Dr. Leo Pekkala:

I am grateful for the invitation to appear before the committee. KAVI has a legal obligation to advance media education, and promote media literacy. KAVI's department for media education and audiovisual media, which I head, also functions as an independent media regulatory authority tasked with overseeing age restrictions for audiovisual programs.

We are responsible for implementing the national media education policy, which states that media literacy is a civic skill for all. We approach media literacy comprehensively to comprehend and analyse media, create media, and engage in a secure and responsible manner in media environments. This approach also considers the perspective of active citizenship across all these aspects. It is hard to stress enough the importance of having a national policy for promoting media literacy. The policy is the backbone for all media literacy work done in Finland and supports different organisations in their work in promoting media literacy. The current government programme of the Prime Minister, Petteri Orpo, states that critical media literacy and awareness of cyber risks in order to reinforce broad social resilience should be boosted. Our ultimate goal is to promote peaceful society, functioning democracy with stable economy and by doing so we hope to work for a good life for everyone.

I will outline some examples of successful media literacy initiatives. We have been organising a media literacy week since 2012. The Finnish games week has been running as long. We have a media literacy school website which collects and shares teaching and learning resources for media education which is free for anyone to use. Another simple fairly recent initiative has been “media literacy coffee breaks” for government civil servants, in which civil servants gather together to discuss current issues on media literacy, following the Chatham House rules. This way we have managed to create cross-sectoral co-operation within the government structures.

I wish to conclude by reflecting on some issues related to media literacy discussion internationally. There seems to be an ongoing obsession with measurement of success of media education or media education programmes or projects. However, it is unclear what is being measured and how. Typically, the measurements we see, like the media literacy index, focus on technical skills, access or other external factors, but not on critical thinking skills, which are most important.

Another problem is the solutionism, where media literacy is seen as the solution to all problems in society. However much I believe that promoting media literacy is really important, I do not believe that we can solve all the problems in society by investing only in media literacy.

Achieving results in media literacy requires policy support, time, patience and resources. If you think media education is expensive, try ignorance.