The Media and Society

I have only reached the stage of firmly opting for any straight hour's worth of mass-culture in preference to again being told about it.

KINGSLEY AMIS, Encounter, July 1960

The story is told of an ancient tribe whose people lived a comfortable and unchanging existence. The children of the tribe were brought up in the traditions of their fathers and were taught how to fish in clear streams and how to hunt the sabre-toothed tiger. Then the snows came and the streams became muddy and the sabre-toothed tiger moved south. But the tribe preserved their traditional ways. They cleared a small part of the stream so that the children could continue to fish, and they stuffed a tiger's head so that they could learn to hunt. Then a radical young tribesman approached the council and asked why, instead, the children were not taught to fish in muddy streams and hunt the polar bear, which had recently begun to ravage the villages. But the council was angry. 'We have always taught how to fish in clear streams and how to hunt the sabre-toothed tiger. These are the classical disciplines. Besides,' they added, 'the curriculum is overcrowded.'

In recent years two social changes have excited considerable comment and controversy in the educational world. The first is the revolution in communications brought about by the development of sound recording, cinematography, sound broadcasting and television, and the use of these media to provide information, art and entertainment. The second is the change in the attitudes of young people — the so-called 'teenage' revolution — which has been particularly marked since the end of the war.

The first is the direct outcome of the industrial revolution — the application of the techniques of multiple transmission and wide dissemination to the printed word and the reproduced sound and image. This technical transformation has been paralleled by a general growth in democracy and the spread of literacy. Yet the process has been a long and continuous one: it began with the invention of printing. The second is a more recent development and can be identified, not so much with the industrial revolution as a whole, but rather with one particular phase of that revolution — the phase of high consumption and increased leisure which has become a feature of some societies in the middle of this century. During this phase a widespread change in attitudes and style reveals itself among the younger generation — a change which reflects partly their enhanced economic status and partly the changing design of social values in the society as a whole.

Increasingly we are coming to see how the two processes interact. At the simplest level the media do touch the lives of a great number of people in the society. If we take the coverage of sound radio, the two television services, the national press and the sale of magazines and popular papers, and the cinema distribution chains, we have four major national communication grids — variable, it is true, for different parts of the country, but covering roughly every area to some degree, and every sector of the community. More particularly, the increased spending power of the younger generation, and the development of something approaching a discernible 'youth culture', means that a fairly direct connection can be made between the younger generation and the media. In some fields the media are sustained economically by the adolescent market, and much of the material communicated is intended for that age group. The media provide young people with information and ideas about the society into which they are maturing. They can test few of these descriptions and interpretations against their own experience. At the deeper level, the use of the media to provide imaginative experiences through various forms of art and entertainment has a modifying impact upon young people's attitudes and values.

These changes cannot be held apart from education. They are bound to alter its character and modify its content and may even force us to re-examine its aims. Part of the teacher's task is to give his pupils some understanding of the world in which they live. But the media are changing the world in ways important enough for a study of these changes to become part of formal education. More than that; the attitudes of young people are changing. They mature earlier, in some ways their response is more sophisticated, and they are more acutely conscious of the differences between the world of the classroom and that of work and leisure. This alters their expectations of, and their attitudes towards, education. Changes are involved, therefore, not only in what we teach but in how we teach.

There is, in fact, a growing recognition that the media of mass communication play such a significant role in society, and especially in the lives of young people, that the school must embrace the study of their organization, content and impact. But there is little agreement about how such studies should be carried out. Just what shall be studied? With what precise purpose? In what relationship to the established subjects? Ultimately the answer will depend upon our attitude towards these media, our social thinking about the kind of society in which they wield their influence and, in particular, our response to the things the media offer — individual films, television programmes, popular songs, etc.

Many teachers feel that the media represent a threat to standards and traditional values. 'School and home', said Sir Ronald Gould, Secretary of the National Union of Teachers, 'are often oases constantly threatened by the surrounding desert.' It is easy to see how this attitude has developed. The teacher is at the point of interaction between many conflicting social and cultural pressures. He may regard education as justifying itself, a means towards securing individual fulfilment, but he will be made aware of the social pressures for education to provide 'good citizens' or 'skilled producers', and he will be conscious of the fact that for many of his pupils what they are taught seems little related either to their emotional needs or to the kind of work they are likely to do. He is asked to be the guardian of a cultural tradition to which he does not always wholly belong. As the entry to the teaching profession widens, we see new tensions arising — tensions between the teacher's own background (which may be closer to that of his pupils than he would care to admit), the goals of the professional class to which he is a newcomer, and the culture of the school. The last of these no longer represents the coherent body of knowledge and standards it once did. The cultural map is no longer so clearly defined. The...