Popular Culture and Kids: “Know Your Enemy”

by Robert Pondiscio
January 27th, 2010

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Posted in Parents, Teaching | 17 Comments »

Few parents fully appreciate the corrosive effect that popular culture has on their children’s lives, writes Psychology Today blogger Jim Taylor, who observes that the music, movies, television and advertising children consume is no longer a reflection of contemporary values.  “Many heroes offered by popular culture are not heroic, many of its icons represent unhealthy values, and many of its rituals, myths, and beliefs are in its own best interests, not those of your children,” he writes.  Popular culture also dominates virtually every part of your children’s lives, he observes.

Popular culture is like a network of saboteurs that infiltrate your family’s lives with stealth and deception, hiding behind entertaining characters, bright images, and fun music. You probably don’t notice half of the unhealthy messages being conveyed to your children. Popular culture is also an invading army that overwhelms your children with these destructive messages. It attempts to control every aspect of your children’s lives: their values, attitudes, and beliefs about themselves and the world that they live in; their thoughts, emotions, and behavior; their needs, wants, goals, hopes, and dreams; their interests and avocations; their choices and their decisions. With this control, popular culture can tell children what to eat and drink, what to wear, what to listen to and watch, and children have little ability to resist.

Taylor acknowledges that not everything kids consume through their ears and eyeballs is garbage.  There is educational television for children and video games that encourage creativity and problem solving.  But even ”good” popular culture isn’t all that good for children, he points out, since it encourages them to be sedentary, have indirect social contact, and experience life vicariously instead of directly. 

His advice to parents applies equally well to teachers:  know your children’s enemy.  “Study popular culture. Watch what your children watch on television, play their video games, listen to their music, visit the Web sites they surf, read the magazines they read. Then, understand the value messages they are getting from popular culture,” he writes.

The “Digital Decade” Has Changed Childhood Forever

by Robert Pondiscio
December 28th, 2009

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Posted in Parents | 5 Comments »

Google, Facebook, Wikipedia, Wii and YouTube are among the innovations that have changed childhood – and parenting – for the better in the past decade.  And for the worst?  Grand Theft Auto, digital cheating, World of Warcraft, texting while driving and Webkinz.  So says Common Sense Media, which offers up a list of 20 innovations and entertainments that have “revolutionized how our kids communicate, create, learn, and play” for better and for worse.

 “Just about every child knows how to find just about anything by Googling,” CSM notes. “It’s opened the world to our children — sometimes bringing in too much, too soon — and parents found out it was up to them to teach their kids to surf safely and responsibly.” 

On digital cheating, Common Sense notes:  “Anonymity, ease, and lack of clear rules on right and wrong have made illegal downloading, plagiarizing, or texting answers to friends so “normal” that kids don’t realize that digital cheating is still cheating — and not OK.”

Also on the “10 Best” list:  Harry Potter, American Idol, TiVo, cell phones and iTunes.  Rounding out the worst list: The Bathroom Wall, Gossip Girl books, Superbad, Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears and celebutantes, and erectile dysfunction ads.  “No parent needs to discuss four-hour erections with any child, end of story,” says CSM.  “And certainly not after the third inning on a Saturday.”

The Incredible Shrinking Education Beat

by Robert Pondiscio
December 3rd, 2009

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Posted in Education News, Opinion, Research and Reports | 3 Comments »

A new Brookings report bemoans a lack of education reporting noting that “only 1.4 percent of national news coverage from television, newspapers, news Web sites, and radio dealt with education.”  Some are taking issue with the study’s methodology, noting it only counts page A1 stories in the newspaper.  Still nobody seems to be arguing that we are well-served by the amount and quality of ed news in our major media. 

A call for more coverage, however, is a bit like King Canute calling for the tide to recede.  It’s not going to happen,  The forces that conspire to limit ed coverage — dwindling advertising, staff cutbacks, greater competition for fewer readers– are nothing new.  Time Magazine, where I used to work, hasn’t had a reporter solely dedicated to education for nearly 20 years.  Today, they barely have reporters at all.  There is no reason to expect these trends to do anything other than accelerate.   

I don’t wish to paint a picture of the Brookings report as naive, but newspapers and other media are simply not public interest vehicles.  They are businesses that profit from what the public is interested in.  That’s not nearly the same thing.  The call for more, better and nuanced education news is fine, but the idea that our oxygen-starved major media ought to be the standard-bearer is a bit of wishful thinking.   It ignores too many irreversible trends in the way news is produced and consumed.

Also, I’m not sure the paucity of education coverage is always a bad thing.  Even when our elite media focus on education, they tend to oversimplify or focus on conflict or human interest.  More of that we can surely live without.  The Brookings report also argues ”there should be better use of education research that evaluates school reforms, teacher quality, and classroom practices.”  You might just as easily say “there should be better research.”   Media coverage that looks at schools through the lens of test scores has value, but it’s not the only lens.  If research-based reporting means more media coverage that further enshrines the test scores uber alles mindset, well, thanks but no thanks. 

