Once upon a time, long before my foray into writing for children, I was involved in some curriculum work for our little school district in central Wisconsin. It was the 2000-2010s, a time when I was starting to sense the neighborly goodwill of our town slowly . . . changing. There were new voices on the talk radio. Some alarmingly biased voices. And year by year, they were proliferating. It was creating ripples of distrust in our little community. It was pitting neighbor against neighbor and riling folks up with all kinds of nonsensical, alarming distortions. Suddenly, what used to be just a town of nice people, were now “red” or “blue” people.

(Note: This plays into the premise and setting of my newest book, ROWAN + GEMMA, which releases in September.)

I was so upset to see these early divides forming. Hoping to counteract some of the manipulative effects, I tried hard to get Media Literacy added to our media studies/library curriculum. I used to teach a university course called “The Rhetoric of Argument,” and those skills of detecting fallacies and holes in argument, in debate, are so illuminating, so helpful to have, to help one distinguish propaganda from news. I wanted to teach this to our students.

Well, that was long ago. That was the start of the end. Today, those early-warning signals are now an epidemic. Our country is severely tested. We are awash in distortions. We are being pitted against each other, made to distrust, even hate each other, when we should be quietly asking ourselves, “Who is benefitting most from this malicious divide-us-and-conquer-us scam that’s been perpetrated on us? What is being done to us, while we are distracted, hating on each other?”

Our brains are literally under attack.

Media literacy has never been more important.

Who benefits, by making us hate each other?

Why are we willing to believe preposterous things?

Our kids are especially vulnerable.

Oh, they are so, so vulnerable.

So, what can we do?

Let’s teach children how to:

  • show some healthy skepticism!
  • seek out multiple sources before forming opinions.
  • understant social media algorithms
  • understand that opinion, fact, and propaganda are different beasts.
  • know that an “op ed” is not “news”
  • know how to ask “Who benefits from me believing this?”
  • Know enough to trust their own eyes and their own independent observations, over what they are being TOLD to think/believe/feel.

Our kids don’t need us to tell them WHAT to think. They need us to teach them HOW to think. Through media literacy skills.

Media Literacy isn’t just a school subject. It’s a survival skill for brain strength, for a strong independent life, for a strong society.

Media literacy is CRITICAL — and not just for our kids.

For all of us!

(illustration of those gossipy girls is by Tania de Rigil — from Invisible Isabel)