Abstract
One of the most important legacies of American public education has been providing students with the critical capacities, knowledge, and values that enable them to become active citizens striving to build a stronger democratic society. Within this tradition, Americans have defined schooling as a public good and a fundamental right.1 Such a definition rightfully asserts the primacy of democratic values over corporate culture and commercial values. Schools are an important indicator of the well-being of a democratic society. They remind us of the civic values that must be passed on to young people in order for them to think critically, to participate in power relations and policy decisions that affect their lives, and to transform the racial, social, and economic inequities that limit democratic social relations. Yet as crucial as the role of public schooling has been in American history, it is facing an unprecedented attack from proponents of market ideology who strongly advocate the unparalleled expansion of corporate culture.2
School is … the ideal time to influence attitudes, build long-term loyalties, introduce new products, test markets, promote sampling and trial usage and—above all—to generate immediate sales.
—Cited in Consumer Union Education Services, Captive Kids: Commercial Pressures on Kids at Schools
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Notes
John Dewey, Democracy and Education (New York: Free Press, 1916);
Henry Giroux, Schooling and the Struggle for Public Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988);
David Sehr, Education for Democracy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996).
Michael Jacobson and Laurie Masur, Laurie Marketing Madness (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1995);
Alex Molnar, Giving Kids the Business (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1996);
Consumer Union Education Service, Captive Kids: A Report on Commercial Pressures on Kids at School (Yonkers, N.Y.: Consumer Union Education Services, 1998).
David W. Kirkpatrick, Choice in Schooling: A Case for Tuition Vouchers (Chicago: Loyala University Press, 1990);
Diane Ravitch, Debating the Future of American Education (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institute, 1995). Many of these reports are produced by right-wing think tanks with a vested interest in the privatization movement. For example, see Paul Pekin, “Schoolhouse Crock: Right-Wing Myths Behind the ‘New Stupidity,’” Extra! (January/February 1998), pp. 9–10.
For an excellent rebuttal of the charge that American public education is in a state of disastrous decline, see David Berliner and Bruce Biddle, The Manufactured Crisis (Reading, Mass.: Addison Wesley, 1995); Gerald Bracey, “What Happened to America’s Public Schools? Not What You Think?” American Heritage (November 1997), pp. 39–52.
For a summary of the historical failures of privatization, see the Carol Ascher, Norm Fruchter, and Robert Berne, Hard Lessons: Public Schools and Privatization (New York: The Twentieth Century Fund, 1996). For a specific analysis of the failure of Education Alternatives, Inc., in Baltimore and Hartford, see Molnar, Giving Kids the Business, esp. chap. 4, pp. 77–116. Also, see Vine, “To Market, To Market,” pp. 11–17; Bruce Shapiro, “Privateers Flunk Schools,” The Nation, February 19, 1998, p. 4.
Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve (New York: The Free Press, 1994).
Alan O’Shea, “A Special Relationship? Academia and Pedagogy,” Cultural Studies 12:4 (1998), pp. 521–522.
Stanley Aronowitz, “Introduction,” in Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), pp. 4–5.
Svi Shapiro, “Public School Reform: The Mismeasure of Education,” Tikkun 13:1 (Winter 1998), p. 54.
See also Henry A. Giroux, Teachers as Intellectuals (Westport, Conn.: Bergin and Garvey Press, 1988);
Stanley Aronowitz and Henry A. Giroux, Education Still Under Siege (Westport, Conn.: Bergin and Garvey Press, 1993).
I take up this issue in Henry A. Giroux, The Mouse That Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999).
Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman, Corporate Predators (Monroe, Me.: Common Courage Press, 1999), p. 168.
Jeffrey Henig, “The Danger of Market Rhetoric,” in Robert Lowe and Barbara Miner, eds., Selling Out Our Schools (Milwaukee: Rethinking Schools Institute, 1996), p. 11.
See also Jeffrey Henig, Rethinking School Choice (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994).
Phyllis Sides, “Captive Kids: Teaching Students to be Consumers,” in Selling Out Our Schools: Vouchers, Markets, and the Future of Public Education (Milwaukee: Rethinking Schools Publication, 1996), p. 36.
For an extensive analysis of Channel One, see Henry A. Giroux, Disturbing Pleasures: Learning Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), esp. chap. 3, “pp. 47–67.
For a brilliant analysis of how citizenship is being privatized within an expanding corporate culture, see Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997).
This issue is taken up in great detail in Molnar, Giving Kids the Business. For a more general analysis of the relationship between corporate culture and schooling, see Joe Kincheloe and Shirley Steinberg, eds., KinderCulture: The Corporate Construction of Childhood (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1997).
Gerald Grace, “Politics, Markets, and Democratic Schools: On the Transformation of School Leadership,” in A. H. Halsey, Hugh Lauder, Phillip Brown, and Amy Stuart Wells, eds., Education: Culture, Economy, Society (New York: Oxford, 1997), p. 314.
R. George Wright, Selling Words: Free Speech in a Commercial Culture (New York: New York University Press, 1997), p. 181.
A number of books take up the relationship between schooling and democracy; some of the more important recent critical contributions include: Elizabeth A. Kelly, Education, Democracy, & Public Knowledge (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1995);
Wilfred Carr and Anthony Hartnett, Education and the Struggle for Democracy (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1996); Sehr, Education for Public Democracy;
James Fraser, Reading, Writing and Justice: School Reform as If Democracy Matters (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997); see also Giroux, Schooling and the Struggle for Public Life;
and Henry A. Giroux, Pedagogy and the Politics of Hope (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1997).
Robin D. G. Kelley, “Neo-Cons of the Black Nation,” Black Renaissance Noire 1:2 (Summer/Fall 1997), p. 146.
Cornel West, “America’s Three-Fold Crisis,” Tikkun 9:2 (1994), p. 42.
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© 2000 Henry A. Giroux
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Giroux, H.A. (2000). Kids for Sale: Corporate Culture and the Challenge of Public Schooling. In: Stealing Innocence. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-10916-3_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-10916-3_4
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