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Consuming Children: Education-Entertainment-Advertising
"Consuming Children is an important, exciting, funny and tragic book, addressing key issues for education in the 21st century. It dramatically charts the corporatising of education and the corporatising of the child. It is a book that demands to be read by teachers and policymakers - before it is too late. Sparkling with sociological insight and imagination, it is as clear as it is important as it is disturbing." - Stephen J. Ball, Karl Mannheim Professor of Sociology of Education, Institute of Education, University of London
"Accessible, insightful and boldly argued,'Consuming Children' makes a refreshing contribution to current discussions of young people, schooling and the culture industry. Jane Kenway and Elizabeth Bullen draw on a strong base of research and scholarship to advance powerful critiques and interesting and workable pedagogical responses to corporate culturalism." - Colin Lankshear
National Autonomous University of Mexico
"'Consuming Children' offers a challenging perspective on one of the most pressing educational issues of our time - the changing relationships between childhood, schooling and consumer culture. Combining incisive commentary on established debates with new insights from empirical research, it should be read by all those concerned with the future of learning." - Professor David Buckingham
Institute of Education, University of London
* Who are today's young people and how are they constructed in media-consumer culture and in relation to adult cultures in particular?
* How are the issues of pleasure, power, agency to be understood in the corporatised global community?
* How are teachers to educate young people? What new practices are required?
Buy delight, kids rule, adults are dim and schools are dull. These are canons of children's consumer cultures. In the places where kids, commodities and images meet, education, entertainment and advertising merge. Kids consume this corporate abundance with appetite. But what happens now that schools are on the market? Is this a form of corporate gluttony? Are designer schools educationally 'grotesque'? Who is conspicuously consuming at the educational emporium? How are students packaged? Which students have badge appeal? Who rules? Are adults taking their revenge on children? Are kids hungry to learn or keen to transgress? Where is their delight?
Consuming Children argues that we are entering another stage in the construction of the young as the demarcations between education, entertainment and advertising collapse and as the lines between the
generations both blur and harden. Drawing from the voices of students and from contemporary cultural theory this book provokes us to ponder the role of the school in the 'age of desire'.
"Accessible, insightful and boldly argued,'Consuming Children' makes a refreshing contribution to current discussions of young people, schooling and the culture industry. Jane Kenway and Elizabeth Bullen draw on a strong base of research and scholarship to advance powerful critiques and interesting and workable pedagogical responses to corporate culturalism." - Colin Lankshear
National Autonomous University of Mexico
"'Consuming Children' offers a challenging perspective on one of the most pressing educational issues of our time - the changing relationships between childhood, schooling and consumer culture. Combining incisive commentary on established debates with new insights from empirical research, it should be read by all those concerned with the future of learning." - Professor David Buckingham
Institute of Education, University of London
* Who are today's young people and how are they constructed in media-consumer culture and in relation to adult cultures in particular?
* How are the issues of pleasure, power, agency to be understood in the corporatised global community?
* How are teachers to educate young people? What new practices are required?
Buy delight, kids rule, adults are dim and schools are dull. These are canons of children's consumer cultures. In the places where kids, commodities and images meet, education, entertainment and advertising merge. Kids consume this corporate abundance with appetite. But what happens now that schools are on the market? Is this a form of corporate gluttony? Are designer schools educationally 'grotesque'? Who is conspicuously consuming at the educational emporium? How are students packaged? Which students have badge appeal? Who rules? Are adults taking their revenge on children? Are kids hungry to learn or keen to transgress? Where is their delight?
Consuming Children argues that we are entering another stage in the construction of the young as the demarcations between education, entertainment and advertising collapse and as the lines between the
generations both blur and harden. Drawing from the voices of students and from contemporary cultural theory this book provokes us to ponder the role of the school in the 'age of desire'.
- GenresEducation
212 pages, Paperback
First published October 19, 2001
24 people want to read
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July 26, 2012
Galbraith says in The New Industrial State that capitalism survives by convincing large sections of the population that their central role in life is to consume. Convincing them of this involves marketing to them – but one of the paradoxes is that marketing does not merely respond to the needs people have, but also helps to create those needs. And in creating those needs marketing helps to create the habits and tastes of the society we live in. This is what philosophers call a dialectical process or what the rest of us might call a feedback loop. As this book says, “Since its inception, advertising has been built on the recognition that selling is a matter of motivation through strategic communication.” The interesting thing about this is that we know we are being lied to when we watch advertisements. We know that no matter how nice our breath smells we are unlikely to have a supermodel fawning over us – but it isn’t ‘truth’ we want from advertising, it is rather an acceptable fantasy.
