Development of Media Literacy - an Important Aspect of Modern Education

The media represents a crucial part of everyday communication and it has become an imperative of time and lifestyle, for which educational systems are preparing students for. Students today are commonly exposed to opposed value judgments of family, school and media; and the social system faces a challenge of how to successfully integrate all forms of media disclosure and how to change the educational system adapted to the period in which students are developing and the one they are preparing for. Concerning the fact students are exposed to media influence, and since the time of schooling is a time of learning and acquiring important skills as well, it is important to form a critical attitude towards media content which is being offered to us. Acquiring media literacy can be truly successful only if we consider that relationship between specificity of media and the way those specificities are understood by those getting education. Thus conceived media literacy can contribute to acquiring many social values. In theoretical interpretation we pointed out the tendencies and perspectives of media literacy development. We have come to a conclusion that adequately conceived media literacy can contribute to adopting many social values. Whereby, we can recognize a theme for further research. (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/).