diverse population that parallels what experts say will represent the United States population by the year 2000. A second reason to site the project in New Mexico was its sparse population of 1.5 million—smaller than Denver—organized into only 88 school districts, which made a statewide program manageable. Third, communication studies were already a part of New Mexico's mandatory secondary-education curriculum; although the mandate for "Communications in High School" had already come down from the state, no program had taken shape.
