Stud Philos Educ (2011) 30:85–92

DOI 10.1007/s11217-010-9211-x

Review of Trevor Norris, Consuming Schools:

Commercialism and the End of Politics
University of Toronto Press, 2011

David I. Waddington

Published online: 12 December 2010

 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010

In 1978, the National Film Board of Canada released a short film about consumerism,
‘‘L’Affaire Bronswik.’’ The plot revolves around a brand of television, the Bronswik,
which contains a transponder that drives people into a frenzy of consumption. Chaos
ensues as people rush out and buy things they don’t need.
These days, the message of the film—namely, that television makes us buy things—is
rather familiar. However, what is remarkable about this film is the portrait of fevered
consumption that it offers. After being exposed to the Bronswik transponder, one woman
buys 18 boxes of detergent, while another rushes out to buy 22 bottles of salad dressing. In
2010, 30 years after the film was made, scenes like these—the stuff of science fiction in
1978—are ordinary events. Today, somewhere in North America, perhaps at this very
moment, an entire pallet of salad dressing is being loaded into an SUV.
It is in this context of accelerated, hyperactive consumerism that we turn to Trevor
Norris’s Consuming Schools: Commercialism and the End of Politics. In this compact
volume, Norris outlines some aspects of the problem of consumerism in schools and explores
several relevant avenues of broader philosophical critique. Norris has a clear and concise
style which makes the book accessible to a wide audience. While it is certainly the case that
the book makes a contribution to educational theory, sections of it could also be useful in
undergraduate foundations courses. Prospective teachers are often interested in discussing
the problem of consumerism and in thinking about how they may help combat it.
In the first chapter, ‘‘The Origins and Nature of Consumerism,’’ Norris sets the stage for
his larger analysis. He reviews a number of theories about the genesis of consumerism, and
he points out that consumerism is not merely a tendency—he suggests that it actually
functions as an ideology. One of the interesting ways that he substantiates this is by noting
that our images of heroes ‘‘are increasingly taken from the world of consumption rather
than from the world of work, modeled, on the ‘heroes of consumption’…rather than
‘heroes of production’ like Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford’’ (p. 14). If anything, Norris

Portions of this review will also appear in a future issue of Theory and Research in Education.

D. I. Waddington (&)
Department of Education, Concordia University, LB-579, 1455 de Maisonneuve Blvd. W.,
Montreal, QC H3G 1M8, Canada
e-mail: dwadding@education.concordia.ca

