Excessive commercialization of children’s media, especially television, is obstructing efforts aimed at education and capacity building for global citizenship and raising awareness among children of the diversity of the world, according to experts.

Many of the speakers at the recent World Summit on Media for Children in Kuala Lumpur agreed with Dr. Patricia Edgar, former director of the Australian Children’s Television Foundation, that the majority of children’s programs are commercially driven and not educational. “These less creative and cheaply produced programs are made for entertainment with the intention to sell their merchandize,” she said. “An effective educational program is about good values, constructive messages and most importantly, contains local elements to help the social and emotional development of children.”

The United Nations has set three priority areas for fostering global citizenship and all of these relate to education and intellectual development of children. This includes putting every child in school; improving the quality of learning; and making education a transformational process that brings shared values to life.

Critics of today’s children’s media argue that it is these shared values that are lacking, particularly in television program — unless you believe that these shared values are developing tastes for merchandize that is a by-product of the “fancy world” the programmers create for the children, in order to sell merchandize. “If good global citizenship means a passion for global justice and compassion for the other, we have to develop children’s stories in the form of cartoons and short films that will inculcate the right values in the young from a tender age,” argues Dr. Chandra Muzaffar, President of the Just World Movement.

He believes that global citizenship should be anchored in values that are universal. “All western values are not necessarily universal. Neither are all non-western values parochial,” he said. “On the contrary, there is a great deal in our own religious and ethical traditions, which are universal. These should be harnessed and articulated through local languages and art forms. In the process we would be strengthening local cultural identities.”

Strengthening local cultural identities not necessarily means that one becomes nationalistic and inward looking. Quite the contrary argues Aldana Duhalde, Project Developer of IDIEM Media Research Institute in Argentina. Through a regional television project her team has developed a cross-border common identity she calls a “social kind of identity” that focuses on issues such as identifying with nature and the landscape, the desire to grow economically and not be viewed as underdeveloped, and finding their own solutions to problems.

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IDN-InDepth NewsAnalysis