Education and the Culture of Consumption

Personalisation and the Social Order

David Hartley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415598828
• eBook ISBN: 9781136730870
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

For nearly 200 years the organisational form of the school has changed little. Bureaucracy has been its enduring form. The school has prepared the worker for the factory of mass production. It has created the 'mass consumer' to be content with accepting what is on offer, not what is wanted. However, a 'revised' educational code appears to be emerging. This code centres upon the concept of 'personalisation', which operates at two levels: first, as a new mode of public service delivery; and second, as a new 'grammar' for the school, with new flexibilities of structure and pedagogical process. Personalisation has its intellectual roots in marketing theory, not in educational theory and is the facilitator of 'education for consumption'. It allows for the 'market' to suffuse even more the fabric of education, albeit under the democratic-sounding call of freedom of choice.

Education and the Culture of Consumption raises many questions about personalisation which policy-makers seem prone to avoid:

• Why, now, are we concerned about personalisation?
• What are its theoretical foundations?
• What are its pedagogical, curricular and organisational consequences?
• What are the consequences for social justification of personalisation?
• Does personalisation diminish the socialising function of the school, or does it simply mean that the only thing we share is that we have the right to personalised service?

All this leads the author to consider an important question for education: does personalisation mark a new regulatory code for education, one which corresponds with both the new work-order of production and with the makeover-prone tendencies of consumers?

The book will be of great interest to postgraduate students and academics studying in the fields of education policy and the social foundations of education, and will also be relevant to students studying public policy, especially health care and social care, and public management.

1 Introduction

The municipal rubbish-dump near to where I live is open on a Sunday, a day when one might be forgiven for thinking that business would surely not be too brisk. But normally it is, with a long queue of cars waiting to enter the site, especially in the afternoon. It is a drive-through arrangement and the road within the site forms a long horse-shoe shape. Tangential to this road are small bays in which cars can be parked while the items are unloaded into large metal skips and containers. Each off-loading bay relates to a particular category of rubbish: batteries, clothing, footwear, glass, plastics, paper, cardboard, wood, metal, green waste, and so on. It is intended to be a slick operation, but it assumes that you, the ‘disposer’, know how to classify correctly the items which are to be thrown away, and it also helps if the sequence of the bays is known before you enter the site: ‘glass’, for example, comes before ‘cardboard’ (but not before ‘paper’).

Rubbish is usually associated with messiness, but at the dump there is a strong classification and demarcation of space; and there are clear procedures. Unless you have only a few items to dispose of, going to the dump requires of you a good deal of planning. You will need to arrange the order of goods in your car (if you have one) so that it matches the order in which they will be discarded at the site. In spite of this quest for good order, the possibilities for confusion and category-error are considerable. Take a book: if it is hard-backed, does it go in ‘cardboard’, or in ‘paper’? Or a coat-hanger: if it is a plastic-coated wire-hanger, does it go in metal or plastics (which may be ‘hard’ or ‘soft’)? The staff at the dump are clearly visible, with brightly coloured vests. Each staff-member oversees about two categories of rubbish, and inspects any bag or box which is to be emptied. Anyone who has furtively mixed in some of the wrong type of waste with the correct type will be despatched, without a nice smile from the overseer, to the correct bay. On a busy day this redirected ‘traffic’ causes much congestion. If you were mistakenly to drive past the off-loading bay which you require then you cannot just reverse your car (as you would reverse a shopping-cart in a supermarket). Instead, it is necessary to go forward with the flow; there is nothing for it but to complete another circuit. What was meant to be a smooth operation can so easily become fraught. If it does, then you must navigate your exit as best you can. What adds to the frustration is that there are no spaces where the exhausted depositor can calm down. It is impossible to park your car and to wander about the wasteland; it is very much a matter of drop and go. To be sure, the flâneur has no place here, except for those who lurk in search of ‘rich pickings’.

About 15 miles from the dump is a purpose-built ‘village’ which contains about 130 designer-brand boutiques, together with a few cafes. All of these are arranged either side of the pedestrian-only ‘street’. Most of the shops are on the ground-floor; a few span two floors. The shops resemble houses, and most have clapboard cladding around the display windows. Each shop has its own distinctive canopy. Nowhere is there polished marble, reflective glass or a visible steel beam; it is all slightly rustic. There is a vast car-park, part of which is multi-level, at a short distance from the village. As at the rubbish dump, Sunday at the ‘village’ is a very hectic day, unlike on a weekday when there is a certain discreet calm pervading the place. Some of the larger stores become too crowded. Their staff struggle to keep the goods on neat display, and to retain that chic and charming ambience which the brand would like to create. But this is usually a doomed endeavour; the number of shoppers far exceeds the amount of space in which they need to move freely. Often, at the entrance to the boutiques, dark-suited male attendants finger the ear-pieces of their radio-microphones as they interpret the trustworthiness of the customers who pass before them. Long queues fidget as they await their turn at the check-outs. But once the deal is done, the designer-name on the bag will mark the status of its holder: even amongst the grand designers there is a pecking-order, and the bags will reveal it.

