Amanda’s brother Andrew was in the bathroom vomiting. He had a school test today and he didn’t do well in tests even though his teachers usually gave him good marks for school projects and essays. He thought too much about the questions and was able to think of more than one reasonable answer and this meant he took too long to do the test.

If he failed today’s test Andrew would have to do extra classes on Saturday mornings and might have to give up music classes to make way for more reading classes. Andrew’s parents wouldn’t mind too much if this happened because they had to pay extra fees for those music classes. But music classes were the only part of school that Andrew liked. Otherwise he hated school. It was so boring! They never studied anything that he could relate to and it was all so repetitive. It seemed to be all tests and practice tests and preparing for tests.

Andrew’s poor test results were likely to affect his ability to get into a good secondary school; he might have to go to the dilapidated school across the river where students have to pass through a metal detector and wear their coats in class because the heating doesn’t work.

Their little sister Angie was having a tantrum in the kitchen because Mummy wouldn’t buy the sugary cereal with Shrek on the packet that she saw on television. Amanda thought it wouldn’t be long before Angie would be taking those little white pills that so many kids at school took when she was in primary school. In her school some of the older kids traded them along with other drugs to get a high.

Amanda, Andrew and Angie are too young to understand, but much of their discontent and many of their anxieties stem from the corporate capture of childhood, that is, the way modern business corporations shape children’s dreams and desires, determine their school experience and influence their behaviour and values.

Modern affluent societies overflow with a cornucopia of goods produced for the entertainment, pleasure, convenience and education of children, yet increasingly there are signs that in some of the most prosperous nations, particularly English-speaking countries, something is amiss. Those same children seem to be less content, more stressed and less healthy than any previous generation.

In 2005 the UK National Consumer Council (NCC) found that British children were ‘the least happy generation of the post-war era’.² Towards the end of 2006 a group of over a hundred academics, teachers, psychologists and others wrote to the Daily Telegraph in the UK to express their deep concern about what was happening to children. They argued that ‘the escalating incidence of childhood depression’ as well as ‘the rise of substance abuse, violence and self-harm amongst our young people’, arose from the neglect of children’s emotional and social needs. They blamed junk food, screen-based entertainment, ‘an overly academic test-driven primary curriculum’ and a ‘hyper-competitive culture’ as contributing factors.³

Their concern was backed up by a United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) assessment of the well-being of children in 21 affluent nations, published in 2007. It found that children in the US and the UK were worse off than in any of the other nations in the study, particularly with respect to family and peer relationships; behaviours and risks; health and safety in the case of the US; and subjective well-being in the case of the UK. Children aged 11, 13 and 15 were less likely to find their peers ‘kind and helpful’ in the UK and the US than in any of the other 21 nations apart from the Czech Republic. They ate less fruit and were more overweight. They smoked more cannabis and had more pregnancies. They tended to leave school at an earlier age. In the UK teenagers smoked more cigarettes, had sex, and got drunk more.⁴

In a typical week in Australia, 10 per cent of high school students engage in binge drinking. Almost one in three primary school children is overweight or obese.⁵ Many teenagers are in debt.⁶ Almost half of children aged ten to 14 do not feel confident about themselves and more than half worry about what others think about them.⁷ A significant proportion of Australian children and teenagers are suffering anxiety and depression.⁸ One in ten 13- to 19-year-olds reported having mental or behavioural problems. The rates at which 13- to 19-year-olds are hospitalised for self-harm have increased 27 per cent since 1998–99.⁹ Suicide rates for males aged 15 to 25 more than tripled between 1960 and 2000 and the rate is now higher than in most other affluent nations.¹⁰

In the US, suicide is the third highest cause of death for those between ten and 24 years old. Each year 4600 take their own lives and 142,000 are treated in hospital emergency departments for self-inflicted injuries. A nationwide survey of students in grades nine to 12 found that 17 per cent said they had seriously considered suicide, 13 per cent had planned suicide, and 8 per cent had attempted it in the previous year.¹¹ The numbers of teenagers between 15 and 17 going to prison is increasing twice as fast as the rest of the population.¹²

In the UK children are getting fatter, consuming more alcohol, committing more crime, and are increasingly excluded from schools.¹³ The rates of self-harm among young people are higher than anywhere else in Europe and it is estimated that one in 15 young people between eleven and 25 years of age self-harm. Each year 25,000 young people are admitted to hospital emergency departments in England and Wales as a result of deliberate self-inflicted injury. Many more are treated at home and never make it to hospital.¹⁴

