The question of media and media literacy in the ESL problem : “Opening of a perspective”

In which way could be media literacy relevant in the ESL problem ? If we consider the general trend which is intrinsic to mediated society, namely that the reading habits and culture is vanishing and being replaced by visual culture, we have to admit, that it represents one of the major future challenges in education, which will unfold on its bare structural level. It is not difficult to imagine that incoming visual modes of perception, experience and description of the world already have their own implications in the still verbal educational activity. But there is another aspect, which is not so closely related to the learning process and curriculum content, but is likewise important regarding the ESL question. This aspect is determined by the fact that media cannot be the world itself, although they tend to represent themselves as if they were. At best they can be regarded as an intentionally structured (planned) and editied representation of it. In this case it is not an exaggeration, if we talk about a certain inherent conflict between educational process, which tries to prepare and introduce us into the world and to tell us about it as it is and a production of a mediated “world”. This conflict is not only about the morally questionable media content (sex & violence), that is disrupting accepted social values, but more about our potential posture in the world and our attitude in common human affairs. Namely, the decisive characteristic of a mediated society is that it can become a substitute “habitus”, where worldliness is something senseless, where apolitical positions (privateness, isolation) and apolitical attitudes (spectatorship, passiveness, self-centrism) are its ordinary features in direct opposition of what should be the approach of active learning. These are the main reasons why deliberate and well-thought-out media literacy should be included into the school curriculum and not for the purpose of teaching the use of media technologies as they were some neutral tools, but to enable students to think their implications on our daily life and relations to other people. Its main task should be to enable students to read and understand their specific language and intentions, a competence that became indispensable for educated persons that are prepared to acknowledge their own political capacities.