After reading “Literacy for the 21st Century” at the site medialit.org, I came away from the experience feeling that a propaganda truck for teaching multi-media had just run over my body.  The article (can I call it that?)  is really a marketing tool to sell an outline for teaching a course on media literacy in today’s classroom (emphasis on today … the reader does not want to be left behind in the wake of technology).  The authors of the booklet pose the question, “What does it mean to be illiterate?” (3).  The reader is cautioned that no longer must the student just be able to read text and decipher said traditional text for meaning, but today’s student must be able to “learn, unlearn, and relearn something” in order to find literacy in our multi-media culture.  This “literacy for the 21st century” is not fact driven, not an accumulation of data, because students already have access to this information at the touch of a button.  No, according to the authors, students really need to synthesize, analyze, and interpret with a new set of vocabulary that charts our modern culture with its media driven society.

I do understand that high schoolers today live in a world of techno-gratification – Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, texting, blogs, online gaming worlds, and the list goes on.  But is this what we have come to as a society when we define literacy as navigation of these worlds?  It doesn’t take much research on Wikipedia to find that traditional definitions of illiteracy in American are potentially catastrophic.    In 1993, the most comprehensive government study to date on adult literacy in America found that, “21% to 23% of adult Americans were not “able to locate information in text”, could not “make low-level inferences using printed materials”, and were unable to “integrate easily identifiable pieces of information.”^[2] 

^{As educators, do we now feel that 1 in 4 Americans, who are illiterate in reading and deciphering plain text, will become literate if given access to unlocking the meaning behind multi-media presentations?  Is it more important to be able to understand the commercial you just saw or the movie you just watched than being able to fill out an interview application or read a neighborhood school’s newspaper article?}