During the twentieth century the rise of technology, media and popular culture grew to affect schools by influencing the minds of children and teenagers where the entertainment industry constantly built a social framework of the workings of the world. There was a large debate during the early 1900’s that discussed whether movie censorship should be approved and whether it should be government controlled censorship or self-regulation. Those advocating self-censorship argued that the content of films should be controlled to teach moral lessons to maintain social order among adolescents. The attitudes of educators were that the media were in competition with schools for children’s minds.
Overall, there are ways in which the media can be used to benefit or damage the minds of children because sometimes exposing children to certain things can have either a negative or positive effect. For example, although during the 1930’s, there were media that were used to instill Utopian ways of living, this doesn’t necessarily mean that this is good because it encourages children to believe that there is no other way of life and that if their lives were any different from that represented in the films, then they are not conceived as being normal. Also, sometimes when there is censorship in the media, it produces a false model of how life really is, almost as though the true problems in life are being ignored. Sometimes exposing children to the realities of life and explaining to them why it is right or wrong is a better way of reinforcing good morals and values. How does the media in our current society affect children? Does this differ from that of the effects of the early 1900’s?