The dump is municipal and public; the ‘village’ corporate and private. They are at opposite ends of the contemporary quest for personal renewal. In this sense they need each other. A quick and efficient means of disposal of goods is no less important than an agreeable ambience for their acquisition (Bauman 2005: 308). But while they need each other, the rituals surrounding the rites of passage through each are not yet similar. The dump is bureaucratic. Its spaces are clearly labelled and zoned. The metal skips at the off-loading bays are as solid as can be. There is no equivalent at the dump to the ‘soft sell’ of the designer boutique, where the customer seeks status-affirming packaging around the bought object; the disposer needs none. The process of dumping remains decidedly physical and macho, and at times quite dangerous. No money changes hands. There is no pleasant reception area. Taking rubbish to the dump today is like taking a car to a garage 30 years ago when it was all a little rough and ready. Some garages have since softened up their image. Separate reception areas dispense coffee and provide comfortable seating. The noise and smells are separated from the customer, who nevertheless may be able to see the activity in the workshop through a glass panel. The modes of address tend now to be more polite and scripted. Perhaps, as dumping ‘becomes’ recycling, and is privatised, we may expect the ‘dumper experience’ to improve. But not yet.

Like the rubbish which is processed bureaucratically, those who lack the means to buy into consumer culture are processed in a similar way. They literally have no credit, and so they are corralled and constrained. They have been deemed unworthy of credit; they quite literally owe nothing. Those who for whatever reason lack access to education and employment opportunities have insufficient funds to buy the branded identities which give them style and status (Bird 2011: unpaginated). The compulsion to shop (and to discard) seems particularly strong in the UK. In 2007, UNICEF published its report on children’s well-being. Among the dimensions of well-being was ‘relationships’. The UK ranked 21st out of 21 countries (the US ranked 20th). Moreover, the highest incidence of risk-taking behaviours (obesity, substance abuse, violence and sexual risk-taking) occurred in the UK (UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre 2007). A subsequent study commissioned by UNICEF UK (of 250 children aged between 8 and 13 in the UK, Sweden and Spain) sought to investigate further these findings. The study was qualitative, and included observations and filming in 24 families of different socio-economic makeup. The report concludes: ‘Consumer culture in the UK appeared in our research to be “disposable” with households full of broken and discarded toys and a compulsion to continually upgrade and buy new’ (Ipsos MORI 2011: 71). Historically, this is something new. Things of substance which lasted used to be an indication of high social standing. Nowadays, there seems to be a lesser inclination to retain them, or to regret the loss of them. A new fashion always provides a ready excuse to be rid of them (Thompson 1979; Bauman 2001: 249). Noticeably, the need to symbolise identity with branded goods was particularly strong in deprived areas, and especially in areas of ‘mixed affluence’. Not so in Spain and Sweden, where toys and gadgets were maintained and retained. But, in the UK, what is paradoxical is that even when these goods are acquired, and when status is deemed to have been achieved and symbolised, the satisfaction and happiness which they are meant to confer is fleeting. Indeed, between 1988 and 2008, levels of ‘despair’ and ‘anxiety’ among adolescents rose rapidly and significantly in the US and the UK. The financial crash of 2008 gives reason to pause for thought: should these levels continue, or should we now set aside the ‘ethos of greed and despair’? (Dorling 2009: 9).

Occasionally the frustration at being excluded from ‘consumer culture’ erupts, as in the London riots of 2011. They seemed not to have been about basic needs and political rights, but about fulfilling wants and desires. The conspicuous destruction by the looters was said to have been the counterpart of the conspicuous consumption by those who had ‘bought in’ to consumer culture: ‘These are not hunger or bread riots. These are riots of defective and disqualified consumers’ (Bauman 2011: unpaginated). Tellingly, much of the disorder occurred in high streets and shopping malls. In order to ‘become someone’, the rioters would have to ‘brand’ themselves accordingly in a flurry of designer looting. They – the ‘they’ being mainly male – had taken to heart Campbell’s telling mantra: ‘I shop, therefore I know that I am’ (Campbell 2004). For them, there was no ethic; they sought only an aesthetic. They acted openly, and seemingly without fear or shame, oblivious to the legal consequences, which by most accounts were unusually harsh (Lewis et al. 2011). But this view that it was unmet wants, not unsatisfied needs, which drove the rioters to destruction and looting may be a stereotype in need of refinement. Elizabeth Chin’s renowned anthropological study of consumption among the poor black community of New Haven, Connecticut, calls into question the common view that this ‘mixture of consumer culture and poverty’ is ‘dangerously combustible, resulting in crazed pathological consumers who kill for sneakers and who are addicted to brands’ (Chin 2001: 6). What was so alarming for the middle classes in parts of London was that these riots spilled over into the areas where they lived. Unlike the rioters in Paris in 2005, those in London lived not in the suburbs beyond the belt-way or ring-road, but in many cases they resided among, and contiguous to, the middle classes. Unlike in Paris, the police in London could not easily contain the fast-moving rioters. But in both London and Paris there was something redolent of Le Nouveau Moyen Age: the market pushes those who cannot afford its offerings to the margins, almost beyond the reach of the state where the writ of the local ‘micromafias’ runs (Minc 1993: 89).

