>This Little Kiddy Went to Market: The Corporate Capture of Childhood
After Toxic Fish & Sewer Surfing (1989), The Nature of Sustainable Development (1993), Global Spin (1997), Environmental Principles and Policies (2006), Free-Market Missionaries (2006) and other books, Sharon Beder's latest work is called This Little Kiddy Went to Market: The Corporate Capture of Childhood (together with Wendy Varney and Richard Gosden).
Capitalism's exploitation of children has a long history.
Capitalism of the 19th century used, misused and abused children as labourers, illustrated brilliantly in Friedrich Engels' The Condition of the Working Class in Britain and E. P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class.
In the 20th century, consumer-capitalism started to target children as auxiliary consumers, integrating children into rising consumerism. This century, advanced consumerism has gone one step further through the removal of protective provisions introduced by the social-welfare states of the 20th century.
This opened the door to the child market and was supported by a neoliberal ideology — that watching TV is a free choice, just like switching the box off. It hid the fact that behind every second, every sound, every shape, every colour, and every action on children's advertising and children's TV shows, a substantial number of child and marketing psychologists were employed to create ads that enter a child's brain most deeply and successfully.
Most parents do not have enough defensive shielding in place to withstand the most comprehensive attacks on a child's brain that the advertising industry can muster (Baillargeon's Short Course in Intellectual Self-Defense — Find Your Inner Chomsky, 2007).
This Little Kiddy Went to Market investigates the way in which large multinational marketers, toy companies, fast-food companies, textbook publishers and educational corporations target young children. Children are exposed to an onslaught of advertising and marketing images designed to turn them into compliant workers and consumers.
As such, children are encouraged to define themselves by showing off what they "have" rather than "who they are". It is no longer use-value that counts and it is no longer exchange-value of objects that counts either. What matters in 21st century advanced consumer-capitalism is the value of a sign, a brand, a label, a logo (Klein's No Logo, 2000).
All of this occurs between corporate advertising and the education system in conjunction with the mass media. Rather than secret deals done in back rooms, children are targetted because of the common interest of corporations and advertising agencies — profit.
Beder shows how almost everything in the lives of today's children has been designed to convert them into consumers.
Beder argues that school reforms are driven by corporate needs, based on her analysis of so-called reforms in the Britain, North America, Australia and New Zealand. In these countries corporations have successfully persuaded governments to turn schools into competing business enterprises that suit corporate ends rather than the interests of the children. Australian deputy prime minister Julia Gillard's favouring the US education system is proof of this.
In sum, the book shows how children are converted into consumers, how child play has been used by corporations, and how this affects today's children. But it does not stop there.
Beder's book is the most advanced work since Bowles & Gintis' Schooling in Capitalist America (1976) discussed the relationship between the education system and the demands of capitalism, turning students into educational consumers to make profit. This is done even more so when schools are converted into businesses.
It makes schools financially accountable to management while converting a previous public good — education — into a market-driven business. It creates a dumbed-down version of functional human resources, disconnected from the idea of being democratic citizens.
Rather than teaching social and human values, school promotes corporate values. This is linked to the way schools have been privatised, exposed to market perceptions and ranked on invented lists.
All of this achieves two functions necessary for consumer capitalism. It controls inquisitive, untamed, rebellious and wayward children — hence the perceived demand for discipline — and turns them into diligent workers (Orwell's Oldspeak) — now called human resources (Orwell's Newspeak).
And there must be consumers fulfilling their double task of endless oscillations between working and consuming while never realising the suffocating consumerist regime they are confined within. They willingly join the rat race, never understanding that even when they have won, they are still a rat (see Schrijvers' The Way of the Rat – A Survival Guide to Office Politics, 2004).
Beder and her colleagues finish with a US "former businessman turned school chancellor" representing exactly what Gillard has in mind.
According to the October 19 Age ,"Gillard's American journey began last year when she travelled to New York to meet that city's schools chancellor, Joel Klein, a tough-talking former prosecutor".
According to Labor, our schools should be run by businesses and former prosecutors. This represents the anti-democratic merger of the legal system and management, expressed in order, discipline, and creating adults ready to be consumed by corporations.
In all this, the US is the shining example for schooling. But the October 19 Age, for example, suggested Gillard "should look to countries such as Finland, which outperforms Australia and the US in international assessments".
Never let the facts get in the way of an ideologically motivated politician. As Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine has shown so exquisitely, the US is a great example for workplace relations, education and social inclusion — isn't it?