JLO63O, 4/12

I think the discussion we had in class on Thursday got a lot of us thinking about our K-12 education. Dr. Casey put this (initially wordy) quote in perspective, “The failure of critical thinkers and organizations charged with articulating the interests of dominated individuals to think clearly about this problem only reinforces the mechanisms I have described” (336). Taking our K-12 education in account, there was no required class about media, media constructs, and/or propaganda. What Bourdieu argues is that there should be because these media constructs have huge influences over our lives and the way we live them. In K-12 we are required to take math, history, English and science courses. I wouldn’t argue against any of these courses, after all I do go to a liberal arts college, but I would say that none of these required fields apply directly to our daily lives. Chomsky says that the mass media “inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures or the larger society.” Doesn’t this sound a lot like what schools do? We can then say that the mass media inculcates values in our schooling as well, so the question reemerges, why are there no required class in K-12 that address these pressing influences. Perhaps because they’re ideological, and ideology is profoundly unconscious – Althusser.