“Media Studies”: A New Master’s Degree in Manipulation 

After introducing emotional, relational and sexual education (EVARS), nutrition education, and education on ecological transition, the French Ministry of National Education is now turning its attention to information—at the expense of teaching core academic subjects. On Monday, March 23rd, Minister Edouard Geffray announced his intention to make “media education” one of his new priorities. Behind this new fad lies a new project designed to mould young minds under the guise of education.

The ministry has announced the signing of an agreement with Arcom, the independent media regulatory authority, to implement a series of educational initiatives aimed at young people.

Media, information, and digital citizenship education is described as “a key challenge to enable every pupil to better understand the flow of information, develop their critical thinking, and adopt responsible digital practices.” The aim for French schools must be to “train enlightened, free and responsible citizens in the digital world.”

Once again, the Ministry of National Education is targeting teaching that does not fall within the scope of basic skills—reading, writing and arithmetic—even as young French people continue to fall behind in international rankings across all subjects.

Moreover, the use of Arcom as an educational partner in this field raises questions—just as emotional education programmes deliberately choose to cooperate with activist organisations whose progressive stance is well established, such as Planned Parenthood. Arcom is supposed to guarantee neutrality and objectivity in the media but has, on numerous occasions, demonstrated its bias through its ideological condemnations, targeting media in particular for conservative or simply right-wing positions or guests. We can therefore trust it to ensure a perfectly monolithic approach in this ‘media programme,’ which will, in all likelihood, take the form of a politically correct propaganda lesson.

The tools for truly shaping “enlightened, free, and responsible” citizens are, however, well-known: the teaching of the country’s language—in this case, French—to a high standard, so that young pupils master the content they read and hear and are able to reproduce and comment on it with the precision afforded by a sound knowledge of the language, syntax, and vocabulary; and the teaching of the humanities—literature, philosophy, history—which gives children and teenagers the means to think, critique, and evaluate in the light of the experience and knowledge of the great authors.

But these tools have been devalued for several decades within the education system on the grounds that they were discriminatory and encouraged the reproduction of bourgeois, not to say fascist, patterns. 

Critical thinking can develop only when it rests on guidance, authority, and truth—solid points of reference that allow one to judge the value of information. Yet these very foundations have been so thoroughly criticised that they are today largely absent from pupils’ minds. As a result, students are left without clear standards of truth and justice with which to evaluate the flood of information they face every day. 

Through a proliferation of participatory workshops and the haphazard construction of knowledge by children themselves, we have diligently trained generations to challenge authority, if not mock it outright. And yet we are surprised today that the younger generations are no longer able to separate the wheat from the chaff, allowing themselves to be swept up by ‘fake news’ and other forms of conspiracy theories. They cannot see why they should give more credence to Descartes than to a TikToker or why an article in Le Monde would be more relevant than a video posted on Snapchat by their girlfriend’s brother. Is it any wonder, when their teachers have explained to them in class that Balzac was an old fart and that the rapper Jul is a musical icon every bit as worthy as Mozart?

This decision by the Ministry of National Education is, ultimately, cut from the same cloth as the repressive arsenal designed to control social media. Regulating X and Facebook is supposed to prevent the spread of fake news, but no one is thinking of restoring to the humanities, classical culture, and mastery of language the status that once made them the ultimate bulwarks against manipulation. For we must harbour no illusions about the exact motivations of the promoters of this “media education”: it is not a matter of combating obscurantism, but of ensuring that the education system retains, according to its own criteria, a monopoly on manipulation.

As Joachim Le Floch-Imad put it—a teacher and one of the last whistleblowers warning about the collapse of the school system—when this ‘discovery,’ namely the media studies classes, was announced: “Education has definitively become the exception, and re-education the norm.”