From the historic campus of Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan, where the good, the true, and the beautiful are taught, nurtured, and honored, this is the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour, bringing the activity and education of the college to listeners across the country.

The idea here basically amounts to dissolving the boundaries of ourselves, that we're too limited, we're too weak or too slow.

We're basically just primitive machines, and we need an update. This is your host

Scott Bertram, and that's Spencer Claven. He's the author of the brand new book, How to Save the West,

Ancient Wisdom for Five Modern Crises. We'll talk in-depth with Spencer about the book and those crises

a little bit later on in today's program. First, we're

joined by John J. Miller. He is director of the Dow Journalism Program here at Hillsdale College.

John, thanks for joining us. Hi, Scott. Talking with you today about media literacy requirements for

high schoolers or even for grade schoolers depending on the state that you're

looking at Illinois has a requirement in place by law New Jersey is at least considering if not

moving forward with one I guess first I want to ask how you would define media literally

reading these stories it sounds like proponents means something like knowing who is behind the information being shared. Or maybe knowing how to consume the

news and read it well and understand it properly. I suppose literacy means the ability to read

and write. And we adopt this term as a kind of metaphor in lots of other

contexts, financial literacy and so forth. So media literacy, what does media literacy mean? I guess that

just means the basics of reading and writing in terms of understanding what the media says and how we learn from it.

Generally speaking, our teenagers today, our grade schoolers, teenagers, high schoolers,

lacking in that kind of skill? Is it a problem that you see that needs to be addressed?

Well, I suppose we're all lacking in that kind of skill. The world of media today is so enormous and diverse and confusing that it's difficult

for anybody to understand always what you can trust and not trust.

So it's probably especially confusing for young people, but I think it's confusing for everyone, maybe in different ways, but but confusing for us all.

If we're trying to address this at a younger age, who theoretically should be responsible for? Parents, educators, is it a good idea to assign this topic to our schools?

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