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understates the case here—one would be hard-pressed to name any popular production
heroes in the mode of Carnegie and Ford. People revere the rich not for their contribution
to society, but for their potential consumption power; Paris Hilton is one prominent
example of a modern-day consumption hero. If there are, in fact, any production heroes
left, they are confined to the realms of art and music. Outside of these demimondes,
however, the possibilities of heroic production appear slim.
The discussion of our shift in focus toward consumption leads into one of the most
interesting parts of the first chapter—Norris’ analysis of what he calls the ‘‘productivist
bias.’’ Norris suggests that, historically, intellectuals have tended to ignore the importance of
consumption. He argues that thinkers like Marx and Smith simply did not pay very much
attention to questions of consumption—instead, they focused squarely on production. Norris
acknowledges the significance of Marx’s account of commodity fetishism, but suggests ‘‘his
analysis is limited insofar as it emphasizes the importance of labor and production rather
than consumption’’ (p. 22). He then enumerates some of the other shortcomings of Marx’s
account.
Although Norris is correct to note that consumption has been overlooked, the question of
production may be more important than he acknowledges. One must ask the question of why
people are as focused on consumption as they are. This is where productivist theories—and, in
particular, Marx’s theory—can be especially useful. In the famous ‘‘Estranged Labour’’
(1844) fragment, Marx explained four ways in which human beings can become alienated
through work. One of the most significant of these is simply becoming alienated from one’s
own work. Consider the following extract from an interview with an auto worker:
The assembly line is no place to work, I can tell you. There is nothing more dis-
couraging than having a barrel beside you with 10,000 bolts in it and using them all
up. Then you get a barrel with another 10,000 bolts, and you know every one of those
10,000 bolts has to be picked up and put in exactly the same place as the last 10,000
bolts (Walker 1952, p. 54).
Beyond this, Marx suggests, it is possible for humans to become alienated from their
‘‘species-being,’’ by which he means to suggest our human capacities to create and produce
in interesting ways. The upshot of all this is that if production is at best unfulfilling, and at
worst despair inducing, the only recourse may be to fulfill oneself through consuming. The
combination of improved manufacturing techniques, low-cost overseas labor, and corpo-
rations like Wal-Mart have opened up exciting new consumption possibilities for even the
poorest of first-world citizens. For the rich, naturally, the possibilities for consumption are
endless and vast but even if one cannot afford the full range of possibilities, one can still
consume vicariously by accessing the lives of consumption heroes on the television and on
the internet. And if one is really adventurous as far as the internet is concerned, one can flee
to the wish-worlds of multi-player online environments and chase after the most coveted
virtual goods. In this very 21st-century state of affairs, it’s now possible to be virtually very
wealthy and really quite poor.
An additional friendly amendment to Norris’ narrative in this chapter concerns his
comments on consumerism and politics. At one point, while explaining how consumerism
is different from more formal, organized ideologies (e.g. Communism, fascism) Norris
makes the following remark:
There is no ‘‘Consumers Party’’ which represents the will of consumers (though there
are agencies which lobby on their behalf); there is no formal spokesperson or

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charismatic leader who inspires political guidance (though there are famous celebrity
representatives drawn from the entertainment industry); there is no cohesive written or
unwritten doctrine or founding text that can provide theoretical orientation… (p. 17).
Obviously, Norris is correct about this; there is, as yet, no formal ‘‘Consumerist
Manifesto.’’ However, in the light of recent developments, I think we need to think more
carefully about the link between political parties and consumerism. In the United States,
which we may safely assume to be the contemporary ground zero in terms of consumerism,
the political trend over the past 30 years has shifted decisively in favor of the wealthy
consumer, thanks largely to the Republican Party.
This claim may seem odd, as one rightly does not associate the Republicans with
‘‘consumer advocacy’’ or ‘‘consumers’ interests.’’ Consumer advocates, however, are often
concerned about poor consumers—the individuals who are forced to patronize payday
lending operations and shady credit card companies. The real drivers of consumption, the
key capital-C consumers, are the people who spend the most money—namely, the com-
fortably well off. These consumers have been enormously advantaged by a number of
Republican-led initiatives over the course of the past 30 years. First, there has been a
dramatic decrease in the tax rates paid by wealthy citizens in the last 60 years (Urban
Institute 2010). Reagan and George W. Bush both cut taxes significantly on personal
income, promising to put more money in the pockets of consumers. And, of course, in the
most recent election, we had the media frenzy around the ridiculous figure of ‘‘Joe the
Plumber,’’ a man who was, apparently, upset about Barack Obama’s threat to increase
taxes on families that earned more than $250,000. When it is possible to foment media
outrage over a tax increase on people who earn more than $250,000, the day of the wealthy
consumer has arrived definitively.
In addition to putting money in the pockets of the wealthy, the Republicans are also the
party of the consumer in a second important respect. As Mark Lilla (2010) has noted in a
recent New York Review of Books essay, there is one overarching principle articulated by
the vigorous new Tea Party Movement: ‘‘I want to be left alone’’ (para. 6). A significant
number of Americans, Lilla argues, are overconfident in their ability to manage endeavors
like health and retirement savings without government assistance. As a consequence, these
citizens simply want the government to butt out of their lives—no taxes, no regulations, no
nothing. For example, the financial backers of the Tea Party Express (2010) lead off their
statement of core principles in the following manner:
The solution is not to take more of the American people’s money—it is rather for
government to take less, and allow the American consumer to make his or her own
decisions about how to spend THEIR money (para. 2).
But what are the sources of this belief? One possibility is that it stems from consumers
having been told over and over again, through advertising, that their whims should rule the
day. Another significant possibility is that consumers simply wish to be free of any pesky
taxes and regulations that would prevent them from consuming. Thus, the slogan of the
Carl’s Jr. hamburger chain, ‘‘Don’t bother me, I’m eating,’’ could be fruitfully repurposed
as a tagline for the libertarian wing of the Republicans: ‘‘Fuck off, I’m consuming.’’ If
there were a consumerist manifesto, this would be the core commandment, and, in fact, it
has already been made explicit in the form of the Tea Party movement’s use of the
revolutionary-era Gadsden flag, which depicts a coiled snake with the famous inscription
‘‘Don’t Tread on Me.’’