This book starts with a very broad – admittedly too broad and too simplified – history of childhood. It starts by saying that childhood did not exist in the Middle Ages – that back then children were more or less seen as ‘little adults’. This is an overstatement of the case, but it is clearly the case that the transition from child to adult back then was not nearly as ‘segmented’ as it is today. The standard list of changes is mentioned, with the 1950s ‘teenagers’ and the 1990s tweenies and today even with talk of the teenage years lasting until the 30s, given that school seems to lasts until 25 for increasing sections of the population. With all this the social construction of ‘childhood’ seems apparent.
This is another book that applies Bourdieu’s notion of fields and habitus to education. A large part of education is about indoctrinating students into the tastes of their appropriate classes and, as Bourdieu is quoted as saying here, “taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier”. Marketing comes into this because marketing increasingly is based on the premise that there is no ‘middle market’ you can focus on, but rather the world is increasingly differentiated and segmented. Youth provide an optimal market segment, not because they have lots of money – although, their role in deciding what will be bought in a family (up to and including cars and houses) is often understated – but because the preferences they develop early can become preferences they have for life. Manipulating those preferences – helping to form them – has the potential to provide long-term profits. As one marketing company says to potential advertisers in schools, ”Let Lifetime Learning Systems bring your message to the classroom, where young people are forming attitudes that will last a lifetime.”
With the rise of the Internet and gaming, children are not as easy to market to as they had been when there were a limited number of television channels they were more or less corralled into watching. Also, technology (even technology as bland as the video recorder) means people can skip through the advertisements. Al the same, as Ani Difranco quotes, the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. So, we now see ever more product placement within ‘reality television’ shows of ever diminishing quality.
This presents marketers with a dilemma, the horns of which are formed by the difficulty in reaching smaller and smaller market segments defined by increasingly idiosyncratic distinctions that therefore deny an ‘overall’ marketing strategy confined to marketing ‘space’ that is appropriately (manageably) delimited. This is generally true, but, of course, as a society we do entrap large sections of our youth (that most valuable of market segments) into a single space for hours on end per day called ‘schools’. It is hardly surprising then that such spaces (schools) should increasingly come under the attention of corporations and marketers as obvious places to promote their products. The horrors of this are best exemplified in the US with such strategies as Channel One and school districts that supply exclusive rights to corporations such as Coke to their schools. This is increasingly becoming true elsewhere too.
With the proliferation of advertising in every other space within society to the point where it is so ubiquitous as to be virtually invisible, school has long been a site free of such promotion. School has also been a place of ‘trust’ within society. Educators are trusted to tell the truth – and so, both parents and students are likely to feel that products promoted in schools have the imprimatur of the school. Despite the often noble efforts of schools to distance themselves from such marketing, the savage cuts to the public school budgets in virtually all western nations and the increasing need for high value items (computers and such) mean the arms of corporate marketers are increasingly appealing. The issue identified here is that schools often undervalue (in both dollar and moral terms) what access to such a non-competitive marketing space advantages corporations in such ‘deals’. “Corporations are well informed of the schools’ need for revenue, yet school administrators are ill informed or do not fully comprehend the value of exclusive access to the children, an information asymmetry that apparently leads to an undervaluing of this access”. Which is actually made worse, as corporations are also the loudest voices in demanding reduced taxation – and thereby make the needs schools face all the greater for the crumbs corporations are prepared to provide in return. The move from citizen to customer is probably the most significant development in our society.
But marketing to children is more than just marketing within schools. Marketing informs our way of life and our way of life is informed by the content of television programs too, which are also a marketing exercise paid for by the advertisements which are the point of the programs. “Advertising and TV construct school as an old-fashioned, puritanical, drab and over-disciplined place where, dreadfully and ridiculously, children must be governed by others or be self-restrained – in other words, as a dystopia.” Furthermore, “In children’s culture, entertainment and advertising are constructed as separate from, and superior to, education. However, this world in which children are free and enjoying themselves is normative in many, many ways, not least in its construction of the normal person as white and middle class – as is pointed out in this book, you would struggle in Australia to see a Southern European or an Arab in a children’s program or advertisement – certainly never one that isn’t being parodied or presented as a terrorist of some sort.
