This book investigates the way that corporations are strategically shaping children to be hyper-consumers as well as the submissive employees and uncritical citizens of the future.
Sharon Beder shows how marketers and advertisers are targeting ever younger children in a relentless campaign, transforming children’s play into a commercial opportunity and taking advantage of childish anxieties.
She presents an alarming picture of how a child’s social development – through education, health care and nutrition – has become an ordered conveyor belt of consumerist conditioning. Focusing on education in particular, she also shows how ‘difficult’ children are taught from an early age that pharmaceuticals can be used to discipline them or to make them ‘happy’.
Table of Content
Introduction
1. Turning Children into Consumers
2. Turning Play into Business
3. Branding Childish Identities
4. Teaching Consumer Values
5. Turning Schools into Businesses
6. Making Schools Accountable
7. Business Campaigns
8. Made to Order
9. Dumbing Down Future Citizens
10. Teaching Corporate Values
11. Privatising Schools
12. Turning Schools into Markets
13. Privatisation Proponents
14. Controlling Wayward Children
Conclusion
Notes
About the author
Dr Richard Gosden is a full time writer and researcher based in Australia. He is the author of This Little Kiddy Went to Market (Pluto, 2009).
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