Yes, many teachers do teach media literacy skills. Several states, including Texas, New Mexico and North Carolina, require media education for high school graduation. The American Library Association has developed and posted Information Literacy Standards you can review. Sometimes media literacy skills are the goal of instruction. For example, a teacher who wants to highlight how marketing strategies target children might have students visit three or four web sites that invite kids to enter contests, then compare how these sites encourage kids to reveal the personal information marketers want.
Students learn to recognize how each medium interprets historical information.
Media literacy can also be applied to the programs children see on television. Cable in the Classroom, the National Cable Televison Association and the National Parent Teacher Association teamed up in 1994 to create the Family and Community Critical Viewing Project to address concerns about television and the impact of television violence and commercialism on children. The goal of the critical viewing project is to help families make informed choices in the TV programs they watch and to improve the way they watch those programs. You can begin by sharing web time with your kids.