Abstract
Education should never be reduced to a single subject. A curriculum should never be reduced to a single field, period or academic discipline. Media Education, likewise, has to be committed to a plurality of approaches and fields of interest. It has to deal with the seemingly trite and the unambiguously significant, whether in relation to fashion, history, science, religion, national and personal identities, gender, age, ethnicity, class and a myriad of other fields of representation. It has also to allow for the critical exploration of the relationships between representation and lived existence. Media Education, initially, has to be about the way things are, the way things are represented, and how the ways in which things are represented have an impact on the way things are. It is a process which requires at least two conditions to be met. The first is that those engaged with Media Education, whether as students, researchers or teachers have to undergo a constant, demanding and open-ended period of skill acquisition, of intellectual development and a willingness to doubt and to act in the world. The second condition is that all involved in Media Education have to recognise and accept that we inhabit a fragile, delightful, horrific, challenging, beautiful, ugly, insecure, contradictory world, and it is the only one we have. That, at least, is a beginning. Acceptance of these conditions does not sit comfortably beside the bureaucratisation of education and the managerialism which sustains the bureaucracy. But these two conditions are, to adopt the language of the planner, prerequisites.
