In January, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center released a report on young children’s media diets. The survey of more than 1,500 parents of children ages 2-10 asked a bevy of questions about educational media use. Much of the ensuing news coverage focused on the sheer volume of media use, and how little of it overall parents deemed helpful, especially when it came to science and math content.
But I found something else to be more interesting: the study shows a serious class divide on educational media use. That made me wonder, could it be that high-income parents are letting their presumptions about “screens” cloud their judgment?
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If we can get beyond the false assumptions, parents might be able to demand more, and better, educational media. Right now for media developers, the incentives are elsewhere, Jesse Schell, CEO of Schell Games and professor at Carnegie-Mellon University, told Games Industry International.“Report Finds Class Divide in Educational Media Use,” Barbara Ray
I had a great economic professor at the University of Texas at Austin, in the 1980’s, named Harry Cleaver. Dr. Cleaver was a Marxist economist who had somehow survived the conservative purges of the 1970’s. Dr. Cleaver saw the impact of class and the class struggle everywhere he looked. Once you see the way class shapes American culture and the world, you can never un-see it.
Yet academic researchers in particular seem perpetually surprised by the pervasive impact of class, as if they suddenly realized that capitalism is a class-based system. Why wouldn’t class shape media use? It shapes everything else. I suspect that this surprise goes back to the fact that academic economics has been so conservative for so long. If no one points it out, you don’t see it.