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Of course, this serpentine rhetoric of consumerism has also been on the rise lately in the
educational realm. Since Milton Friedman published ‘‘The Role of Government in Edu-
cation,’’ in 1955, ‘‘consumer choice’’ has been a key rallying cry for defenders of school
vouchers and charter schools. Witness former Republican house speaker Newt Gingrich’s
(2006) remarks on the subject in the National Review:
The simplest and surest way to transform education is to give students and parents
the freedom to choose where they will go to school…This means introducing free-
market forces into education, encouraging schools to compete for students, much like
businesses compete for customers (para. 7).
Later in the same article, Gingrich continues in this vein, adding, ‘‘When Americans shop
for a new car, home, or thousands of other items, they quickly and easily gather
information on cost and quality from an endless array of resources’’ (para. 15). The
problem is, of course, that education and consumer goods are significantly disanalogous.
Even a relatively complex good like a car can be appraised in relatively straightforward
ways: a car’s speed, size, and reliability are easy to assess. The effectiveness of education,
by contrast, is a far murkier question. Standardized test scores clearly assess a certain
minimal level of effectiveness, but they utterly fail to assess schools according to arguably
more important criteria, e.g. the promotion of a disposition to think critically.
In the second chapter, Norris explains how corporate influence is growing more pow-
erful within public schools. There are multiple avenues by which corporations are working
to influence children, ranging from fairly conventional partnerships (‘‘This playground was
built with assistance from Home Depot’’) to ad-laden ‘‘free’’ textbooks and field trips to
corporate settings. Corporations are also resorting to more unconventional strategies to
inveigle themselves in children’s lives—they hire ‘‘cool’’ guerilla teen marketers to push
their products and sponsor ads within video games. Norris’ explanations here are thorough
and, throughout the discussion, it is clear that he realizes that direct corporate action within
schools is the thin edge of the consumerist wedge.
Having dealt with the question of consumerist influences in schooling, Norris, in his
third chapter, turns to Hannah Arendt for theoretical insight. Arendt, in The Human
Condition (1958) and other works, analyzed what she saw as the decline of the public
realm. Starting with the lively public sphere of the ancient Greeks, Arendt traces a long
decline of genuine speech and action which has, as its counterpoint, the rise of what she
calls the ‘‘social’’ realm. Arendt (1958) defines the rise of the ‘‘social’’ as ‘‘the rise of
housekeeping, its activities, problems, and organizational devices—from the shadowy
interior of the household into the light of the public sphere’’ (p. 38). In other words, she
asserts that as the social realm grew in power over time, production and consumption,
activities formerly confined to the household, encroached increasingly upon the public
sphere. Consider the example of consumer goods. These, which, long ago, were necessities
that were largely unworthy of public discussion, now occupy public space in the forms of
advertising and of everyday discourses. Simply put, ephemeral consumer goods occupy
peoples’ minds, and the desire to acquire them often provides the motive power for
everyday life. The public sphere, meanwhile, is impoverished, and people no longer have
the chance to distinguish themselves through speech and action. This is, as Norris says,
‘‘The process by which we present ourselves and appear to others,’’ and it is, for Arendt,
the quintessential human activity. Laboring and consuming, Arendt notes, are activities
that we share with the animals. Far from being activities that highlight our human dis-
tinctness, they reduce us to the same level.

