Advertising, Policies and Politics: How Culture Influences Policy

Kenway and Bullen’s text Consuming children: Education-Entertainment-Advertising provides many interesting insights into how the education system and more specifically schools are being run in contemporary society. The authors comment that schools ‘see themselves as free-standing entrepreneurial small businesses’ (Kenway and Bullen, 123) with parents and students ‘encouraged to adopt a consumerist stance to schools and to knowledge.’ (Kenway and Bullen 123) This article was published in 2001 with numerous references made from earlier articles written by the pair so it would be unfair to say that policies by recent governments have attributed to this. It could however be suggested that policies are a result of these social movements. For example, Jack Waterford in his editorial piece in the Canberra Times on the 4^th September 2012 writes that ‘Labor’s post-Latham shorthand for an education policy... made Labor seem fairly with it.’ These policies included introductions to laptop computers as well as ‘national standards and testing and... the MySchool program.’ These policies mentioned by Waterford link nicely with what Kenway and Bullen say. Kenway and Bullen comment that there is a claim ‘made that new technologies will eventually liberate educational consumption from certain time and space restrictions’ which tie in nicely as to why a government would be inclined to fund a technological revolution like the one seen in recent years. Waterford also mentions the MySchool policy which can be linked to why schools are actively pursuing advertising. Kenway and Bullen state that ‘advertising is selective and seeks to persuade’ yet it ‘stands in direct opposition to education in the sense that education... encourages students to consider issues from many angles.’ (Kenway and Bullen, 128) One has to wonder as to why this is the case yet an answer could be seen that a policy such as MySchool is a result of a consumerist culture. Schools are finding the need to advertise in order to gain members who will contribute to their schools ranking. This can be perhaps morally ambiguous because, using girls schools as an example, some are advertising ‘the status aspects of private schools... and others drawing from liberal and cultural feminist agendas’ (Kenway and Bullen, 130); therefore suggesting schools essentially want to pick and choose their clients rather than be fully inclusive. Despite this article preceding most of these policies it provides some information as to why schools feel the need to showcase themself and why governments are willing to implement strategies which Waterford suggests are just politically charged in order to win elections. He comments that ‘fundamental issues in education go well beyond throwing money... at the problem’. Perhaps that is exactly what schools are doing, throwing money into things which are more or less superficial and not beneficial to the pursuit of knowledge.

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/gillards-education-crusade--flounders-20120904-25cyg.html Jack Waterford (4th September 2012)

Kenway, J. & Bullen. (2001) Consuming Children: Education-Entertainment-Advertising. Buckingham: Open University Press. Chapter 5: Designer Schools, Packaged Students.