Media and Education in the digital age

The idea that education is a fundamentally political process construes education as a process in which a number of participants compete for a variety of goals, depending on the nature of the issues at stake. A classical tradition in political science defines the core aspect of this process as a competition for control over the distribution of values in society. In this perspective, the study of politics is, in practice, the study of ‘who gets what, when and how’ (Lasswell, 1950). Seen as political process, the study of education is the study of who gets what, when and how in the competition for control over the future of society. This includes the study of the main cleavages, or the fault lines defined by relevant issues at the core of the competition between the main actors, the strategies, or the moves through which main actors try to gain political influence and the nature of the stake. While shared in political studies and also in critical contributions to the analysis of education (Youdell, 2011) this position seems nevertheless far from mainstream in much of the current discussion on media and education. For too many, education is a technical problem: one which has to do primarily with the effective management of available resources, with the identification and implementation of costefficient educational models, curricula and technologies.

(Available at: https://library.oapen.org. Adapted.)