This places adults in an uneasy position. They can see that the world children are being encouraged to believe in as enviable is anything but. There is a general feeling, brought about by the exaggerated stress on the pace of change, that children are ‘learning’ about ‘life’ far too quickly but also out-of-phase, learning about sex before they have any means of understanding it within any context. That this troubles parents is rather inevitable, I guess. That they feel childhood is being forsaken and children are being cheated out of that childhood itself leads to a false nostalgia. The response of many adults (teachers and parents), ironically enough, has been to turn schools into exactly the kinds of places marketing has constructed them as. Schools market themselves on the discipline they create, becoming obsessed with such things as uniforms and appearances. They market themselves to parents – parents who increasingly feel they have ‘failed’ their own children in ways that are impossible to define – with reassurances about test scores, predictable futures and tradition. I’ve been reading lots of school prospectuses lately, and even a school that was only set up last year bizarrely and repeatedly mentions tradition.
“The question is what social relations do school advertisements help to shape and whose fantasies do they tap into? Our research suggests that an adult fantasy here involves a return to particular educational traditions invoking respect for elders and clear discipline – a form of educational traditional fundamentalism. We see an attempt to create some certainty in the ‘manufactured uncertainty’ which characterises current school education and adult-child relations.”
Schools become sites of a commercial exchange. Knowledge becomes a commodity. But students also become products with differential worth and use value to their schools. As Youdell points out, there is a kind of triage that goes on in schools, with middle class girls the section you don’t need to worry about (them being the high value students who can both ‘calm’ the boys while also achieving the best grades, thereby helping the school to promote itself in all senses), the kids you can do nothing for (an increasingly large part of the population) and the kids you can and should intervene to help (essentially middle class boys, and hence all of the talk lately about schools being feminine spaces and that the feminist revolution having gone too far). As is quoted from the research done in this book into schools in Geelong in Victoria, when the interviewer asked the kids what it would be like to attend an all-boy school the kids (boys and girls) all agreed it would be ‘trouble’. Boys are presented invariably as poison – a troubling fact in itself.
Our society, based as it is on marketing and advertising and therefore the creation of false hopes and dreams, believes that happiness is always but one purchase away. This view has also found its way into our school system, where the more you are able to pay for your education the better you are seen as providing your children with the best of all possible educations – and therefore the better you love your children. The relationship between consumption and value and values and educational attainment and parental love is seen as complete and self-evident.
But all of this is oddly framed – as is pointed out repeatedly, “Advertising depends on touching something deep in the consumer’s psyche … it tells fictional tales, but implies that the purchase of goods will fulfil the story’s promise. However, the exquisite irony is that advertisements are not expected to fulfil their promises or to connect to reality, but, rather, to connect to their readers’ fantasies about themselves and about their futures.”
The rub relates to our foundation myth in capitalist society, that not only is choice a ‘good’, but also that choice is ‘rational’. Parents and students alike are placed in a world of conflicting and confusing ‘information’ and, most importantly, one of manufactured emotional cattle prods, and then are told that whatever choice they make will be based purely on rational self-interest.
In this constructed world ‘childhood is implicitly defined as a powerless and dependent state and the commercialisation of schooling reinforces this.” But the commercialisation of school also places moral values on students who are forced to attend some schools rather than others – and exclusion typically determined on the basis of finance. This is the sorting hat of the new economy, or rather, the sorting parental hip pocket. The kids interviewed in this study had no trouble in seeing their place in the social hierarchy according to the school they could attend – as one girl says, “The private schools are really snobby and the rich people go there, the upper-class people, so we are just like, the Hall (her state school) scum.” The advantages that come from attending private schools aren’t lost on them either – in terms of the promise of jobs later and of valuable social networks – “if given the money, over half of them (the kids going to a local government school) said they would move to a private school.”
The last few chapters of the book look at ways in which teachers and parents can ‘fight back’ against the commercialisation of our schools. In part this is in doing a Dewey – rather than seeing education as a preparation for some distant future, seeing education as something real that needs to connect with the student’s life now by giving them tasks that are valuable on their own and for their own sake, rather than as some kind of down payment for a future that may never eventuate.
