Review of Carlos Cortes' work on multicultural education

Carlos Cartes: The Children Are Watching

Research shows that every year the average American youth has 900 hours of school and watches 1500 hours of television. In his book, the Children are Watching, Carlos Cortes shows that children and teenagers are learning just as much about different cultures from TV than at school. This is not reliable because people who produce television and radio shows and magazines are not teachers. "The media teaches because their products, programs, papers and magazines serve as textbooks on democracy," He says. "The media curriculum becomes a chaotic series of many voices when all the textbooks are put together -- it becomes an unplanned curriculum." In his book, Cortes explains how the media shows diversity, supports certain values, and has many stereotypes.

In the beginning of the book, Cortes says that school education about diversity will not be effective if educators do not look at what he calls "otherness" in the media. "Othering" is how the media place compares one group of people with another. He says that misinformation about minorities is very common in children's television and films. "It is entertainment. But it is also education, because when children watch a video -- Mr. Rogers or Sesame Street or Barney and Friends or the Teletubbies or Saturday morning cartoons -- they are also learning about many other things, including diversity." Through these programs, children learn about good and evil, right and wrong, life and death, villainy and heroism. Cortes says that even "The Lion King" is being criticized because the hyenas, who are using black language, are the bad characters. There are also complaints about sexism and homosexual stereotyping.

A like the part in the book when he talks about his granddaughter. One day she was trying to cry, because when Shirley Temple cries in the movie people come to help her. Disney movies like Pocahontas and Cinderella make them want to grow up as princesses. Cortes kept a detailed journal of all the different types of stereotypes and wrong information he saw in the media.

Cortes is a consultant with the people who make the Dora cartoon on television. He says the producers are trying very hard to show Dora's life correctly. Even though she is a cartoon, it has looks and sounds like Latin America. The show has a panel of people from Latin America who look at the cartoons. They are from countries like Mexico, Cuba, Costa Rica and Argentina. "The idea is to put across messages of understanding, of building cross-cultural, bilingual bridges," Cortes says.

He also likes NBC's "Homicide: Life on the Street," because it shows that a multi-ethnic television show can be liked by a diverse audience. He also likes that the 1997 TV musical, "Cinderella," by Whitney Houston, had an African-American Cinderella with a Filipino-American Prince Charming. "I loved the way it included every combination of interracial couple in the ballroom scene," he says.

A couple of weeks ago the movie the Longest Yard came out and I was surprised how much it was like the first movie that was so long ago (I've seen it a few times on TV). In this one, the minorities were stereotyped, Chris Rock said "nigger" thousands of times to make everyone laugh, the guards were all white and the gay cheerleaders were all minorities. It was supposed to be a spoof, and many people movie writers agree with that. However, I feel like Cortes. Here is a movie that was pushed for kids (although rated PG-13) that includes gay jokes and sexual humor with minorities. I have read about the prison system in the U.S. with a too high percentage of minorities over whites and about other discrimination in this country. I do not think that movies like this help.

Cortes says that one of the most important things to do is to have better classes in schools that look at these types of stereotypes and multiculturalism. He states, "Our children 'are not blank slates. The mass media provide an ongoing forum for multicultural education. If schools don't get involved in teaching about diversity they have abandoned that teaching to other sources."

He says that school educators have to recognize the problem, pay attention to how the media is giving information, explore what this is doing to the students and learn how the media feels about its own shows. Then they have to find ways to put this into the courses.

I have read that the population in the United States is greatly changing. For this paper, I looked up some statistics. The U.S. Secretary of Commerce Norman Mineta says that America's population will increase 50% over the next 50 years. Almost 90% of the increase is minorities. In California, the number of Asians and Hispanics is growing rapidly. Los Angeles just elected a Hispanic mayor. Also, there are other groups that are not shown on TV like the Native Americans.