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Norris’ explanation of Arendt is clear, as is the relevance of her work for his overall
argument, but his account does raise one minor concern when he gamely tries to defend
Arendt against accusations of nostalgia. This is a hopeless endeavor, as Arendt is strongly
nostalgic for Greek times. There is an air of ‘back in the time when men were men’ about
her warm description of public life in the Greek city-state. She explains that, in the polis,
citizens had the chance to be genuinely heroic, to distinguish themselves through speech
and action in the public sphere. At one point, she even suggests that the polis’ reason for
existence was as ‘‘a guaranty that those who forced every sea and land to become the scene
of their daring will not remain without witness’’ (Arendt 1958, p. 196). Those swash-
buckling Greeks!
Ultimately, though, the whole question of Arendt’s nostalgia does not matter very much
in and of itself. The most important question is whether speech and action in the Greek
mode is still possible or even desirable. Arendt suggests in The Human Condition that the
polis can go anywhere—in other words, that speech and action can happen in any public
space—but this claim is not particularly well supported with relevant current examples.
Norris points out that she refers us to the American Revolution, the Paris Commune, and
the Hungarian Uprising as examples of modern action, but even these (especially the first
two) are now rather remote from our contemporary situation. And as we all know, the
derring-do that, in Arendt’s eyes, characterized the polis is rather difficult to find at the
monthly meeting of the municipal council or even in the rarefied heights of the House of
Commons. It isn’t clear that harkening back to Greek life can illuminate the problems that
we face in the context of the 21st century. Arendt’s nostalgia is problematic in that it
distracts us from the critical fact that whatever speech and action are going to look like in
the vast networked society we inhabit, they are going to be substantially different from any
guise they may have had in the ancient world.
Furthermore, an additional possible problem with Arendt’s view is that her whole account
has an intensely anti-private and somewhat anti-democratic flavor. Her criticism of the social
may well be warranted, but she gives very little credit to lives that unfurl outside the space of
appearance in which action and speech take place. Consider the following remark:
The space [of appearance] does not always exist, and although all men are capable of
deed and word, most of them—like the slave, the foreigner, and the barbarian in
antiquity, like the laborer or craftsman prior to the modern age, the jobholder or
businessman in our world—do not live in it…To be deprived of it means to be
deprived of reality, which, humanly and politically speaking, is the same as
appearance (Arendt 1958, p. 199).
Arendt is opposed to Plato’s political scheme, which leaves politics to the experts and
allows ordinary citizens to go about their own work peacefully. Is it such a terrible fate not
to be decisively involved in the public sphere? According to Arendt, one is ‘‘deprived of
reality’’ if one fails to participate. Suppose that one ‘‘dropped out’’ of the consumerist
mainstream and opted simply to do one’s job, living a quiet life largely outside of the
consumer society and outside of any possible sphere of public action. Granted, this type of
choice doesn’t actually do much about the phenomenon of consumerism that concerns
Norris, but it still seems like an option that deserves more legitimacy than Arendt gives it.
Having offered a lucid account of Arendt, Norris then, in his fourth chapter, turns to the
ideas of French social theorist Jean Baudrillard. Baudrillard has a number of significant
insights about consumer culture—as Norris notes, Baudrillard remarks, ‘‘the new mantra of
marketing is not to produce advertising but to commercialize public reality itself; the aim is