This is a fascinating book and one of much more interest than it might be interpreted as from its title – as being solely of interest to teachers. The nexus presented here between education, entertainment and advertising is fundamental to our society and it positions both students and various ‘adults’ – parents, teachers, politicians – in ways that need to be considered and challenged. (and I love the cover of this book)
This book starts with a very broad – admittedly too broad and too simplified – history of childhood. It starts by saying that childhood did not exist in the Middle Ages – that back then children were more or less seen as ‘little adults’. This is an overstatement of the case, but it is clearly the case that the transition from child to adult back then was not nearly as ‘segmented’ as it is today. The standard list of changes is mentioned, with the 1950s ‘teenagers’ and the 1990s tweenies and today even with talk of the teenage years lasting until the 30s, given that school seems to lasts until 25 for increasing sections of the population. With all this the social construction of ‘childhood’ seems apparent.
This is another book that applies Bourdieu’s notion of fields and habitus to education. A large part of education is about indoctrinating students into the tastes of their appropriate classes and, as Bourdieu is quoted as saying here, “taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier”. Marketing comes into this because marketing increasingly is based on the premise that there is no ‘middle market’ you can focus on, but rather the world is increasingly differentiated and segmented. Youth provide an optimal market segment, not because they have lots of money – although, their role in deciding what will be bought in a family (up to and including cars and houses) is often understated – but because the preferences they develop early can become preferences they have for life. Manipulating those preferences – helping to form them – has the potential to provide long-term profits. As one marketing company says to potential advertisers in schools, ”Let Lifetime Learning Systems bring your message to the classroom, where young people are forming attitudes that will last a lifetime.”
With the rise of the Internet and gaming, children are not as easy to market to as they had been when there were a limited number of television channels they were more or less corralled into watching. Also, technology (even technology as bland as the video recorder) means people can skip through the advertisements. Al the same, as Ani Difranco quotes, the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. So, we now see ever more product placement within ‘reality television’ shows of ever diminishing quality.
This presents marketers with a dilemma, the horns of which are formed by the difficulty in reaching smaller and smaller market segments defined by increasingly idiosyncratic distinctions that therefore deny an ‘overall’ marketing strategy confined to marketing ‘space’ that is appropriately (manageably) delimited. This is generally true, but, of course, as a society we do entrap large sections of our youth (that most valuable of market segments) into a single space for hours on end per day called ‘schools’. It is hardly surprising then that such spaces (schools) should increasingly come under the attention of corporations and marketers as obvious places to promote their products. The horrors of this are best exemplified in the US with such strategies as Channel One and school districts that supply exclusive rights to corporations such as Coke to their schools. This is increasingly becoming true elsewhere too.
With the proliferation of advertising in every other space within society to the point where it is so ubiquitous as to be virtually invisible, school has long been a site free of such promotion. School has also been a place of ‘trust’ within society. Educators are trusted to tell the truth – and so, both parents and students are likely to feel that products promoted in schools have the imprimatur of the school. Despite the often noble efforts of schools to distance themselves from such marketing, the savage cuts to the public school budgets in virtually all western nations and the increasing need for high value items (computers and such) mean the arms of corporate marketers are increasingly appealing. The issue identified here is that schools often undervalue (in both dollar and moral terms) what access to such a non-competitive marketing space advantages corporations in such ‘deals’. “Corporations are well informed of the schools’ need for revenue, yet school administrators are ill informed or do not fully comprehend the value of exclusive access to the children, an information asymmetry that apparently leads to an undervaluing of this access”. Which is actually made worse, as corporations are also the loudest voices in demanding reduced taxation – and thereby make the needs schools face all the greater for the crumbs corporations are prepared to provide in return. The move from citizen to customer is probably the most significant development in our society.
But marketing to children is more than just marketing within schools. Marketing informs our way of life and our way of life is informed by the content of television programs too, which are also a marketing exercise paid for by the advertisements which are the point of the programs. “Advertising and TV construct school as an old-fashioned, puritanical, drab and over-disciplined place where, dreadfully and ridiculously, children must be governed by others or be self-restrained – in other words, as a dystopia.” Furthermore, “In children’s culture, entertainment and advertising are constructed as separate from, and superior to, education. However, this world in which children are free and enjoying themselves is normative in many, many ways, not least in its construction of the normal person as white and middle class – as is pointed out in this book, you would struggle in Australia to see a Southern European or an Arab in a children’s program or advertisement – certainly never one that isn’t being parodied or presented as a terrorist of some sort.
