CONSUMING CHILDREN

"Consuming Children is an important, exciting, funny and tragic book, addressing key issues for education in the 21st century. It dramatically charts the corporatising of education and the corporatising of the child. It is a book that demands to be read by teachers and policymakers - before it is too late. Sparkling with sociological insight and imagination, it is as clear as it is important as it is disturbing." - Stephen J. Ball, Karl Mannheim Professor of Sociology of Education, Institute of Education, University of London

"Accessible, insightful and boldly argued,'Consuming Children' makes a refreshing contribution to current discussions of young people, schooling and the culture industry. Jane Kenway and Elizabeth Bullen draw on a strong base of research and scholarship to advance powerful critiques and interesting and workable pedagogical responses to corporate culturalism." - Colin Lankshear
National Autonomous University of Mexico

"'Consuming Children' offers a challenging perspective on one of the most pressing educational issues of our time - the changing relationships between childhood, schooling and consumer culture. Combining incisive commentary on established debates with new insights from empirical research, it should be read by all those concerned with the future of learning." - Professor David Buckingham
Institute of Education, University of London

* Who are today's young people and how are they constructed in media-consumer culture and in relation to adult cultures in particular?

* How are the issues of pleasure, power, agency to be understood in the corporatised global community?

* How are teachers to educate young people? What new practices are required?

Buy delight, kids rule, adults are dim and schools are dull. These are canons of children's consumer cultures. In the places where kids, commodities and images meet, education, entertainment and advertising merge. Kids consume this corporate abundance with appetite. But what happens now that schools are on the market? Is this a form of corporate gluttony? Are designer schools educationally 'grotesque'? Who is conspicuously consuming at the educational emporium? How are students packaged? Which students have badge appeal? Who rules? Are adults taking their revenge on children? Are kids hungry to learn or keen to transgress? Where is their delight?

Consuming Children argues that we are entering another stage in the construction of the young as the demarcations between education, entertainment and advertising collapse and as the lines between the
generations both blur and harden. Drawing from the voices of students and from contemporary cultural theory this book provokes us to ponder the role of the school in the 'age of desire'.