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#2054 -
Selection from The Happy Child:
Changing the Heart of Education, by Steven Harrison
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Culture and Perspective
A great many people think they are
thinking when the are merely rearranging their prejudices. William
James
Recently, I walked through a store with one
of my young children. I was distracted for a few moments by my
purchase and my son became captivated by a television monitor in
the corner broadcasting smarmy offers for products of one kind or
another. He joined me after a few minutes and began repeating the
jargon of the piped-in come-on, intrigued by the promise that he
could join in the wonderful world that was promised by the toy,
the movie, or the dirnk simply by buying something. My son had
learned something. I had learned something too. No one had asked
me if it was all right to sell my son something. And no one will
in the future. My son is a market share, however small, and
marketers will find him wherever he goes.
The culture's perspective and my son's
perspective are in constant interaction, and much of that
interaction will have to do with a relationship to materialism.
The market will promise happiness, but it can deliver only goods
and services. What my son is learning from his culture is that
goods and services are the same as happiness. What is important
to me is that he have the opportunity to find out, for himself,
whether this is true. His understanding will make up his life.
It is impossible to address the question of
educating our children without taking on the difficult task of
understanding the culture in which the child learns. In the
contemporary western culture, we are subject to powerful media
forces that condition our perspectives in powerful ways. We can
hardly move about in society without ingesting marketing of one
product or another. More insidious is the omnipresence of brands,
representing entire lifesyles and evoking feelings of freedom,
happiness, and accomplishment through the choice of the proper
can of soft drink or designer jeans.
This crass, materialistic society is
teaching us constantly. Marketing is education, but what is
taught is consumption, not consideration. Reflection on the
nature of the market forces is not desirable from a marketing
standpoint. This is why marketing always tries to co-opt the
consumer by creating fads, tendencies, and urges just below the
threshold of considered action. Marketing speaks in hyperbolie or
subliminal language, seldom in accurate or factual terms. It is
fundamentally dangerous to our children to be unaware of the
impact of these forces on their minds.
Children who have been given responsibility
and the freedom to exercise it develop critical thinking as
an obvious by-product of their circumstance. They have the chance
to explore what brings them satisfaction and what does not. The
child whose discrimination and will has been broken down by years
of coercive education is a perfect candidate to be a pliant
consumer of whatever is being sold. Of course, what is sold must
be produced, and the pliant consumer is also a docile worker.
To educate our children in a new way,
we must understand our culture -- the social contracts and
paradigms that make up our collective perspective. The forces of
mass marketing and consumerism come out of deeply entranched
patterns in our society and its history. They reflect the very
structure of mind and biology that make up the individual. If we
can understand something about out individual and collective
reality, we can hope to create a learning environment that is
something more than just an indoctrination into our conflicted
world.
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