Introducing the Manifesto

I've recently made a written contribution to Pete Fraser and Jon Wardle's project, A Manifesto for Media Education. This is a web based collection of rationales for media work in the classroom, sparked off by the current UK government's desire to turn the educational clock back fifty years to a time in which schooling was (I believe) deliberately narrow in order to exercise a rather insidious type of control over the vast majority of the population. The Manifesto is an important project, because it brings together a range of viewpoints from the broad church that is media education. My contribution to it is a the perspective that I have been able to enjoy while at Addington for the last four years; namely, a view of schooling that puts media education at its heart. The point that I want to make in the piece, which you can read at http://www.manifestoformediaeducation.co.uk/, is that Media education has for many of the young people I have taught, opened doors to all sorts of other educational opportunities. Michael Gove and his ilk seem to yearn for the kind of education where difficult, challenging concepts and facts dominate educational discourse. For me, media education, and more specifically media studies has been the one and only gateway to these difficult facts and concepts. For example, I wonder how good Gove is on Kantian apperception? I ask the question only because, the only place where I have ever discussed epistemology in a really challenging way is in the media classroom, where the necessity of uncovering the meaning of a priori and a posterori knowledge becomes obvious when talking about truth, realism and representation. The fact is that Gove wants hard, he wants difficult. Thats good, because I want hard and I want difficult too. I believe its also what the majority of media teachers want it to be, and that's good as well, because in my fifteen years experience of teaching, the media classroom is the only place I have found that level of challenge.