There is a common view in industrialised countries that we are living through a crisis in citizenship. Levels of political participation are at an all-time low; fewer and fewer people are inclined to vote in elections or to join political parties; and levels of political knowledge and interest are rapidly declining.

This view is often tied to broader arguments from ’social capital theory’, for example in the work of the US writer Robert Putnam. Here it is argued that local social networks and community-based associations are in decline, as we move towards more individualised, privatised forms of existence. While these tendencies may be more advanced in the US, they are increasingly apparent in Europe also.

The media are often seen to be to blame for this state of affairs. Putnam, for example, argues that television in particular has led to a growing disengagement from the political process, Crudely, the more people watch TV, they less they are interested in going out and associating with others.

Advocates of this view also offer evidence of a declining interest in ’serious’ news media. TV current affairs programmes and broadsheet newspapers are steadily losing their audiences; and this is not a fixed generational difference, but a long-term decline over decades.

This argument about disengagement, or the decline of citizenship, is also particularly applied to the young. Critics argue that youth culture, or popular culture more broadly, encourage a form of apathy and cynicism among young people – a sense that there’s really no point in bothering to get involved.

However, it is possible to offer another interpretation of these developments, which I considered in my book ’The Making of Citizens’. Rather than a decline in citizenship, what we may be seeing is a process whereby traditional (modernist) forms of citizenship are giving way to new (postmodernist) forms. These new forms are based not so much on geographical location but on the new forms of community made possible by electronic media.

My research suggests that, far from being uninterested in politics, young people are able to show a developed awareness of – and engagement with – social and political issues, albeit not necessarily in the terms that adults might wish. Insofar as they are active participants, they opt for single-issue campaigns and do-it-yourself movements, rather than conventional political parties.

I also argue that it is false to equate cynicism with apathy. Young people may be alienated from the political process – or, more specifically, from the actions of politicians – but that does not necessarily mean they do not care about social issues. Indeed, they may have very good reasons for being cynical.

This argument leads to a view of young people not as apathetic and lazy, but as disenfranchised. The problem is not with young people, but with the fact that politicians and political discourse make no attempt to address them. And when it comes to news media, the problem is not that young people have abandoned these media, but that traditional forms of news media have abandoned them. Thus, one could argue that news media are making no attempt to address themselves to young people, or to reach out to young people’s experiences and life worlds. The gap in social and political communication that arises is being filled by new media, and particularly by the internet.

This argument poses a challenge for traditional news media, to find new ways of reaching out to young people. But it also challenges us to re-think our conception of citizenship. It implies that old ideas of citizenship based on duty, deference and responsibility are giving way to new ideas, which are more diverse and fragmented, more interactive, and more tied up with consumption, including media consumption.

Here, therefore, are two contrasting interpretations of the changing relationships between young people, media and citizenship. Yet despite the differences between them, they are bound to agree that the media are central to the political process, to participation in society, to citizenship, and to the formation of social identity.

Media education

To this extent, we would expect media education to be playing an important role here. Arguments for media education traditionally employ the rhetoric of citizenship. For example, international documents like UNESCO’s Grunwald Declaration of early 1980s, or its Seville Declaration from 2002, clearly define media education as a means of fostering democratic participation.

In practice, however, this is often seen in rather limited ways, as a matter of producing ’critical consumers’. For some, media education seems to be allied to a rationalistic, old-fashioned notion of citizenship: it is about creating ’good little citizens’, who will do their duty, act responsibility, and make sure they are appropriately well-informed. Thus, there are some who see media education as being primarily about telling the difference between fact and opinion in the press, or detecting media bias – and implicitly, about encouraging children to stop reading nasty tabloid papers (if indeed they read newspapers at all) and to move on to ’serious’ newspapers.

Experience in the UK would suggest that this approach doesn’t really work, because it misses the target. It fails to engage with children’s experiences of media, or with what they find significant; and it is implicitly moralistic, offering children a model of citizenly responsibility which they may well be inclined to resist. In my view, we need to see the role of media education in rather broader terms.

Firstly, we need to begin by engaging with children’s existing uses of media – with their agenda rather than with ours, with what they find significant rather than with what we think they ought to be doing. If we do this, we may well find there is rather more going on that we might have imagined. We might find that citizenship and participation for young people might have rather more to do with rap music or skateboarding or soap operas or chat rooms than it does with the news. This is not to suggest that we simply celebrate what young people are doing – merely that this is the place to start.

Secondly, we need to recognise that participation involves more than critical consumption: it also involves production. Media education needs to involve both critical analysis (or reflection) and practical, creative production. This is not to say that it is a vocational enterprise – for example, about training the TV producers of tomorrow. However, it is about giving children access to the means of cultural production and expression, and encouraging them to use those means in a thoughtful and critical way.