In September 2007 an even larger group of professionals, academics and writers again expressed their concern about the state of Britain’s children. This time they blamed a decline in children’s play as a major contributing factor in their deteriorating well-being. This in turn was attributed to factors such as ‘the ready availability of sedentary, sometimes addictive screen-based entertainment; the aggressive marketing of over-elaborate, commercialised toys (which seem to inhibit rather than stimulate creative play); … a test-driven school and pre-school curriculum in which formal learning has substantially taken the place of free, unstructured play’.¹⁵

This book argues that this rapid decline in children’s well-being has, in large part, been caused by corporate interference in children’s lives and psyches. Chapter 2 covers some of the many ways that corporations are targeting ever younger children with a barrage of advertising and marketing designed to foster discontent in children and turn them into hyper-consumers who define themselves by what they have rather than who they are. Chapter 3 shows how manufacturers and marketers have transformed children’s play into a commercial opportunity; Chapter 4 how they have preyed on and taken advantage of childish anxieties and insecurities, reshaping their very identities.

Schools are no longer a haven from these commercial pressures, and Chapter 5 details how funding cuts have made them vulnerable to a massive infusion of corporate messages. Businesses seek to sell their goods to school children, as well as develop brand loyalty now and into the future, through sponsorships, competitions, communication technologies and industry-produced classroom materials.

Chapter 6 will reveal how business coalitions have persuaded governments around the world to turn schools into competing business enterprises where children are treated as inputs to be processed. Widespread reductions in school funding have caused governments to shift the goal of education from quality to efficiency, and the responsibility for school performance to ‘devolved’ school boards and principals who have to make do with inadequate budgets.

Chapter 7 explains why a widespread emphasis on standardised testing in schools has developed since the 1980s in English-speaking nations and evaluates the consequences. And in case there is any doubt that this push for standardised testing and educational efficiency has come from the corporate sector, Chapter 8 exposes the powerful business coalitions, the many interconnected business-funded advocacy groups, and the campaigns that have been behind it.

Chapters 9 and 10 show that corporations are taking control of more and more aspects of schooling, not only to ensure that schools produce submissive employees with basic skills, but also to prevent the development of critical-thinking faculties in schools. Business interests are driving the renewed emphasis in schools on long hours, discipline, rewards and punishments as well as the narrowing curriculum that emphasises literacy, numeracy, computer skills and a business-friendly view of history and society.

Chapter 11 covers the flood of corporate-sponsored classroom materials that teachers are being offered. These provide a distorted picture of environmental, economic, health and social issues so as to fulfil the public relations needs of industries, particularly those in the health, environment and energy sectors, and also promote a wider ideology of free market economics.

The move towards private provision of educational services that has occurred in many English-speaking countries since the 1980s is covered in Chapter 12. This includes the privatisation of the local educational authorities (LEAs) and the establishment of academies in the UK, and the proliferation of charter schools in the US. The chapter evaluates the outcomes of these privatisations.

The corporate push for schools to compete for students in an educational marketplace, in the name of ‘school choice’, has manifested as open enrolments in the UK and Australia, and a campaign for school vouchers in the US. Chapter 13 discusses the consequences of this in terms of equity and how the right of every child to receive a high-quality public education has been replaced by the right of parents to choose the school their children will attend. The role of corporations, and the foundations they fund, in promoting privatisation of schooling and competitive education markets, is covered in Chapter 14.

Finally, Chapter 15 reveals how children who are naughty, lively, bored, inattentive or depressed as a result of the assaults described in previous chapters, are identified in schools and disciplined through the use of psychiatric drugs. It analyses the way that the pharmaceutical industry portrays these ‘medications’ as a way of ‘normalising’ children’s thinking and behaviour in order to expand the child and adolescent market for psychiatric drugs.

The consequence of this corporate capture of childhood has been a generation of children who have been manipulated, shaped and exploited as never before in history. Not only have they lost the opportunity to play and develop at their own pace, their psyches have been damaged and their view of the world distorted. They are trained rather than educated and constantly tested to make sure they have absorbed the ‘correct’ information. They are supposed to seek happiness in possessions, treat relationships as a means to an end, and incessantly compete with each other. Children have never before been under such pressure to ‘succeed, conform and look good’.¹⁶ It is little wonder that so many children grow into youths who are unhappy, stressed, fat, delinquent or self-destructive.

This book will show that nearly all of the problems facing children today are a direct result of the efforts of corporations to make profits from children and to shape and socialise them to suit business interests.