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not to sponsor culture but to be the culture’’ (p. 104). This pithy observation constitutes a
genuine revelation about consumer culture. Brands don’t merely aim to sell individual
products to people; they attempt to invest the consumer in a complex brand ecosystem. In
other words, the human animal must be convinced to enter into the forms of life that
require the brand. In this way, the brands manage to replace reality with their particular
simulation of it.
On this point, Norris offers up an experiment he did with a ‘‘brand alphabet’’ in which
the letters of the alphabet were formed out of corporate logos. He notes that while aca-
demics only managed to recognize a few of the logos, schoolchildren were able to identify
virtually all of them. Clearly, children have a high degree of ‘‘brand literacy.’’ Norris
elaborates further:
It is noteworthy that while cultural conservatives like E. D. Hirsch lament the decline
of a common knowledge and call upon education to promote ‘cultural literacy’,
youth today in fact already speak a common language; ‘What every American needs
to know’ is about brands and their meanings. (p. 110).
This is one of the most depressing statements that Norris makes in the book, and also one
of the most insightful. If one does not know how to navigate the symbolic architectures
offered by these brands, then one really is a genuine illiterate in the context of
contemporary youth culture. Norris comments that this ‘‘hegemonic literacy’’ is a ‘‘mere
simulation of learning,’’ and I agree insofar as the question of hegemony is concerned.
However, the second part of the statement is more dubious. Brand literacy is, in fact, a
genuine form of learning—it is a kind of 21st-century common sense that is now required
in order to pass smoothly through the world. Even if what advertising communicates is, as
Norris suggests, ‘‘a false world of signifiers that does not refer to the signified’’ (p. 119),
the messages that advertising communicates are significant in terms of people’s everyday
realities. The fact is that in a First World urban environment, it is usually more useful to be
able to identify a brand than to be able to identify a tree. As Baudrillard notes, the
simulation has, to some extent, become the real. Therefore, it’s a doomed project to try to
convince students that knowledge of brand culture is worthless because this proposition is
manifestly untrue. A more promising project is to convince them that this type of
knowledge is limited in its value and that it has serious deficiencies. Norris quotes
Baudrillard on this latter point: ‘‘There can be no more impoverished language than [the
language of advertising], laden with referents yet empty of meaning. It is a language of
mere signals’’ (p. 115).
Norris does excellent work summarizing Baudrillard’s fairly wide-ranging and non-sys-
tematic theories about consumer culture. His explanation of Baudrillard’s famous Disneyland
analysis (‘Disneyland must exist in order to distract Americans from the fact that America is a
simulation.’) is especially effective. The sole significant difficulty with Norris’ account of
Baudrillard comes when he appears to support a particularly questionable aspect of Bau-
drillard’s theory—the strategy of ‘‘surrendering to the object.’’ Norris comments, ‘‘Bau-
drillard encourages us to abandon the subject and side with the object, a ‘fatal strategy’ of
surrendering to the object and submitting to the power of seduction’’ (p. 141). As Norris notes,
Baudrillard thus understands ‘‘the silence of the masses’’ in the face of growing consumerism
as ‘‘an effective fatal strategy of resistance’’ (p. 141).
An effective fatal strategy of resistance? Baudrillard is famous for unconventional
analyses, but this one beggars belief. Who would have thought that, all this time, the folks
who phone in and order products from the Shopping Channel were gallantly resisting

