Abstract
Capitalist expansion is predicated on consumption and growth driven by citizens following their individual preferences in the marketplace. To promote consumption and influence consumer wants and desire, propaganda is used to persuade citizens to purchase products using a wide and diverse range of techniques. In recent decades, this has involved an increase in the marketing of products and consumerist values to children through the education system and the broader media. This article argues that successive UK governments’ public policy in this area has been characterized by inaction, inertia and contradiction and that the resulting policy disjunctures are at variance with their public rhetoric about the commercialization of childhood and professed objectives regarding the promotion of environmental awareness and sustainable lifestyles in schools.
Highlights
Children today are being sold the idea that the path to happiness lies through excessive consumption
That the leader of the British Conservative Party, quoted above, should add his voice to the public disquiet about modern marketing techniques to children and, further, that his party should promise in their 2010 election manifesto to ‘take a series of measures to help reverse the commercialisation of childhood’ (Conservative Party, 2010, p.43)
As the newly elected Opposition leader, Cameron had visited arctic Norway in 2006 for what became known as his ‘hug-a-husky’ photo-shoots and, as prime minister, declared to civil servants at the Department of Energy and Climate Change that he wanted the new coalition administration to be ‘the greenest government ever’ (Randerson, 2010)
Summary
Children today are being sold the idea that the path to happiness lies through excessive consumption. The central theme advanced throughout the paper is that corporate marketing and brand-building to children in schools and educational contexts, what Molnar (2005) calls ‘school commercialism’, reinforces the values of consumer culture and is, in essence, a further contributory factor to the commercialization of childhood.
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