What has all of this got to do with education? At the annual conference of the British Labour Party in 2006, Gordon Brown stated: ‘We cannot leave public services as they were. We must build them around the personal aspirations of the individual.’ By 2008, personalisation was said to have been the UK Labour government’s ‘big idea’ (Wilby 2008), and it has gained currency, even if its label has changed slightly. After the defeat of the Labour government in May 2010, the Conservative-led coalition government published in July 2011 its Open Public Services White Paper (Her Majesty’s Government 2011):

Therefore, we will, on a customised basis, establish a robust framework for choice in individual services – in adult care, education, skills training, early years, other children’s services, family services, health and social housing. Each framework will ensure that: funding follows the choice of the individual to their provider of choice; those choosing a service are well informed and prompted about the options available; access is fair and the poorest are advantaged; providers meet basic quality requirements enforced by appropriate inspectors or regulators; and if an individual does not receive their right to choose, then there is a means of redress.

(Her Majesty’s Government 2011: 14; emphasis in original)

This book provides a critical analysis of the emergence of marketisation and personalisation in education, especially of personalisation. Marketisation is not the same as privatisation, for it remains the case that compulsory schooling is largely funded by the state. But the range of ‘providers’ has become more diverse, so as to include both the private and the voluntary sectors. It is within this ‘market’, or ‘quasi-market’ (Le Grand 1991), that parents have been encouraged to choose – or rather to express a preference for – a ‘provider’. As for personalisation, it is a term borrowed from marketing theory, and it marks a further step towards the ‘marketisation’ of the public services in the sense that it sits easily with the notion that the customer (not the professional) knows best. Whereas marketisation enables the parent to choose a structure (namely a school), personalisation seeks to ‘employ’ the pupil in the co-production of what is to be learned, and how. And whereas the marketisation is explicit, personalisation is more implicit. In the United States, personalised education is predicted to be ‘The next big thing’ (Gardner 2009). In England, it had been deemed so in 2005 (Department for Education and Skills 2005). Given its currency, personalisation has attracted remarkably little critical analysis insofar as education is concerned. (Much of the literature has centred upon the possibilities of digital technologies to enhance ‘personalised learning’.)

The book begins by setting out briefly how and why contemporary education finds itself facing a profound discontinuity. For much of the modern period (say, from about 1750 to 1960), there had been something of a ‘goodness of fit’ among education, economy and society. This period of modernity has been referred to as ‘solid’ (Bauman 2000) or as ‘first’ (Beck and Grande 2010). Its emphasis has been very much on the presumed causal relationship between mass education (or, more precisely, schooling) and mass production under Fordist managerial regimes, especially in manufacturing and low-skill clerical work.

But this phase of modernity gradually began to reveal signs of tension within it – what the sociologist Daniel Bell referred to as the ‘cultural contradictions of capitalism’. Specifically, there has gradually occurred a tension between, on the one hand, an economy wherein a highly rational, standardised, instrumental and technical mind-set prevails; and, on the other hand, within the culture, a gradual undermining of the bourgeois or Protestant ethic that had initially been the ‘spirit’ in which industrial capitalism grew. In its stead has emerged a more hedonistic, not to say even narcissistic quest – one not given to deferred gratification, nor to the interests of the social. Shops – quite literally – provide the ‘outlets’ for this personalised quest to construct an identity. This orientation has become more pronounced especially since the emergence of the service and culture industries. And what has further facilitated this latter has been the shift from personal to personalised computing; from the PC to the smart-phone. In short, there has been a noticeable shift in the emphasis placed upon consumption; its salience has risen, largely as a result of the so-called service economy and the emergence of new digital technologies.

Schools have necessarily been part of this cultural change, but their forms and functions are not yet of a piece with it. Chapter 2 explores the emerging uneasy relationship between schooling and production during the period of ‘solid’ modernity. Chapter 3 dwells upon what appears to be the point – the financial crisis of 2008 – when the tensions within first modernity could no longer be contained. To be sure, even before 2008, the consumerist mind-set had established a strong foothold in the public services. Both Prime Minister Thatcher and President Reagan had set them on the path to the market. The Third Way refinements by President Clinton and Prime Minister Blair did little to alter that direction. Since 1980, state bureaucracies have endured the criticism that they were self-serving and inefficient; markets, on the other hand, were deemed to be better able to serve the client or user, and would find their own level without the need for too much government regulation.

