(New) challenges for a (new) media education

Media education, as a frame of children’s empowerment, and media literacy, as a result of media education practices, are –together with «Protection» and «Provisions»– means to accomplish children’s rights in the media. New «convergence culture» forces, nowadays, Media education to abandon a media-specific linguistic approach and to adopt the idea of a broader «media culture», involving not only contents and languages, but the so-called «latent curriculum» too: that set of rules by which the educational space is ultimately shaped as a frame of shared values, legitimate behaviour and common expectations about the personal and social life embodied in the institution itself. At the core of such a media literacy should be also the possibility of a new form of subjectivity, really capable of using all the communication technologies as «technologies of the self» which facilitate the processes of social relations and self-fulfilment. The main challenge to the Media education is thus the possibility of contributing to the building of a human type which we can define as the inhabitant of the Mediapolis, as homo civicus