What is the value and what are the consequences of students gaining access to "critical" academic discourses about the media? Ideally, the acquisition of an academic discourse should make it possible for students to reflect on their own experience in a systematic and rigorous way. Nevertheless, a critical discourse about the media may sanction a rationalistic approach to popular culture, which fails to engage with children's subcultural experiences and their emotional engagement with the media. It may result in a superficial irony, or indeed a contempt for popular pleasures, which is merely complacent. In Great Britain, the implications of this debate in terms of developing a critical pedagogy in media education remain to be explored. The Vygotskyan perspective may offer a productive alternative to the rather sterile opposition between advocates of progressive and conservative approaches to critical pedagogy. While acknowledging the central importance of children's existing knowledge and the need for active learning, it also stresses the necessity of students acquiring and participating in dominant academic discourses. While it is true that giving children access to privileged discourses is vital, it is equally important that they should learn to interrogate them. The claim that academic discourse is inherently scientific and thus superior to the ideology of popular discourse must be open to question. The concepts and methods of analysis that teachers introduce to students must be seen, not as neutral tools for the acquisition of knowledge, but as themselves ideological. (Fifty-one notes are included; 59 references are attached.) (PRA)