Consuming children: Education-entertainment-advertising.

Jane Kenway and Elizabeth Bullen Buckingham: Open University Press, 2001.

Education, entertainment and advertising are three words that don't often come together in a book's subtitle, particularly one aimed at teachers and policy makers. However, in Consuming children: Education-entertainment-advertising, Jane Kenway and Elizabeth Bullen aim to bring the world of 'consumer-media culture' directly into the classroom. From the outset of this book, the authors lay their theoretical, political and pedagogical cards on the table. The central message here for educators is that, rather than demonising consumer culture, we need to think through how we can use the realm of the popular to make the classroom critically relevant in an increasingly market-driven age. As the ambiguous title suggests, Consuming children is not just another dystopian tract lamenting the increasing commercialisation of the once innocent world of childhood. Instead Kenway and Bullen aim to convey the fact that, although young people today are the focus of a media-marketing machine with a voracious and seemingly unstoppable appetite, it is important to recognise that children are themselves active consumers in their own right. Rather than portraying young people as passive victims of consumer culture (or as mere objects of analysis for adult critics of that culture), Kenway and Bullen set out to foreground the ways in which children--through their complex and often highly reflexive taste preferences, their high degree of cultural and technological literacy, and their often subversive use of consumer culture as a critical counterpoint to the 'official' culture of the adult world--use consumer culture as a means of forging a sense of agency in a complex and contradictory world.

Accordingly the authors set out to cover an ambitious range of topics relevant to the construction of children's consumer culture, from marketing history and discourse to the increasing commoditisation of school curricula. In chapter one, entitled 'Devouting theory', they set the scene for a wider discussion of the potentially productive relationship between critical pedagogy and consumer culture by summarising the main theories of consumption. Starting with a discussion of the early Marxist critiques of mass culture associated with figures like Horkheimer and Adorno, they move from political economy approaches, through theories of taste, distinction and style, to the more recent focus on the tactical and negotiated nature of consumption. They argue, however, that much of this work continues to hold up an essentially dystopian view of consumer culture as something that must be resisted. In contrast, they see the work of Walter Benjamin as offering a more nuanced account of consumer culture. In particular, his dialectical perspective on mass culture enables an understanding of the pleasures and desires associated with consumption. In Benjamin's writings, the 'dreamworld' of consumerism is not reduced to the vulgar economism of the Frankfurt school but offers the possibility of a critical 'reenchantment' of the world, a notion that the authors appropriate and rework in their later discussion of pedagogy and consumer culture.

After laying the theoretical groundwork for the book, in the next chapter, 'Inventing the young consumer', they proceed to map out the historical development of the child as a consuming subject, from the emergence in the post-World War II period of 'the child as shopper' and the notion of youth as a market category, to the more recent focus on market segmentation and the construction of generational categories such as generations X and Y, and the baby boomers. Continuing on from this discussion of consumption and generationalism, the authors move on to analyse the way in which the construction of children and youth as autonomous consumers relies on the othering of adult culture. Central to this process, they argue, is the creation of transgenerational tensions between the consumer culture of children and that of adults. Children's consumer culture offers a space marked by a carnivalesque inversion of adult values, and a celebration of 'low' forms of culture. By contrast, adult consumption is perceived as being characterised by an adherence to the rules of official culture, with the realm of education in particular being seen as an adult-oriented world governed by principles of constraint, hierarchy and control. Thus, whereas adult consumer culture often involves a blend of education and entertainment, consumer culture aimed at children defines itself through its rejection of educational values.

After foregrounding this opposition between children's consumer practices and the educational realm, another chapter outlines the way that corporations are now challenging this education/entertainment divide as they move towards targeting the secondary school sector as a potentially highly lucrative new consumer market. Although, as Kenway and Bullen note, schools have never been autonomous from commercial pressures, recent developments, such as the fragmentation of the television audience and the growing influence of children over household consumption practices, have made the school sector an increasingly attractive target for advertisers. As they point out, whereas the fragmented children's market means that older mass media forms like television are less attractive venues for advertisers than they once were, the school setting by contrast provides corporations with a captive market, often conveniently divided into age groups, genders and ethnicities. Schools also provide marketers with an ideal environment in which to develop a new group of lifelong 'brand loyal' consumers. Furthermore, for corporations concerned with 'image management', aligning their products with the school sector is a powerful way of constructing themselves as good corporate citizens and providing their products with a veneer of wholesome, educational value.

