ABSTRACT
The caution of official documents nevertheless comes as a big disappointment to many of the first phase’s doughty campaigners. The rhetoric of these campaigns saw media education as essentially radical and subversive. Monitoring what pupils learn through a systematic and continuing program of media education has thus been impossible. Although much media teaching thus focuses on negative aspects of the media, such as commercialization, stereotyping, and bias, young people who have the option are flocking to media courses in the hope of getting jobs. Media teachers tend to be ambivalent or uncertain about the relationship between what they are teaching and the professional practices of the media. Conferences and seminars on media literacy tend to exhibit an excessive respect for the diversity of classroom practice analogous to Samuel Johnson’s famous dictum on women’s sermons being like a dog walking on its hind legs: remarkable for being done at all, rather than for any particular skill.