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consumerism through their heroic surrender to the objects that are offered for sale! Arendt
may be overly nostalgic, and there may be some difficulties with her conception of action,
but at least she has a robust idea of agency, which would seem to be what is required in
order to resist consumerism. Baudrillard’s strategy seems to be nothing more than
acquiescence.
Thus, although it is entertaining to read Baudrillard’s (2000) put-downs of, say,
American culture (‘‘Americans may have no identity, but they do have wonderful teeth.’’
(p. 34)), there is a problem with his thinking that Hegel scholar Allan Wood pinpoints
effectively. In a brief discussion of The Matrix (the makers of which were influenced by
Baudrillard), Wood (2004) makes the following point:
But there is also metaphorical reality to the coolness of the few, which the Matrix
movies fashionably celebrate. This is the attitude that used to be called ‘postmodern-
ism’ and now lives on under various names, or perhaps in forms so ultra-cool they no
longer need any name at all…The distinctive feature of this movement is that it gets
piquant aesthetic pleasure from the deconstructive experience of passing from the
tedious illusion of everyday experience to momentary glimpses of the horrifying reality
that lies behind it. The pleasure derives in part because the nauseating glimpses of
reality relieve the boredom of the illusion and in part from indulging the deconstruction
artist’s childish self-conceit in thinking himself or herself superior to most people who
do not even catch these horrifying glimpses of reality. Postmodern coolness, however,
is only the final form of illusion, the self-deceiving pleasure of thinking there is
something liberating about just catching these momentary glimpses of reality, it is the
last pitiful facsimile of the genuine liberation of humanity that Marx fought for and
hoped for, but which cool postmodernism now knows to be forever impossible (p. 268).
Regardless of whether he is right about the essence of postmodernism, Wood points toward
a genuine danger—the possibility that one will become content to ridicule popular culture
while either doing nothing to combat it and/or simply acquiescing to it. Although
Baudrillard has some powerful insights to offer as far as the question of consumerism is
concerned, the ‘‘fatal strategies’’ should be rejected and this is especially true as far as
education is concerned.
In his final chapter, entitled ‘‘Resisting Consumerism: Ruin or Renewal?’’ Norris turns
directly to the question of promising educational strategies for fighting against consumerist
trends. He attacks the rhetoric of consumer choice, noting that the choices available are
often either sharply limited or trivial. He then highlights a number of strategies for resisting
consumerism in schools, among them critical media literacy and culture jamming. Culture
jamming is where students take action to interrupt the prevailing media discourse—a
simple example would be altering an advertisement in order to subvert its message.
Schools, in Norris’s view, are potentially vital sites of resistance where strategies like
culture jamming could be employed to fight the onslaught of consumer culture.
Norris acknowledges that enacting these types of strategies can be difficult for teachers.
Even in the Canadian context, where teachers are not, as yet, completely subservient to the
demands of standardized testing, teachers often face administrative and curricular pressure
not to tackle potentially controversial issues like consumer culture. Beyond this, corpo-
rations may organize opposition to anti-consumerist efforts—Norris recounts the example
of a group of Toronto teachers who were slapped with a $900,000 lawsuit for opposing a
commercially run ‘‘educational’’ television network that proposed to pipe programming into
classrooms. Still, there is, as yet, some space for promoting resistance. Anti-consumerist

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education can potentially receive sympathy from a broad ideological swath of parents;
conservatives can support it on the basis that it promotes thrift, while leftists can celebrate its
promotion of resistance to corporate messages. The consensus between these groups may be
fairly weak, but it at least offers a starting point for teachers. And, at least in Canada, there are
also opportunities (media studies courses, social studies programs) within the curriculum to
question corporate messages.
Consumerism is one of the dominant narratives of our time, and Norris realizes that it is
going to be difficult to educate for resistance. Even anti-consumerist trends are often
swiftly co-opted by the market—witness the ubiquitous Che t-shirts. Philosophers have
long been aware of the difficulty of struggling against powerful narratives like this—in
Being and Time (1927/1996), Heidegger pointed out that the struggle against inauthenticity
had the structure of eddying—just as a leaf briefly pops onto of the water only to be
submerged by the current, one exits inauthenticity only to be drawn back into it again. But
despite the overwhelming power of consumerism, I agree with Norris that critical edu-
cation can make a significant difference. One has to meet young people on their own
ground and confront them with the falseness and emptiness of consumerist discourse. It is
one of the most important educational efforts we can make. As B. Traven wrote so many
years ago in the opening lines of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1935/1967): ‘‘The
treasure which you think not worth taking trouble and pain to find, this one alone is the real
treasure you are longing for all your life. The glittering treasure you are hunting for day
and night lies buried on the other side of that hill yonder.’’ (p. 1).

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