Culture jamming the ‘corporate assault’ on schools and children

Abstract

In contemporary times, organisations across all sectors of society have been encouraged to collaborate and be 'part of the solution' to childhood obesity. This has led to a proliferation of anti-obesity/healthy lifestyles programmes that are funded, devised and implemented by private sector players (e.g. McDonald's, Nestlé) in schools across the globe. This corporate-friendly version of education attempts to erode the democratic purposes of public education, and at the same time, shape children as consumers. Drawing on the Foucauldian notion of the governmental assemblage, I argue that culture jamming techniques, such as pranking and détournement, may act as tactics within a broader critical pedagogy of consumption that both challenges and counterexploits this new 'brand' of education and corporation. Culture jamming provides an opportunity to develop students and teachers as counter-political agents: those that contest anti-politics, create new truths, unmask corporate interests and 'unsettle' the corporatised education assemblage. Keywords Corporations, critical pedagogy, education, obesity [As] corporate curricula continue to turn schooling into a propaganda ground for their own destructive interests, one solution is clearly to stop using them. Another is to provide teachers with resources for researching the agendas of the corporations that finance and distribute such products in public schools and museums so that the ideological functions of the curricula can be turned against themselves, and the corporation's global agendas will be shown as contextualised and centred within the curricula. In this way, students can be shown how their interests and worldviews actually differ from the way their interests and worldviews are constructed in the curricula.-Saltman and Goodman (2011: 53) The 'corporate assault' on schools and children In contemporary times, organisations across all sectors of society have been encouraged to collaborate and be 'part of the solution' to childhood obesity (see Powell, 2015; World Health Organization,

Distilling the curriculum: An analysis of alcohol industry-funded school-based youth education programmes

“…Greater scrutiny of the role of corporations in schools, including health education in receipt of industry funding such as those programmes analysed in our study, is warranted. Such an agenda could afford greater consideration to previous calls for the adoption of a critical pedagogy that teaches about the impacts of corporations on youth and their health, and one that recognises the rights of students and teachers to be aware of, and critique, such practices and the role of corporations in their lives [ 6 , 11 , 15 , 18 ]. Saltman and Goodman suggest that one solution is to:…”

“…Powell proposes drawing from diverse forms of culture jamming to support the development of critical pedagogies that could enable teaching about corporate influences [ 15 ]. More should be done to draw from effective countering-marketing initiatives, which expose product harms and deceptive industry practices, and media literacy programmes, particularly given the impact of alcohol marketing on youth drinking [ 114 – 117 ].…”

Our Postpandemic World: What Will It Take to Build a Better Future for People and Planet?

“…The corporatization of education poses a threat to the role of public schools as sacred spaces in which to engage critical citizenship and nurture a democratic ethos 95 . Sandlin and McLaren, as well as Powell and others, promote the adoption of a “‘critical pedagogy of consumption’ […] to challenge the global corporate assault on schools, disrupt attempts to fuse children's identities with consumerism” to promote and enable democratic change 104 . (p382) They also advocate a radical reform of the way students and teachers engage and critique corporate materials and the dominant paradigms of corporatization and marketization of their lives 104,105 .…”

“…Sandlin and McLaren, as well as Powell and others, promote the adoption of a “‘critical pedagogy of consumption’ […] to challenge the global corporate assault on schools, disrupt attempts to fuse children's identities with consumerism” to promote and enable democratic change 104 . (p382) They also advocate a radical reform of the way students and teachers engage and critique corporate materials and the dominant paradigms of corporatization and marketization of their lives 104,105 . Saltman and Goodman contend that

as corporate curricula continue to turn schooling into a propaganda ground for their own destructive interests, one solution is clearly to stop using them.

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