As the new century approaches, speculation and hype about new communication technologies is rife. Not a day passes without some newspaper or public debate offering an extraordinary vision of how the latest invention may transform not only people’s everyday lives but politics and business as well.

Familiar rhetoric? Yes - but it’s a description of 1895 and the excitement that greeted new technologies such as the cinematograph and wireless telephony. The implications were staggering: HG Wells imagined children learning from films rather than from teachers, while Edison was already sceptical about the cinematograph, envisaging the commercial possibilities of each household having its own apparatus for watching moving images. Then, as now, anything seemed possible. Apocalyptic scenarios of social degeneration vied with utopias where everything would be accessible to everyone.

But then as now, promises of technological change were easy to make. It was and is still much harder to imagine cultural and epistemological change. As we look at the technological hype of 1995, how can we know which of the new technologies really will root themselves in our everyday lives - and how, and when, and for how long? Through what media and what codes and genres will stories be told, information exchanged, leaders elected? What will it mean to be “literate” in 2095?

If these questions can be answered at all, it must be with caution. Our record so far of understanding the cultural and educational implications of new media technologies is a dismal one. Early in the 20th century, countries such as France and the USA saw the cultural and political potential of cinema and threw real money into them to create powerful expressions of their national cultures. Britain dithered and delayed.

In a society as deeply class-riven as ours it went without saying - and often still does - that something enjoyed by the masses could never be of cultural value. In 1995, public discourse about cinema and television remains deeply contradictory. Both Labour’s David Blunkett and John Major have recently launched educational initiatives by comfortably castigating television, yet both would have been alarmed if television had failed to deliver their messages to the voting population.

A hundred years after moving image media were invented, our concept of literacy is still anchored in the dominant 19th-century medium of print. Thanks to television and film, children arrive in school with more knowledge of generic codes and narrative structures, and more information about the world, than most adults had in 1895. There is no doubt that some of what children derive from the moving image media is erroneous, biased, frightening or meretricious. And yet in their anxiety to defend print literacy at all costs, many teachers marginalise this knowledge or even regard it as a threat. Children no longer depend upon print as their main source of stories and information, and as a consequence, print literacy is in decline.

For those of us who grew up in a world that was still print-dominated, this is alarming. Our modes of thought are formed by the written word and we know its value. Yet, our sense of history should tell us that new technologies rarely obliterate old ones. Photography did not eradicate painting, as many feared: painting changed, and so did our perceptions of realism.

Print is, and will remain, a vital and unique medium, and we must ensure that children gain full access to it. But to persist in regarding it as the dominant medium is a dangerous delusion. There is no dominant medium now: media are interdependent and convergent. No one can be literate in print alone; yet it would be impossible, let alone undesirable, for anyone to be “literate” only in the moving image. It is remarkable that, in all the chatter about superhighways and digitalisation, these basic facts have not yet clearly emerged.

The media studies lobby, operating with a predominantly top-down curricular model deriving from academic critical theory, has so far failed to persuade most educators that the moving image media should be part of every child’s basic education. Despite a toehold for media in the national curriculum for English, most teachers lack the confidence and clarity of purpose to teach about them systematically. Meanwhile, the skills of basic reading and writing are resolutely ring-fenced against the perceived threat from television and video.

Despite the best efforts of its enthusiasts, the arguments for media education still sound to most teachers like exhortations to open their mouths and swallow just one more spoonful of extra-curricular content. But what if we start from a different place: from hard questions about just what literacy now is and should become, including what we must defend and maintain? Is it at least possible that fostering children’s media competences - the ability to discuss, analyse, produce and manipulate moving image texts - might actually enhance the development of print literacy? Can we begin to define a wider concept of literacy that acknowledges media convergence? What transformations might this set in train? Could schools gain a community role as network publishers and cable broadcasters? Would our cinematic and televisual heritage gain the status it deserves?

A conference addressing these questions, entitled Curriculum 2000: Education and the Moving Image, is being organised in London by the British Film Institute and The Times Educational Supplement on May 1 and 2, 1996. We want to set a new agenda for the debate on literacy, and to start imagining its implications. After a hundred years of moving image culture, it is perhaps time to begin!

Cary Bazalgette is principal education officer at the British Film Institute.