Oasis in the Desert: Education and the Media

Abstract

By the end of the 1950s the rapid expansion of the television audience (particularly for ITV) had provided a new stimulus to that debate about popular cultural standards which had been continuous in Britain since the mid nineteenth century. Increasingly this debate came to be structured in terms of a modern morality play, with the cultural health of Everyman (the ‘ordinary’ person or, more usually, the schoolchild) being protected by the good angel (the education system) and corrupted by the bad angel (the commercial mass media). This was at least how it looked from the point of view of many teachers and educationalists, as is apparent from a resolution passed at the National Union of Teachers (NUT) Conference in the spring of 1960:

Conference believes that a determined effort must be made to counteract the debasement of standards which results from the misuse of press, radio, cinema and television; the deliberate exploitation of violence and sex; and the calculated appeal to self-interest.

It calls especially upon those who use and control the media of mass communication, and upon parents, to support the efforts of teachers in an attempt to prevent the conflict which too often arises between the values inculcated in the classroom and those encountered by young people in the world outside.¹