Rewriting Our World Moving from doom and salvation to hope and sustainability in the Western cultural narrative
By John Gust T
HERE WE WERE, doing exactly as our language arts content standard dictated, “analyz[ing] media as sources for information, entertainment, persuasion,
interpretation of events, and transmission of culture,” when the question dawned on me—What sort of tale is our media spinning? “Hey,” I asked, interrupting my fifth-graders’ morning perusal of the Los Angeles Times. “I was wondering: Given what you hear, see, and read in the media––you know… TV, newspapers, books, magazines, the Internet, radio, video games, movies, all that––what do you think is going to happen to the world? What is going to become of us?” Everybody grabbed their pencils and started writing.
I knew that a recent study released by the Kaiser Family Foundation had claimed today’s 8 to 18 year-olds devote a whopping 10 hours and 45 minutes to entertainment media across a typical day, so I really was dying to find out exactly what sort of culture the media was transmitting to these kids. With everything that had been going on in the world, I had my own ideas about what students would say, but I wanted to find out for sure. I desired to delve into my students’ lived experience to uncover what Paulo Freire called their “genera- tive themes” or “thematic universe” (p. 77). My students’ answers exposed a universal theme all
right, but I’d hardly call it generative. Every one of them said our story was going to turn out badly. Their answers were incredibly disturbing and full of despair. Brian wrote:
“I think the world is going to be trashed by pollution and all the things that are being wasted since us humans don’t even care.” Christian declared: “I think the world will end up like the one in Wall • E.” April’s account was the worst: “I think everybody living on earth will soon die and the air will be filled with lots of carbon dioxide. The whole earth will be trashed with plastic bags, water bottles, garbage, etc.” Prior generations had weaved stories about a possible nuclear holocaust, but it was never anything like this. This is the first generation I can remember feeling so desperate about their future. And all of this, from just a brief review of the media. Here’s how it all got started: First, I brought the Los
Angeles Times into the classroom. We identified the sections of the paper, looked at all of the articles and advertisements, cut out those that were noteworthy and saved them in a folder. Then we listed and talked at length about all the movies, TV shows, books and videos that we had watched or read recently. Lots of them had seen the movies Wall • E, I Am Legend, The Day After Tomorrow, Deep Impact, Armaged- don, or 2012. Most had read articles about wars, polar bears and their diminishing environment, rising carbon emission levels, global warming, climate change, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and our planet’s new, sixth mass extinction. And many had read at least one of the growing number of lauded dystopian young adult novels out there, like Lois Lowry’s The Giver or even M.T. Anderson’s picture book, Me, All Alone, at the End of the World. Since my students’ answers were indicative of our cur-
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