By the time today's children in the United States reach age 75, they will have spent nine years of their lives watching TV, including two years of ads alone. Yet media literacy education in the U.S. still lags behind that of every other English-speaking country in the world, according to a new report commissioned by Cable in the Classroom, the cable industry's education foundation.

When you add the number of hours students spend watching movies, listening to radio, and surfing the web, they easily spend one-third to one-half of their time awake involved in the consumption of electronic media. Yet "many schools still treat poetry, short stories, and the novel as the only forms of English expression worthy of study," the report says.

As a result, most children are not media literate, so they are poorly equipped to think critically about the messages they see, hear, and read every day.

"Thinking Critically About Media: Schools and Families in Partnership," actually a series of six essays by media education experts, is intended to raise awareness of the issue and promote a dialog among educators and policy makers about how best to incorporate a broader emphasis of media literacy skills in today's classrooms.

Although all 50 states have incorporated media literacy education into their standards for instruction, too few graduate and professional development programs train teachers to implement media education effectively, the report says. This fact—coupled with the enormous pressure educators are under to meet basic accountability standards in the core areas of reading and math—mean too many students aren't getting the type of media literacy instruction they need to interpret information correctly and evaluate its credibility.

Robert Kubey, director of the Center for Media Studies at Rutgers University, explains why media literacy is an increaingly necessary skill for today's students: "The Jeffersonian ideal of an informed electorate necessitates media literacy education. ... With the incredible rise of the internet and the unedited nature of many web sites, students need more than ever to learn how to assess the validity and credibility of the information to which they are exposed."

The report offers several strategies for addressing these shortcomings: