Media literacy and English

The subject of English has a number of purposes but one of its simplest and most profound aims has always been to enable young people to critique and enjoy texts whilst in school and then to become mature and critical citizens, active participants in a democratic society. What becomes clearly an absolute certainty is that the literacy needed by the young person in the twenty-first century is remarkably more complex in form than that mode produced in the Victorian classroom –will call this ‘media literacy’. If the school building seems nineteenth century, the world that surrounds it is twenty-first century. In order to understand the present state of teaching about the media within the subject of English it really is helpful to have a sense of its vexed history and to gain a perspective on why something so obviously important in everyone’s lives should appear to be absent from the formal English curriculum.