The Brookings report calls for foundations and non-profit organizations to “focus on developing alternative forms of education coverage both nationally and locally.”  On this point I agree completely.  The opportunity would be for a major foundation to bankroll an education news site that attempt to do on a national scale what Gotham Schools, for example, does for New York City.  Perhaps an ed version of ProPublica, the independent, nonprofit investigative journalism outfit let by Paul Steiger, the former managing editor of the Wall Street Journal.  Indeed, the most efficacious move might be for Gates, Wallace or some other ed-minded foundation to write a check to ProPublica to staff up an education beat. 

The world has largely moved on from the day when national media — even strong local media — drove and dominated the conversation on education.  The education beat, never a national media strong suit, is largely viewed as expendable.  People want information about education when they want it, not when an editor in New York or Washington decides to give it to them.  And most of us outside the education and policy bubble are not interested in education; we’re interested in our kid’s school.  These are not necessarily bad trends.  And whether they are or not, they can’t be stopped.

New York Times Discovers Reader’s Workshop

by Robert Pondiscio
August 29th, 2009

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Posted in Education News | 2 Comments »

When America’s paper of record discovers a “trend” that is literally decades old and presents it as cutting edge, it makes you wonder about the articles in the paper you don’t know anything about.  But there’s the New York Times, and a series on “The Future of Reading,” gazing in wide-eyed wonder at the spectacle of classroom teachers letting students choose their own books to read!

The approach Ms. McNeill uses, in which students choose their own books, discuss them individually with their teacher and one another, and keep detailed journals about their reading, is part of a movement to revolutionize the way literature is taught in America’s schools. While there is no clear consensus among English teachers, variations on the approach, known as reading workshop, are catching on.

No one seems to have mentioned to the Times that this is more or less standard practice, for good or for ill, and has been for a decade or more.  Here’s a dead giveaway: search “reading workshop” on Google and you get 241,000 hits.

May I suggest to the editors of the Times that they assign an investigative team to a few other ideas that are “catching on.”  I understand there’s a new sport that involves driving cars very quickly that a lot of people seem interested in called “NASCAR” or some such.   And although I haven’t seen it myself (I don’t own a TV, you see), I also keep hearing about this something called “reality TV” that’s apparently becoming quite popular.   You can even read about it on your computer over something called the Internets, or some such.   Have you heard of it?

Update:  “Progressive schools let kids pick their own books in the 1920s and 1930s. Now it is supposed to be a major innovation. Ha!” tweets Diane Ravitch, who is quoted in the piece.  The paper “applauds the death of any version of a common culture.”  Just desserts of the NY Times,” she adds.  “By encouraging the death of reading, they doom the NY Times.”

Oh Say Can You C?

by Robert Pondiscio
August 19th, 2009

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Posted in Assessment and Testing, Education News | No Comments »

More than three out of four college-bound high school graduates are unprepared to earn a “C” or higher in first-year college courses in English, math, reading and science.

That’s the news from 1.5 million ACT tests taken by of the class of 2009, but curiously it’s not the lede.  A press release from the Iowa City-based ACT frames the results in the opposite manner, noting “the percentage of graduates ready to earn at least a “C” or higher in first-year college courses in all four subject areas tested on the ACT increased from 22 percent in 2008 to 23 percent in 2009.”  USA Today, the  New York Times and lots of others repeat the 23% figure or otherwise lead with the “slight improvement” in scores over 2008 results. The Wall Street Journal alone among major papers seems to catch the obvious story.  “Only about a quarter of the 2009 high school graduates taking the ACT admissions test have the skills to succeed in college,” the paper notes.

In other news, 254 million Americans have health insurance.

Update:  EdWeek weighs in and gets the headline right: “ACT Scores Show Most Students Aren’t Ready for College.”  Catherine Gewertz’s piece also features a great quote from FairTest’s Robert Schaeffer on the failure of NCLB to improve college readiness: “Politicians can make all the claims they want that it is raising achievement, but even when there are improvements in state test scores, they don’t show up in college-admissions test data, or on [the National Assessment of Educational Progress].  So where is the beef?”

Media Overconsumption Linked to Childhood Problems

by Robert Pondiscio
December 2nd, 2008

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Posted in Research and Reports | 3 Comments »

A sobering report from the National Institutes of Health and Yale University  links media consumption with a laundry list of childhood problems, including obesity; drug, alcohol and tobacco use; early sexuality and low academic achievement.

The review of nearly 200 research efforts spanning 30 years examined how television, music, movies and other media affect the lives of children and adolescents.  It found ”strong connections” between media exposure and problems of childhood obesity, tobacco use and early sexual behavior.  About 80 percent of the studies showed a link between a negative health outcome and media hours or content, the Washington Post reports. 

The average modern child spends nearly 45 hours a week with television, movies, magazines, music, the Internet, cellphones and video games, the study reported. By comparison, children spend 17 hours a week with their parents on average and 30 hours a week in school, the study said.

“Our kids are sponges, and we really need to remember they learn from their environment,” Cary P. Gross, a Yale professor tells the Post, noting that researchers found it notable how much content mattered; it was not only the sheer number of hours of screen time. Children “pick up character traits and behaviors” from those they watch or hear, he said.

A show of hands, please.  Anyone surprised?  Yeah, me neither.