The immediate response to the question of whether media has an effect on the ability of children to be educated is a resounding YES!
Media, in the form of television, newsprint, magazines and the internet is ubiquitous and permeates every aspect of our daily lives, it would be foolish not to think that children pick up at least a few things from what they see, read, Google or hear in their parents’ discussions of current happenings as portrayed in the media.
The creators and developers of Sesame Street saw the potential societal-good that mass media could do. In November of 1969, first Sesame Street episode aired. Originally, the show was a social experiment to solve racism and hate problems within the United States. However, Sesame Street also employed principles of learning, memory, and developmental psychology in its presentation of academic and social skills.
According to PBS’ Independent Lens production of “The World According to Sesame Street,” the idea behind the show was to present a limited pre-school curriculum through television and although the urban street setting of Sesame Street was designed to attract an inner city audience, it soon proved popular among children of all backgrounds.
The show’s executive producer, Michael Loman says that, “the most important thing that we do is we show children a wide variety of people living together in a neighborhood, all races, all cultures, all monsters, and a little girl in a wheelchair.”
Sesame Street producers and developers are now taking their social experiment to other countries in need of positive child-friendly lessons.
In South Africa, Sesame Street or Takalani Sesame as it is called fights against the rigid stigma and struggles of those with HIV/AIDS.
In Kosovo, a country torn apart by ethnic strife, Rruga Sesam and Ulica Sezam, the Albanian and Serbian version of Sesame Street, hopes to build peace and tolerance by showing Albanian and Serbian children that their counterparts are just like them. In Bangladesh, Sisimpur, hopes to gives children a modicum amount of pre-school education (as most children are helping to support their families by age 5) and instill a sense of national pride.
Broadcast media is a pervasive and unique way to spread these hopes and messages of tolerance; as it is highly accessible, life-like, and relatively immediate and is instantly understood by the “lowest common denominator.” Futhermore, given the instabilities within Bangladeshi, South African, Serbian and Albanian society, the societal importance, and dependence on TV as an educational instrument increases. However, the Internet is quickly out-pacing television, in modernized western countries.
Recently UNICEF launched “Adolescents & Media,” a discussion board on Voices of Youth where young people from 87 countries worldwide can reflect on the ways in which the media represents young people and the impact of those representations. Due perhaps, to their early exposure to mass media, many of these young people state quite eloquently their perception of the media better than many adults! Furthermore, these young people offer solutions to their societies problems of racism, gender inequality, censorship, misrepresentation, stereotypes, and the economic problems of developing countries based upon information absorbed through the power of mass media. The problem arises when the Medias’ responsibility to use its power wisely clashes with its propensity to be salacious entertainment for the sake of ratings.
A 21-year-old girl from the Zambia wrote, “…the media is a powerful tool to influence behavior, the way people think and the way they perceive the world. In this way you’d think that the media would use its power for positive change, instead we still see images of ‘good for nothing’ youth instead of the progressive people we are trying to be.”
A further example of this negative effect on children is the ever increasing rates of Obesity and Eating Disorders in the U.S. Both are in large part, due to the individual’s response to societal pressures. This society, with a capital ‘S,’ encompasses our culture, our technology, peer pressure, advertising, the media, the availability of cheap fast food, and our economy. Our media lead society has made it acceptable to idealize unrealistic images of how people should look. Even though we, adults and children, know that the images portrayed are unrealistic and even visually altered using technology, yet we apply those images to our value system as the ideal.
“The reason for eating disorders in young women are the pictures that haunt us everyday, at least here in the US. The models are not real! They are airbrushed and body parts are taken from several people. Youth have to be informed on order to overcome this,” says a 16-year-old female participant in UNICEF’s “Media & Adolescents,” from the US.
According to http://www.changingchannel.org/, the amount of television and the type of programming on TV is related to several problems facing our society, because of the lessons and messages imbedded therein. “Current levels of television watching cause problems with childhood obesity, with lowered performance in school, and with higher levels of aggressive behavior. Teen eating disorders, particularly among girls, have been tied to television.”
“Society forces people…especially women and now to a lesser extent men, to conform to unrealistic standards,” says Dr. Tony Cortese, a sociology professor at SMU and author of "The Provocateur."
Children are used to being spoon-feed information by the media while education requires actively searching for the truth to make knowledge relevant to the individual. While most children grow into educated adults even the presence of a media that creates its own world, the actions of passive absorption and active application are very often at odds.  ¶ posted by CiCi at 2:11 PM •