Bridging the gap

So if media educators wish to promote participatory citizenship, they must find ways of bridging the gap between the school and what happens out of school.

In fact, historically, media education has often been seen as precisely the opposite – as a means of helping children to resist, or to defend themselves against, what are seen as the negative or damaging aspects of the world beyond the school.

From this perspective, media education is a defensive operation. It is about exposing the false values of popular culture, and thereby leading children on to the true values of high culture. Or it is about helping children to see through the bad ideas we imagine they get from the media and thereby leading them on to the good ideas that the teacher will offer them. This is an argument that takes many forms, but at the moment it is particularly apparent among those who see media education as a form of inoculation against violence or sex or commercialism.

At least in the UK, a different view began to emerge in 1960s. It was part of a wider movement in schools to try to engage with the realities of working-class children’s lives. It was argued that the school was offering a form of academic knowledge, or cultural capital, that many children saw as quite irrelevant to their lives outside school. It was suggested that such children’s experiences and cultures were not recognised by the school – and indeed that the function of the school was often to define those experiences and cultures as illegitimate.

And so it was argued that schooling needed to become more relevant to real life outside school. Teaching needed to bridge the gap between children’s popular everyday knowledge and academic knowledge – and that children’s experiences (particularly those of working class children) needed to be recognised as valid and legitimate. Rather than leaving their culture outside the school door, children should be encouraged to bring their culture into the school, to use their culture as a basis for investigation.

Of course, this is not to say that this is the end of the process. There is the danger that the school might simply be seeking, in a more subtle way, to colonise children’s culture, to use it for its own purposes – and this is a something children may well recognise and resist. On the other hand, there is also a danger that we end up simply celebrating media culture, and remove any grounds for judgment. This would be little more than an empty gesture, which would effectively leave children where they already are. The key issue in terms of pedagogy, in classroom practice, is how this relationship is worked through.

The development of media education in the UK – which has a very long history – can be seen as part of this broader move. However, it is clear that this task of bridging the gap is becoming more difficult and more complex now than it was in earlier times.

Over the past decade, we have seen significant changes in children’s media culture – changes that are not just technological, but also economic and political. We have seen a move away from the traditional public service ethos, in which children were often addressed in very paternalistic ways, towards a global, commercially-driven, multi-media system. Children are now growing up in a much more diverse, complex, demanding media environment than was the case even twenty years ago.

Children’s media increasingly address them as autonomous and active individuals. The media require participation; they are not necessarily respectful of authority; they are playful and ironic; they offer a diversity of conflicting voices. They are the media of Bakhtin’s carnival, in which traditional values are often inverted.

New media – digital media like computer games or the internet - involve a whole range of informal learning processes, in which participants are simultaneously ’teachers’ and ’learners’. Children learn to use these media largely through trial and error - through exploration, experimentation and play; and collaboration with others - both in face-to-face and virtual forms - is an essential element of the process.

Playing a computer game or participating in a chat room involves the ability to switch between modes of communication, to rapidly figure out rules and conventions. These are ’multiliterate’ activities that carry unique challenges and demands, which is why most adults find them incomprehensible.

Meanwhile, school systems in many countries seem to be heading determinedly in the opposite direction. The rapid pace of change has led to a growing sense of panic around childhood and education – and the response to this is often to retreat to a kind of ’educational fundamentalism’. Educators are urged to move ’back to basics’, as though the basics had remained unchanged. Politically, there is great pressure to reject and disavow the innovations of the 1960s and 1970s, in favour of an insistence on traditional forms of knowledge, traditional teaching methods, and traditional relations between teachers and students (or adults and children).

Arguably, the advent of new technology in schools has not made much difference to this. ICT is used mostly in the service of traditional pedagogy – in fact, of regimes of testing. Opportunities for genuinely flexible, interactive learning are very limited.

Furthermore, a new division is emerging between uses of ICT in school and children’s uses of ICT out of school – what some of us are calling the new digital divide. Outside school, children are using new media for computer games, for chat rooms and SMS messaging, for surfing the internet – not for ’educational’ information, but for information about their other media enthusiasms. Yet in school, much of what they do is basic word processing and spreadsheets; and if they are allowed to surf the internet, they have to cope with the ridiculous obstacles posed by filtering software.

To be rhetorical, one could argue that schools largely failed to acknowledge and use the most significant media of the 20th century – film and television. Now, at the start of the 21st century, many of them seem to be trying to head back to the 19th. This divide or gap between school and the world outside school may in fact be growing – or at least the task of building bridges may be getting harder.