Consuming Children : Education Entertainment Advertising

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'.