This Little Kiddy Went to Market

Richard Gosden, Wendy Varney, Sharon Beder

Description

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'.
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

Sujets

• Public Policy
• Corporate Governance
• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• Child protection
• Economics
• Business

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 20 mai 2009
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783715473
• Langue: English

Extrait

This Little Kiddy Went to Market
This Little Kiddy Went to Market
The Corporate Capture of Childhood
Sharon Beder
with Wendy Varney and Richard Gosden
 
 
First published 2009 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010
www.plutobooks.com
Distributed in the United States of America exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010
Copyright © Sharon Beder 2009
The right of Sharon Beder, Wendy Varney and Richard Gosden to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN   978 0 7453 2916 1   Hardback ISBN   978 0 7453 2915 4   Paperback ISBN   978 1 7837 1547 3   ePub ISBN   978 1 7837 1548 0   Mobi
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin. The paper may contain up to 70 per cent post-consumer waste.
10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1
Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services Ltd, Sidmouth, England Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England Printed and bound in the European Union by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne
Contents List of Figures, Tables and Boxes Acknowledgements      1 Introduction    2 Turning Children into Consumers    3 Turning Play into Business ( Wendy Varney and Sharon Beder )    4 Branding Childish Identities    5 Teaching Consumer Values    6 Turning Schools into Businesses    7 Making Schools Accountable    8 Business Campaigns    9 Made to Order 10 Dumbing Down Future Citizens 11 Teaching Corporate Values 12 Privatising Schools 13 Turning Schools into Markets 14 Privatisation Proponents 15 Controlling Wayward Children ( Richard Gosden ) 16 Conclusion   Notes The Authors Index
List of Figures, Tables and Boxes
FIGURES 2.1 Percentage of Overweight Children Around 10 Years Old 6.1 Declining Corporate Income Taxes 1950–2004 8.1 Edward Rust’s Connections 8.2 Some Standards and Testing Advocacy Groups and Some of the Organisations that Fund Them 8.3 McGraw-Hill Companies, Products and Connections 8.4 Publishers Share of K–12 Market 12.1 Estimated Growth and Coverage of EMOs 1998–2008 14.1 Voucher and Charter School Advocacy Groups and Some of the Foundations that Fund Them 14.2 Key Think Tanks Promoting School Privatisation and Foundations that Fund Them 14.3 Some Key Individuals and Their Associations with Think Tanks
TABLES 2.1 Percentage of Purchases Resulting From Nagging 3.1 Some Barbie Dolls and Accessories Promoting Brands 5.1 Educational versus Commercial Agendas 6.1 The New Language of School Reform 9.1 Enterprise versus Citizen Education 9.2 Some International Enterprise Programmes 10.1 Educational Paradigms 12.1 Charter School Teaching Staff – Some Figures 12.2 Performance of Charter Schools – Some Studies 12.3 Some Different Types of Schools 14.1 Key Individuals Funding the School Privatisation Efforts 14.2 Voucher and Tax Credits Referenda 15.1 Children and Adolescents Aged 9–17 Claimed to Have Disorders
BOXES 2.1 Extent of Television Watching – Some Figures 2.2 Children and Alcohol 2.3 Food Advertising – Some Figures 2.4 Some Studies on the Impact of Advertising on Children’s Diet 2.5 Changing Diets – Some Figures 2.6 Some Denial Studies from the Food Industry 2.7 Some Advertising Regulations in Various Nations 3.1 Cartoon Characters and Cigarettes 3.2 Alcohol and Tobacco 4.1 Children’s Brand Recognition – Some Study Findings 4.2 Marketing Conferences – Some Quotes 4.3 Materialism in Young People – Some Study Findings 5.1 Junk Food in Schools – Some Examples 5.2 Some Coupon Redemption Schemes 5.3 Alloy Media and Marketing 5.4 Some Examples of Contests and Scholarships 5.5 More Examples of Product Placements in Class Activities 6.2 School Devolution Around the World 6.3 Funding Inequities – Some Figures 7.1 Accountability and Testing in Various Nations 8.1 Some More Business Advocacy Groups 8.2 Money to be Made from Testing – Some Figures 9.1 Eliminating Recess – Some Figures 9.2 Organisations Fostering Enterprise Education in the UK 10.1 ‘Back to Basics’ in Mathematics Teaching 10.2 Open Court by McGraw-Hill 10.3 Membership of the UK Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) 10.4 Standard English 10.5 Excerpt of Fifth-Grade Citizen Education Content Standard 10.6 Organisations Behind the National Voluntary Content Standards 12.1 Online or Virtual Schools 12.2 Academies – Some Problem Cases 12.3 Education Action Zones (EAZs) 12.4 Education Alternatives (EAI) / Tesseract 12.5 Outsourcing School Meals 14.1 Some More Privately Funded Voucher Programmes 14.2 Steps Towards Privatisation 15.1 Examples of Childhood Mental Disorders 15.2 Diagnostic Criteria for Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder 15.3 Sample Questions in TeenScreen Interviews
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Nina Lansbury-Hall for her research assistance with Chapter 11 : Teaching Corporate Values. Also thanks to the Campaign for Commercial-Free Education in Ireland for permission to reproduce Table 5.1 : Educational versus Commercial Agendas and Professor Geoff Whitty for permission to use a table from his book Devolution and Choice in Education in compiling Table 6.1 : The New Language of School Reform.
1
Introduction

