01Sep10d Book review: Giroux

Book review:

Stealing Innocence: corporate culture's war on children

By Henry A Giroux. Palgrave, 9.99

Childhood is a social construction as well as a biological process. Parents, increasingly backed up by the state, have always tended to raise children in the light of what they believe others will expect of them in later life, with such expectations varying according to family wealth and prevailing cultural and economic norms.

These norms change over time, with religious and community influences less powerful today than they were a century ago. But while childhood can never be culture-free, there will always be fierce individual quarrels with the prevailing culture at any time.

Henry Giroux, professor of secondary education at Pennsylvania State University, argues that as his own country becomes inexorably more commercialised, the only type of citizenship its "national entertainment state" has to offer children is that of consumerism.

He notes a familiar pattern that occurs whenever a conservative administration cuts taxes while running down welfare and support services for the disadvantaged. Schools, taking the full brunt of the intensified poverty that results, and already over-worked and under-staffed, are then criticised for failing to provide a proper education to increasingly alienated pupils. Time, therefore, to bring in the private sector to make a better job of running inner-city schools.

Making the most of the opportunity for quick profits, private firms also set about putting their unique stamp on the education day.

School notices and classroom displays in the US may now carry advertisements, and special deals are struck up, in one case involving the provision of free personal computers and internet access in exchange for the right to display on-screen advertising for at least four hours a day.

Pupils who refuse to comply are promptly suspended or even expelled. Giroux cites the case of two high-school students in Georgia who wore shirts bearing the Pepsi logo during an aerial photo-shoot of students dressed in red and white to form the "Coke" logo, at an event sponsored by Coca-Cola.

Away from school, the author sees commercial forces filling the social vacuum left by absent parents and the decline of public values in other undesirable ways.