What then has been the role of the schools themselves in this trend? As Kenway and Bullen note, although their research has found that school principals are often highly critical of this commercialisation process, the growing pressures on schools to become self-managing and entrepreneurial has provided the ideal climate for the commoditisation of the curriculum. As the chapter on 'Designer schools, packaged students' suggests, in the face of chronic under-funding by the state and economic rationalist government policies, schools themselves are having to invest time and money into marketing in order to attract both students and corporate funding. Discussing the way schools are often forced to construct themselves as commodities, the authors note that students are also increasingly being interpellated as educational consumers. Accordingly 'knowledge increasingly becomes understood as a commodity both for individual students to invest in and also for schools' (p. 134). Paradoxically, however, although the boundaries between education and consumer culture are increasingly being eroded, their research indicates that students continue to see schools as largely marginal to their everyday lives and identities. 'Schools generally lack enchantment for students' (p. 151).

The final two chapters accordingly suggest strategies for reenchanting the classroom and, at the same time, empowering students to become active cultural critics. Chapter six on 'Popular and profane pedagogies' looks to both the corporate and anti-corporate world for strategies to bring into the classroom. Arguing that teachers need to tackle consumer culture head-on, the authors suggest that a critical pedagogical approach to consumerism starts with the recognition that education and entertainment are not necessarily polarised spheres. Rather than purely celebrating or denigrating the popular sphere, they argue for a double-edged approach where teachers are both critical and playful towards consumer culture. Emphasising the importance of validating children's knowledges and everyday experiences, they argue that teachers need to work with rather than against the pleasures of consumer culture. In other words, rather than offering students a politics of resistance constructed in purely negative terms, Kenway and Bullen emphasise the need for a more productive approach whereby the critical agency of young people is affirmed.

In their final chapter, Kenway and Bullen move towards formulating some concrete strategies for both re-enchanting the classroom and getting teens to think critically about their own place in consumer society. Borrowing again from Benjamin, they coin the term 'cyberflaneur' to capture the sense of the 'young activist' as an 'insider-outsider figure', who is at once immersed in consumer-media culture and at the same time possesses a degree of critical distance. Rather than purely resisting or rejecting consumption practices, the cyberflaneur borrows strategies from marketing, such as 'cool hunting' (where marketers look to the latest trends in popular culture for new advertising and product ideas) and appropriates them for critical ends.

One approach the book recommends, for instance, involves students focusing on the 'cultural biographies and social histories' (p. 171) of particular consumer items. By literally tracking the social life of the commodity, students engage in a process of historicising and contextualising the object concerned. The authors suggest that this focus on foregrounding the concealed or abstracted processes behind commodity culture can also be promoted through students accessing the 'backstage reality' of consumer culture by, for example, interviewing people involved 'behind the scenes' in cultural production and critically analysing industry publications. Another approach they suggest is to look to the realm of 'zines' and 'culture jamming' where students use the internet to 'develop a strong sense of agency as producers of culture' (p. 181). In particular, they point to the distributed, self-publishing aspects of the Net, and note, for example, the many critical 'Girl power' zines that have emerged out of this medium. These publications are part of a broader subcultural movement which combines politics with style through the appropriation and subversion of the forms and genres of popular mass media and culture' (p. 183). Likewise they suggest the practice of 'culture jamming' also offers a way of critically engaging with consumer media culture in a way that values student literacies and pleasures at the same time as subverting corporate values. Examples of culture jamming mentioned include using corporate-sponsored computers at school to rework and parody corporate advertisements.

Having covered this huge amount of territory, the book finishes rather abruptly at this point with an all-too-brief conclusion that leaves a number of complex questions unanswered. I found myself asking, for example, how parents, teachers and policy makers are expected to work against the commoditisation of education and the curriculum (as the authors suggest in their conclusion) at the same time as bringing consumer-media culture into the classroom. Furthermore I wondered if this interpellation of adults into the role of protectors of education as a commodity-free zone tends to gloss over their own investment in the desires and pleasures generated by consumer culture. Another problem this raises is the ongoing construction of adult and children's culture as somehow oppositional or separate. Although Kenway and Bullen work hard to emphasise the constructed nature of this opposition, the arguments in the book nevertheless tend to reinforce rather than undermine this dichotomy. Accordingly there was not enough discussion of the way in which the search for the reenchantment (or the Harry Potterisation) of everyday life has seen the boundaries between adult and children's culture becoming increasingly blurred. Part of the problem possibly stems from the fact that the book is drawn from work done by a number of researchers across more than one research project. There is a sense that the chapters have been somewhat artificially connected together; the two chapters on the marketisation of schools, for instance, do not seem to quite fit into the flow of the overall argument.

Nevertheless Kenway and Bullen's book makes an important contribution to cultural studies work in education at the same time as tackling some of the key issues facing contemporary educators and policy makers heading into the 21st century. Although it draws upon a range of complex academic and theoretical debates, the book manages to be both accessible and practical and would be likely to appeal to academics, teachers and policy makers alike. Perhaps most importantly, it offers concrete ways for bringing cultural studies approaches to consumer culture into the classroom in ways that should be meaningful for students and teachers alike.

Tania Lewis
Monash University