By 2008, the market had made considerable inroads into education. Chapter 4 explores the uneasy co-existence of bureaucracy and markets in schooling, particularly in relation to charter schools (in the US), academies (in England) and free schools (in the US, England and in Sweden). All of these tended to be indicative of what had been the ‘quasi-market’ and the ‘new public management’. The term ‘consumer’ has been part of educational discourse since the school-choice legislation in the early 1980s but, notwithstanding its affinity to the notion of a (free) market, there has always been a high level of regulation by the government. This is because, in order for a market to operate, parents (now defined as ‘consumers’) required objective and comparable information about the various ‘providers’ (namely schools) in order to make a ‘rational’ choice among them. In England, all this had been set in train by the Conservative governments between 1979 and 1997, but thereafter the Labour government continued it, though with more Third Way heed being paid to ‘equity’ than hitherto. And whereas the Conservative government had sought to restructure education along the lines of a quasi-market, the Labour government, in addition, set about a more dirigiste re-culturing of education: that is, it intervened with national pedagogical prescriptions for the teaching of numeracy and literacy. Indeed, national standards in literacy and numeracy did initially improve, thereafter to level out. But the prescribed pedagogy was highly didactic, and arguably ill-suited to preparing children for life as both producers and consumers in a ‘new’ economy. If anything, it was more of a piece with an age of mass production and mass consumption.

Until about 2005, the notion of consumerism and education had centred largely on the issue of school choice – it had been about marketisation. In addition to the research and scholarship on school choice, there have been important contributions on the presence of advertising, sponsorship and sub-contracting in the publicly funded school system. All this goes well beyond what had hitherto been the extent of commercial companies’ involvement in publicly funded schools. It is now not just about stationery, technology and furniture; it is about the outsourcing of management, assessment, school inspection, consultancy and staff development and training. Nor are these local providers; they can be multinationals in search of a global reach and economies of scale (Ball and Youdell 2007). But there are emerging signs of an even more pervasive presence of consumerism in education, and they are beginning to circulate at the levels of both policy and practice. Put simply, there are indications of an emerging personalisation of learning. In other words, whereas until recently we have come to regard the parent as an active consumer of schools (as in school choice), now – and in addition, and complementary to it – there are indications that the pupil or student is to be regarded as a co-consumer and co-producer of what, where and how she or he learns (that is, personalised learning). In this latter respect, there is a temptation to say that personalised learning is no more than the nostalgic revival of child-centred or progressive education (Hartley 2009). But the similarity in nomenclature does not explain why, now, personalisation and customisation loom on the horizon. The convergence of ‘personal’ digital technologies, together with new modes of production and consumption (loosely referred to as ‘prosumption’), may now allow for the emergence of personalised learning to mark a further stage in the consumerisation of education.

All this prompts a range of considerations about personalisation and its historical and contemporary contexts. On the historical, it needs to be stressed that during the modern period up to about 1960 the relationship between education and the economy was largely a matter confined to the realm of production (the subject of Chapter 2). Thereafter, as the culture and service industries take priority in economic activity, so does the emphasis paid to consumption. This is especially so from the mid-1980s when economic neoliberalism takes root in the United States and in the United Kingdom, only to result in the ‘double bubbles’ of 1990 and 2008 (the subject of Chapter 3). Inherent within neo-liberalism are strong tensions: between prudence and pleasure; between individual and collective; between the nation-state and the global; and between credit and debt. In 2008, the tensions became all too visible: for decades, individuals had bought things which they did not need, with money which they did not have, in order to impress people whom they did not know. The flaunting and accumulation of wealth had become its own justification. Gradually, the prices of property and equities became disconnected from their real values. Few economists saw the folly in this, and some who did were ridiculed for daring to speak out.

Chapter 4 explores the path taken by education towards the market, and it considers in particular charter schools, free schools and academies. Paradoxically, in wending its way to the market, education encountered an intensification of bureaucracy, something which might not have been expected in a policy which champions unfettered free choice. But all of this marks only a first stage i...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Education and the Culture of Consumption
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
•   1 Introduction
•   2 Modernity, production and education
•   3 The economic crisis
•   4 Markets, bureaucracy and education
•   5 Towards personalisation
•   6 Consumption, personalisation and education policy
•   7 Personalised learning
•   8 The paradox of personalisation
•   9 Personalisation and the social order
• 10 Code switch? Education and the personalised society
• References
• Index