Gambling with the Future of Public Education: Risk, Discipline, and the Moralizing of Educational Politics in Corporate Media

Abstract

This article discusses how representations of individual discipline and risk-taking in mass media inform the broader public discourses about public education and the public sector generally. Such representations and narratives about individual discipline and risk-taking often function in mass media as moral imperatives of consumer culture. Such moral imperatives of consumer culture not only replace a civic morality of political engagement more consistent with democratic ideals and participatory culture but also typify and even stimulate the shifting of politics onto a moral register and language that has characterized neo-liberal ideology, third way post-politics, and that informs contemporary US politics, especially evident during the ‘War on Terror.’ The article discusses these matters through the media spectacle of a Utah woman who permanently tattooed an advertisement for a casino on her face to pay for her son's private school tuition and through the gambling problem of former Secretary of Education and educational entrepreneur William Bennett.