This places adults in an uneasy position. They can see that the world children are being encouraged to believe in as enviable is anything but. There is a general feeling, brought about by the exaggerated stress on the pace of change, that children are ‘learning’ about ‘life’ far too quickly but also out-of-phase, learning about sex before they have any means of understanding it within any context. That this troubles parents is rather inevitable, I guess. That they feel childhood is being forsaken and children are being cheated out of that childhood itself leads to a false nostalgia. The response of many adults (teachers and parents), ironically enough, has been to turn schools into exactly the kinds of places marketing has constructed them as. Schools market themselves on the discipline they create, becoming obsessed with such things as uniforms and appearances. They market themselves to parents – parents who increasingly feel they have ‘failed’ their own children in ways that are impossible to define – with reassurances about test scores, predictable futures and tradition. I’ve been reading lots of school prospectuses lately, and even a school that was only set up last year bizarrely and repeatedly mentions tradition.
“The question is what social relations do school advertisements help to shape and whose fantasies do they tap into? Our research suggests that an adult fantasy here involves a return to particular educational traditions invoking respect for elders and clear discipline – a form of educational traditional fundamentalism. We see an attempt to create some certainty in the ‘manufactured uncertainty’ which characterises current school education and adult-child relations.”
Schools become sites of a commercial exchange. Knowledge becomes a commodity. But students also become products with differential worth and use value to their schools. As Youdell points out, there is a kind of triage that goes on in schools, with middle class girls the section you don’t need to worry about (them being the high value students who can both ‘calm’ the boys while also achieving the best grades, thereby helping the school to promote itself in all senses), the kids you can do nothing for (an increasingly large part of the population) and the kids you can and should intervene to help (essentially middle class boys, and hence all of the talk lately about schools being feminine spaces and that the feminist revolution having gone too far). As is quoted from the research done in this book into schools in Geelong in Victoria, when the interviewer asked the kids what it would be like to attend an all-boy school the kids (boys and girls) all agreed it would be ‘trouble’. Boys are presented invariably as poison – a troubling fact in itself.
Our society, based as it is on marketing and advertising and therefore the creation of false hopes and dreams, believes that happiness is always but one purchase away. This view has also found its way into our school system, where the more you are able to pay for your education the better you are seen as providing your children with the best of all possible educations – and therefore the better you love your children. The relationship between consumption and value and values and educational attainment and parental love is seen as complete and self-evident.
But all of this is oddly framed – as is pointed out repeatedly, “Advertising depends on touching something deep in the consumer’s psyche … it tells fictional tales, but implies that the purchase of goods will fulfil the story’s promise. However, the exquisite irony is that advertisements are not expected to fulfil their promises or to connect to reality, but, rather, to connect to their readers’ fantasies about themselves and about their futures.”
The rub relates to our foundation myth in capitalist society, that not only is choice a ‘good’, but also that choice is ‘rational’. Parents and students alike are placed in a world of conflicting and confusing ‘information’ and, most importantly, one of manufactured emotional cattle prods, and then are told that whatever choice they make will be based purely on rational self-interest.
In this constructed world ‘childhood is implicitly defined as a powerless and dependent state and the commercialisation of schooling reinforces this.” But the commercialisation of school also places moral values on students who are forced to attend some schools rather than others – and exclusion typically determined on the basis of finance. This is the sorting hat of the new economy, or rather, the sorting parental hip pocket. The kids interviewed in this study had no trouble in seeing their place in the social hierarchy according to the school they could attend – as one girl says, “The private schools are really snobby and the rich people go there, the upper-class people, so we are just like, the Hall (her state school) scum.” The advantages that come from attending private schools aren’t lost on them either – in terms of the promise of jobs later and of valuable social networks – “if given the money, over half of them (the kids going to a local government school) said they would move to a private school.”
The last few chapters of the book look at ways in which teachers and parents can ‘fight back’ against the commercialisation of our schools. In part this is in doing a Dewey – rather than seeing education as a preparation for some distant future, seeing education as something real that needs to connect with the student’s life now by giving them tasks that are valuable on their own and for their own sake, rather than as some kind of down payment for a future that may never eventuate.
This is a fascinating book and one of much more interest than it might be interpreted as from its title – as being solely of interest to teachers. The nexus presented here between education, entertainment and advertising is fundamental to our society and it positions both students and various ‘adults’ – parents, teachers, politicians – in ways that need to be considered and challenged. (and I love the cover of this book)
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