Teaching children critical media consumption strategies

¶ … Raising Media-Savvy Kids." (November/December 2004)

"Every one' knows the 'common sense' cliche -- television is bad, the mass media is bad, anything learned over the Internet is especially bad and of doubtful truth, and today's children would be better off in a technology free-zone, locked in stimulation-free rooms that are lit by candlelight and filled with nothing but volumes of the collected works of Shakespeare and perhaps conduct books from the past century.

Not so, says the author of "Raising Media Savvy-Kids." The media, like so many things, must be approached with a 'use it or lose it' strategy by parents and educators. Use the media to your advantage, parents and educators, or lose children to the media's worst excesses. Disdain the media at your own risk!

Rather than viewing the media with hostility and attempting to eradicate its presence from children's environments -- a Quixotic quest, at best -- children must learn how to become good consumers of the media, and to use media strategies in intelligent and proactive ways, such as deploying positive public relations posters for good causes like 'Earth Day.'