Media Education in Bulgaria:

Slightly above Ground Zero

In a recent annual report the international non-profit organization IREX gave a low score on the media sustainability index in Bulgaria. Amongst other main reasons for that (no access to quality media coverage of political, economic and social developments in the country; attacks on journalists; self-censorship; corruption; low quality; low pay levels etc.) it pointed out the lack of sufficient media education at all levels in the Bulgarian educational system.

IREX’s report wasn’t the first and only to mark that problem. Several national and international surveys did the same. Compared to other countries in the EU, Bulgaria is at the bottom of all charts measuring the levels of media education. And considering the fact that the media freedom is strongly dependent on the general quality of education, our country should pay big attention to all the EU-initiatives for raising the levels of media literacy.

Media education in schools

The term “media education” in Bulgaria is widely understood only as education in the field of journalism, public relations or graphic design, provided mostly in universities and some professional high schools. Almost no one understands it as a means to develop critical thinking in the minds of the youth, to raise media awareness and to teach children how to seek, choose, use and create media products. That fact is easily explainable – our last few governments didn’t pay attention to the subject, because they were too busy arguing on other serious problems of the educational system.

There have been two recent studies, however, the comparison of which shows how important it is to raise the level of media education in schools. The first one was the PISA (announced at the end of 2010), which found out that 41% of Bulgarian students possess less than the critical minimum of reading skills, have vast difficulties in analyzing text, graphics, maps and other media content. The other research – EU Kids Online II (September 2011), classified Bulgaria in “the group of countries with higher use and higher risk”. The reasons – Bulgarian kids are on the top of most cross-country comparative graphs – 85% use internet at home on a daily basis (50% of the parents do that), 61% have internet access in their own room (while the average is 49%). The country is ranked third after Greece and Slovakia in using internet via mobile phone. Being technically advanced, however, children in Bulgaria are not very familiar with the risks of the global network, because there is no one to teach them what to do with all the information and media content they can access with their computers.

Of course, our educational system provides fundamental computer education –web browsing, using office packages, programming etc. And still – there are almost no teachers who can make children able to critically understand the nature, techniques and impacts of media messages and products, to make them decode, analyze, synthesize and evaluate media, to teach them how to navigate through the complex and often manipulative media landscape.

One of the few attempts to implement media education in school was part of the project OnAir, funded by the European Commission and done by several nonprofit organizations across Europe, the Bulgarian being Zinev Art Technologies. It took place between 2005 and 2008 in Nikola Stoychev High School in Razlog, a town in Southwestern Bulgaria, involving more than 100 classes and providing training courses for both teachers and students. During that time a vast range of media activities was taught in the school – for example writing a newspaper article, analyzing online communication and video games, investigation of stereotypes or risk behaviors, related to the use of media products.

Although the authors of the project claimed that it worked and that it was very beneficial, there still has not been even any attempt to start a discussion regarding the inclusion of media education in the school curriculum.

Media education in the university

When a young person in Bulgaria decides to study media sciences professionally, the best option for him is to try somewhere abroad. Almost all of the biggest universities in our country – Sofia University, University of Economics, New Bulgarian University, the American University, the Plovdiv University etc. have programs for bachelors and masters in the fields of Journalism or Public Relations.

The problems of the media education in university are similar to these in the educational system in general – troubled financing, corruption allegations, low quality, low level of remuneration, unwillingness to reform, little or no contact with the media business.

University students, even those in the master-degree programs, are kept away from almost any contact with computers. Maybe this is healthy for the eyes, but reading from copies from copies from textbooks, printed in the 1980s, is not. The students have to learn vast amounts of useless history and data with absolutely no regard to what they really need to know in their journalistic practice. Own initiative is not stimulated; the students have to follow strict orders from the teacher, memorize word by word their textbooks and then recreate them on paper during the exams.

The IREX report cited in the beginning of this presentation, points out another problem of the university media education – the low entry level and motivation of students. It says that most of the students are extremely ill prepared by the basic school system and some of them don’t know even how to speak and write in their own language.

Of course, there are some positive examples of people, working to reform the media education system, one of them being Hristo Panchev. Young teachers use modern educational practices, implement new media in their classrooms, they try to keep a continuous interaction and a bilateral connection with the students.

But they are too few to make the change. 

Ivan Zhikov