It is easy to exploit children – any fool can do it. It takes both strength and intelligence not to do so.
C. Glenn Cupit 1
Amanda’s parents gave her an mp3 player for her thirteenth birthday. She had been nagging them for an iPod for months but they didn’t understand, as her peers did, the importance of the iPod brand. So they got her another brand that they thought offered better value for money. Instead of being delighted she was depressed. It was the same with everything she had. Her mobile was two years old yet her parents couldn’t understand the importance of having the latest model. She was sure that it was because she had second- or third-rate versions of everything that she was not popular at school.
Amanda’s brother Andrew was in the bathroom vomiting. He had a school test today and he didn’t do well in tests even though his teachers usually gave him good marks for school projects and essays. He thought too much about the questions and was able to think of more than one reasonable answer and this meant he took too long to do the test.
If he failed today’s test Andrew would have to do extra classes on Saturday mornings and might have to give up music classes to make way for more reading classes. Andrew’s parents wouldn’t mind too much if this happened because they had to pay extra fees for those music classes. But music classes were the only part of school that Andrew liked. Otherwise he hated school. It was so boring! They never studied anything that he could relate to and it was all so repetitive. It seemed to be all tests and practice tests and preparing for tests.
Andrew’s poor test results were likely to affect his ability to get into a good secondary school; he might have to go to the dilapidated school across the river where students have to pass through a metal detector and wear their coats in class because the heating doesn’t work.
Their little sister Angie was having a tantrum in the kitchen because Mummy wouldn’t buy the sugary cereal with Shrek on the packet that she saw on television. Amanda thought it wouldn’t be long before Angie would be taking those little white pills that so many kids at school took when she was in primary school. In her school some of the older kids traded them along with other drugs to get a high.
Amanda, Andrew and Angie are too young to understand, but much of their discontent and many of their anxieties stem from the corporate capture of childhood, that is, the way modern business corporations shape children’s dreams and desires, determine their school experience and influence their behaviour and values.
Modern affluent societies overflow with a cornucopia of goods produced for the entertainment, pleasure, convenience and education of children, yet increasingly there are signs that in some of the most prosperous nations, particularly English-speaking countries, something is amiss. Those same children seem to be less content, more stressed and less healthy than any previous generation.
In 2005 the UK National Consumer Council (NCC) found that British children were ‘the least happy generation of the post-war era’. 2 Towards the end of 2006 a group of over a hundred academics, teachers, psychologists and others wrote to the Daily Telegraph in the UK to express their deep concern about what was happening to children. They argued that ‘the escalating incidence of childhood depression’ as well as ‘the rise of substance abuse, violence and self-harm amongst our young people’, arose from the neglect of children’s emotional and social needs. They blamed junk food, screen-based entertainment, ‘an overly academic test-driven primary curriculum’ and a ‘hyper-competitive culture’ as contributing factors. 3
Their concern was backed up by a United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) assessment of the well-being of children in 21 affluent nations, published in 2007. It found that children in the US and the UK were worse off than in any of the other nations in the study, particularly with respect to family and peer relationships; behaviours and risks; health and safety in the case of the US; and subjective well-being in the case of the UK. Children aged 11, 13 and 15 were less likely to find their peers ‘kind and helpful’ in the UK and the US than in any of the other 21 nations apart from