Teaching our Children to "Do For Themselves"

Like many of you, I watched with great joy Sunday night the remake of The Miracle Worker, the moving story of how Annie Sullivan helped the blind and deaf 7-year-old Helen Keller learn to "speak" with her hands. Eventually Helen was able to both "see" and "hear" — and thus make sense of the world around her.

Annie, of course, was a wonderful teacher and she knew that the key to unlocking Helen’s brilliant mind was language. "Language" she says to Captain and Mrs. Keller when she first arrives at their home, "language is as important to the mind as light is to the eye."

Without language, without a set of tools — and rules to use them — to: a) understand the thoughts and ideas of others and b) communicate back to people the thoughts in OUR heads, we would all be like young Helen Keller, wandering around in the dark concerned only with our basic survival.

But language, in today’s 21st century media culture, is more than words made up of letters in an alphabet. Ideas and information come to us most often now visually — in powerful images and sounds that form a language — a media language — that needs to be unlocked for young children. Like Annie Sullivan before them, teachers today have a huge challenge to help their young charges understand the many-layered meaning of this new multi-media environment. While some might feel it best to withdraw from it all and "protect" children from this barrage, remember the warning given by Annie to the Kellers: "There’s no use to protect her. You must teach her to do for herself."

Teaching our children to "do for themselves" is what media literacy education is all about. Indeed, learning to "do for themselves" is what ALL education is about But what makes a good education? How do you learn to "do for yourself?" Recently I had the pleasure of attending a performance of Anna Deveare Smith who profoundly challenged her audience to "think about education as a garden where questions grow."

Good education is learning to ask questions, to think critically and to test out different answers by expressing your own point of view. When the Nobel Prize winner, Isado Rabi, was interviewed about his achievements, he said he owed it all to his mother. "When we got out of school each day," he explained, "all the mothers would ask their children what they had learned that day. But my mother would inquire, ‘what did you ASK in school today?’"

In a time when television, movies, and now the multimedia Internet makes everything seem so "real," children need a set of skills to ask important questions about the multimedia world around them. AND they need to master those same technological tools in order to express their ideas to each other and take leadership in their world, now and in the future.

The good news is that some of us have been working on this for over 20 years now. So there ARE resources and methods for teaching about this visual culture that have been developed and tested. The sad news is, we’re only reaching a tiny percentage of teachers and schools and thus families and kids. We need to reach a lot more. Millions more. I have a dream, as some of you know, to expand the Center for Media Literacy into a national training institute for teachers, based here in Southern California, but reaching out to teach teachers around the US and even around the world. This is not an impossible dream. We have a lot to build on.

"Think about education as a garden where questions grow."
— Anna Deveare Smith

We are already the leading distributor of media literacy teaching materials to teachers and schools and school districts in the US. And we are the leading importer of teaching resources from Australia and Europe and, of course Canada, where media literacy is required to graduate from high school. But we could do more.

We already have a comprehensive website that draws over 5000 unique visitors each day. The Internet is a phenomenal new technology for reaching millions of people. We’ve hardly begun to learn how to really tap its potential for teaching and learning. We have a lot more to do.

And we already have a national model for training teachers in our crash course and in the Felton Media Literacy Certificate Program. But we could do more especially in the area of guiding kids in expressing their point of view, their ideas and their insights about the world using the new technologies now available to them.

I am very proud of the work the Center for Media Literacy has accomplished in its first decade. And I’m deeply grateful to the staff, the volunteers and the financial supporters who have made it possible. But more, much more, needs to be done. With your help here today, we CAN do more in all of these areas: distributing resources for teaching, using the Internet and expanding training opportunities for educators.

Learning to Swim

Before we take a look at another video message that, I believe, will inspire you, let me close with another quick story. When people ask me why I’ve given my life to media literacy education, I often explain that the challenge for adults and leaders in today’s multimedia society is not unlike the challenge faced by our parents or grandparents in the 1950’s. Remember the post war housing boom — when many families built or bought houses with swimming pools? All of a sudden society looked around and realized there were these big holes in the ground full of water. Kids could fall in — and drown.

So as a responsible society we did two things. First, we required those who owned the swimming pools to put fences around them in order to keep children, particularly, from falling in. But remember Annie Sullivan’s warning about restraining kids from the world they’re going to live in. You can only do so much. Its better to teach them to "do for themselves."

So, wisely, we also mobilized the Scouts and the Y and summer camps all over the country to teach kids to swim. That way, no matter where they were — with or without their parents — in a backyard pool, frolicing in a lake or learning to surf at the beach they’d be able to take care of themselves. In addition, good swimmers not only enjoy themselves and get wonderful exercise — they know when it’s time to come out of the water. And they also learn when it’s wise not to go in. They know how to navigate safely through ANY watery environment.

Today at the dawn of the 21st century, we MUST mobilize all efforts to guarantee that our children and grandchildren gain the skills they will need to navigate safely the multimedia culture they are swimming in — not just for today but for the rest of their lives. Thank you for commitment to being here so early this morning to learn how you can support the work of the Center. And thank you in advance for your generosity!