Consumer Culture and its Social Effects on Education
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Some of the difficulties that educators are having in teaching their students today are resultant from what Hannah Arendt (2006), called the crisis of authority in our modern world. It is hindering, among other things, the teacher’s ability to educate and protect the children from the world. This study proposes the importance of including consumer culture as the fundamental context with which to understand some of today’s more negative aspects of individualism and individuation that may be partly caused by a culture of entitlement in contemporary society in general, as well as in education and schools. Using consumer culture as an all-encompassing term to understand what Zygmunt Bauman (2007) referred to as our ‘liquid’ society, this study shows how this crisis is the result of capitalism’s metamorphosis from that of producers to that of consumers. It discusses how the change of capitalism’s ethos over the decades has had a marked effect on the individual sense of being and belonging by fundamentally replacing the citizen with the consumer. In education, consumer culture is promoting an individualized consumerist ethos that compromises the more metaphysical and holistic aspects of teaching (educere) while promoting the exclusively functionalist and mechanical educare with its more practical, skills-oriented, standardized, individualizing and ‘marketable’ aims of education. To understand the genesis of consumer culture’s alienating form of individualism, this study makes a brief historical analysis of capitalism’s initial stages of consolidation to its semiotic and surveillance forms of today. It demonstrates how the quasi-complete commodification of daily life, including often within rapports, is manufacturing our identities and personas through egotism, egoism, and even simulation. Through an autoethnography, this study manages to align and illustrate this discussion and theories espoused by several scholars through ten vignettes from this author’s personal life experiences both as a citizen and educator.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".