Media Literacy and Alcohol

Adolescents are not good at long-term thinking or reasoning through consequences, which presents challenges when it comes to teaching them about the long-term risks of alcohol. Emotional dependency and liver problems seem remote to 15-year-old boys who can buy beer on any street corner.


When it comes to alcohol, local culture also sends mixed signals: the Evangelicals do not drink because it is a terrible sin, but alcohol is readily available and the men who do drink get completely wasted (it is culturally unacceptable for an indigenous woman to drink). The teens are caught in a do-don’t double-bind, where the option of “drink in moderation” does not exist. So adolescents either choose not to drink, or they get dangerously drunk.

To get the students to reason through the realities of alcohol, this week I taught a class on media literacy. They examined beer ads and compared the benefits promised in the ads to the real-life affects. What is this ad saying about people who drink? How do media messages compare with reality? Most especially, Gallo beer proclaims that it is the “pride of Guatemala”—is it? The goal was for students to do their own analysis of long-term consequences, and then make recommendations as to whether or not a person should drink.



However, the class hit a snag when the local teacher tried to “guide” the students in reasoning through the long-term effects of alcohol. My co-teacher is Evangelical, and his lecture went like this: “If you have one drink today, you’ll have two tomorrow. By next week you’ll need five drinks. You won’t have any money to buy more, so you’ll steal and end up in jail and then die.” He also believes that any alcohol consumption qualifies the person as an alcoholic.

The teacher completely missed the point of the activity. Just as the kids were almost arriving at a concrete understanding of the consequences of alcohol, the teacher creates an unrealistic connect-the-dots scenario in which alcohol brings certain death. (Only profound professionalism kept me from banging my head on the desk). The teacher also missed the philosophy of teaching: the students learn when they discover it for themselves, not when it is preached to them.


After the lesson, I gave feedback to the teacher about the “discovery” component of these classes. I still need to sit down with him and define “alcohol abuse” (more than 7 drinks a week for a woman, or more than 14 for a man). My job this year is to train teachers to give these classes, and so here’s to hoping that it goes better this week.