It’s a funny old world! Often I talk to young students at college or University who tell me that they are studying all sorts of interesting new subjects. They are emerging with Degrees in the most varied disciplines, and they pride themselves that they constitute the new intellectual elite.
I must take their word for it. For so often in conversation with these bright young things, I find blank incomprehension when I speak of the most basic concepts or ideas or arguments. Intellectual and literary references with which almost everyone was familiar when I was their age [and I am not quite Methuselah] are completely unknown to them. Humorous puns and subtle satire in films and literature passes completely over their head. Knowledge of hugely important historical or current world events has rarely cluttered their minds.
On the other hand, they are very clever when it comes to using iPods, mobile phones, computer games and other sophisticated technology. They have a language and vocabulary which is completely incomprehensible to people who are not 'switched on' to the jargon of consumerism. They do not read anything other than ‘chick lit’ ‘fan fiction’ and comics - now called ‘graphic novels’ which sounds much more intellectual, but which is still the same thing! In other words they make excellent and informed consumers, and although I don’t know where it all comes from, these young people seem to have enough money to buy anything they want.
But it seems to me, that what passes for education has simply become a social engineering tool, churning out endless hoards of potential consumers who feel entitled to everything ’because they are worth it!’ And the last thing anyone wants to educate them for is to think - because of course, if they do, they might begin to wonder if ‘having things/stuff’ is all that life is ever going to offer them. Keep them busy consuming, and they just won’t have time to wonder what life, existence is actually for.
I was interested therefore, to read the following excerpt from an article: Consumerism and the Predicament of Moral Education by Jin Shenghong at the Research Institute of Moral Education in the School of Education at Nanjing University in China.
http://www.philosophy-of-education.org/pdfs/Saturday/shenhong.pdf
It makes for very interesting reading. Clearly the incredibly damaging results of the deconstruction of modern education is not simply a problem for Europe and America. Worldwide, the whole fabric, and indeed concept, of society as co-operative unit has almost disintegrated with catastrophic consequences for social cohesion.
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“Consumerism and Egocentrism
In consumer society, the commoditization of everyday life made its reconstruction of values orientations and aims to depend on the desires production and consumption. Human values are only evaluated by the market and individuals’ capacity of consumption. Therefore individuals only have commercial values that can be calculated and exchanged in the market. Everyone has no alternatives except to be subjected to the requirement that the commercial society pressed on the personal qualities because only in meeting the needs of the commercial market can he or she gain the satisfaction though consumption. Because of the relations between desires and consumption, everyone has become a servant to his consuming desires and concentrates his or her concerns on the desires that developed by the consumer market and on the capacity to get the satisfaction though calculating, competing and owning….
The commercialization of school education changes personal spiritual communication in whole range into consumption. The school market service and the educational consumption change education and cultivation into a consumption style. The communication between education and people becomes relationship of the exchange. Education abandons its intrinsic values in the cultivation of moral person. Commercialized schooling debases moral education. Morality seems only to be a kind of adjustment to the social order and conventions to define peoples’ activities…
Consumerism and the new social responsibility
In the rise of commercial society, the production and reproduction of desires and the objects of consumption form a new relation between individuals and society. People form the social conformity as consumers who are involved in the circle of desires and pleasure satisfaction. Choices of the multifarious commodities and their symbolization of meaning become the ultimate end of life, but the choices of moral values turn to be like “Supermarket Choice”. Moral values are determined by personal tastes and personal preferences. Values relevant to self and others do not matter morally, which become neutral and everybody can freely determine how to dispose his own mind and body according to his desires and needs. Values have no relations with the flourishing of personal and social well-being. So there are no moral duties and responsibilities to self and communities in the values preferences. What is more, in the dominant consumerism era, the difference of desires and the multifarious preferences bring the situation of lack of shared values and public spiritedness. To be apathetic to others’ well-being and alienated from the community is regarded as the justified private morality. No common and shared social values hold the modern individuals together except the consumption mutual advantages. The social solidarity and social trust are degenerated and we are related each other not morally but in the consumerist way. Consumerism reduces the social life to a trivial materialism. It makes social responsibility lapsed and constructs lives in relation to a future devoid of moral obligations and social responsibility of citizenship.
When public education becomes a venue for making a profit, delivering a product, or constructing consuming subjects, education reneges on its responsibilities for creating democracy of citizens by shifting its focus to producing a democracy of consumers. Giroux, Henry. Stealing Innocence: Youth, Corporate Power, and the Politics of culture. New York: Palgrave, 2000, page 173.) “
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