Consumer Culture and its Social Effects on Education

Some of the difficulties that educators are having in teaching their students today are resultant from what Hannah Arendt (2006), called the crisis of authority in our modern world. It is hindering, among other things, the teacher’s ability to educate and protect the children from the world. This study proposes the importance of including consumer culture as the fundamental context with which to understand some of today’s more negative aspects of individualism and individuation that may be partly caused by a culture of entitlement in contemporary society in general, as well as in education and schools. Using consumer culture as an all-encompassing term to understand what Zygmunt Bauman (2007) referred to as our ‘liquid’ society, this study shows how this crisis is the result of capitalism’s metamorphosis from that of producers to that of consumers. It discusses how the change of capitalism’s ethos over the decades has had a marked effect on the individual sense of being and belonging by fundamentally replacing the citizen with the consumer. In education, consumer culture is promoting an individualized consumerist ethos that compromises the more metaphysical and holistic aspects of teaching (educere) while promoting the exclusively functionalist and mechanical educare with its more practical, skills-oriented, standardized, individualizing and ‘marketable’ aims of education. To understand the genesis of consumer culture’s alienating form of individualism, this study makes a brief historical analysis of capitalism’s initial stages of consolidation to its semiotic and surveillance forms of today. It demonstrates how the quasi-complete commodification of daily life, including often within rapports, is manufacturing our identities and personas through egotism, egoism, and even simulation. Through an autoethnography, this study manages to align and illustrate this discussion and theories espoused by several scholars through ten vignettes from this author’s personal life experiences both as a citizen and educator.