Toys, Cultural Transmission, and Recruitment

We like to think that a protective barrier separates children from society. Kids live in a bubble. They have special books and toys and television programs, all of which present them with a sanitized version of the world. We don't like to think about the ways in which the cultural elements of children's worlds are saturated with "outside" social forces of nationalism, imperialism, and capitalism.

Sometimes it is obvious. Feminists have done a fine job critiquing the image of womanhood and the female body promoted by Barbie dolls. Disney has been duly criticized for its patriarchal values and often explicit racism. Fads such as pogs (or bottle caps) have really laid bare the money-making schemes that, with the help of creative marketing and television/movie product integrations, have the power to shape children's behavior.

Then there are the still obvious but less uniformly accepted social/political implications of youth culture. There are endless debates about the harms of Gangsta Rap and violent movies and video games. We just had another round of this after the tragic shooting in Sandy Hook. Some people say, "It's no wonder we have all these mass shootings. Look at the games young people are playing, and the movies they are watching." And then of course others fire back with either the less persuasive argument that "kids really don't take the violence seriously and exposure to video games/movies alone doesn't predict whether any particular person will become a mass murder" (and then they typically blame the news media, because, as we all know, there is no greater young adult influence than the news) - or the slightly more convincing but nonetheless fallacious argument that "other countries have violent video games and they don't have these mass shootings.... ipso facto, there is absolutely no relationship between violence embedded in cultural artifacts and real, enacted violence."

Any kind of culture - whether it is adult culture, teenage culture, children's culture - penetrates individual consciousness and shapes behavior. If your argument is premised on culture being in any way inconsequential, then you are clearly wrong. Every encounter with a cultural production provides us with images, vocabulary, and morally charged narrative, which together compose a framework for interpreting, valuing, and talking about the world. To put it crudely: the images, words, and narratives that we are presented through cultural media determine what we believe and how we perceive the world around us.

So, for example, if one is consistently, from childhood, being presented with variations on the Good vs. Evil narrative, and if violence is perpetually being portrayed as the only effective means for Good to triumph over Evil (add in some patriotic symbols, perhaps, for greater emotional effect), then violence will likely occupy an ambiguous position within one's moral framework, making it easier to justify particular violent acts. On a more sensory level, the abundance of everyday play that involves acts of violence (from toy water guns to graphically violent video games), which are sanitized to remove both the physical gore and the psychological/moral quandaries associated with brutality, serves to normalize and trivialize violence. This can numb one to the real effects of violence and also allow an easier transition to actual brutality.

Meanwhile, as people continue to debate these sorts of issues, a third (but not unrelated) consideration lurks in the background. Are the purveyors of youth culture simply trying to make money, or is any active, purposeful transmission of values taking place? (We have agreed that some transmission of values is taking place; the question here is to what degree it is intended.) For example, there is a striking parallel between the attitudes and behaviors indigenous to team sporting events (from school sports to professional leagues) and those that are characteristic of nationalism. It is clear that the cultivation of these dispositions early in life prepares children to be receptive to nationalist ideology. Was that ever planned, and/or is anyone currently trying to maximize its political potential?

Similarly, we may never know whether Disney intended to reinforce racist attitudes or whether Mattel tried to promote a particular image of an ideal female body. We do know about all the various ways in which the makers of toys, games, and tv shows try very intently to promote the development of different cognitive skills (we now even have Goldiblocks to encourage girls' interest in engineering) - but this is not only an uncontroversial goal, but more importantly, it is a great marketing ploy.

What about the violence? It is so pervasive in youth culture... does it serve any purpose other than its supposedly inherent entertainment value? I think it is clear that the processes of normalization and desensitization are supremely useful to the maintenance of a social order that requires violence as its modus operandi. Plenty of movies and video games have explicitly defended and glorified courses of action taken by the United States. More than this though, the military has seen the motor coordination skills that are cultivated by video games as a valuable resource in the operation of drone technology. They have a keen interest in video game competitions and view the events as recruiting grounds. How innocent, then, are video games when the military seriously considers them as a preparatory stage to real warfare?

We all, generally, feel a need to brainwash children. Usually this is framed in terms of socialization, education, and instilling values. Regardless, though, we still see children as the blank slates that we can form to our liking. The problem is that, through mass-produced cultural productions, multiple interests are trying to shape any given child, and we hardly know who or what they are.

The Role of Education in a Capitalist Society

It is not easy to answer the question, "What is the purpose of education?"  There are so many competing ideas about what education should be.  Furthermore, the history of the development of the institutional apparatus that has become the modern education system is incredibly complex.  However, from a historical materialist perspective, neither the "should" nor the "was" directly explain what is.  The past may provide the materials, and ideology may affect the nuances, but only current conditions (relationships and structures) can account for the role that education actually plays in late capitalist society.

Perhaps the most important and most obvious use of education is its provision of vocational training. Particularly in late capitalist society, many jobs require complex skill sets.  The existence of public and private educational systems, as opposed to apprenticeship and other forms of on-the-job training, shifts the cost of training from the employer to the employee (either directly via private institutions or indirectly through the tax-funded public school system).  Thus, regardless of whether they are public or private, educational institutions serve as a means of reducing labor costs.  Public education may be viewed as a subsidy of the cost of labor.

The second most salient role of education is as a means of "indoctrination," or, in my own preferred terms, transmission of ideology.  Knowledge is not neutral. Human knowledge is never a transparent reflection of reality.  One can only make sense of the world by organizing it according to some framework for interpretation.  In the process of transmitting knowledge, one must also impart and reinforce a particular interpretive framework (ideology).  Educational institutions, in concert with the media, inculcate members of society with ideological frameworks that legitimize, even romanticize, the social order:  most notably social contract ideology, neoliberal ideology, the ideology of progress... the idea that capitalism = free markets = AWESOMENESS.  Or democracy = liberty = SO GREAT I COULD KILL PEOPLE FOR IT.

But not only is this ideological management a means of generating consent, it also places limits (by reducing variability and making certain things taken for granted) on the diversity of beliefs and opinions held by a large portion of the population.  During the early 20th century, amidst rising tides of immigration and heightened class conscious, education was overtly used for "assimilation."  Although the use of this term in reference to education has waned, the assimilative role of education persists.  Assimilation is more powerful than consent.  A large body of shared beliefs and perspectives makes the general population much easier to manipulate and control.  For example, when something new arises, novel arguments can be fashioned from the communal knowledge base which serve to garner new types of consent.

Another important, though slightly more incidental, effect of formal education is its contribution to the social division of labor.  Some argue this is THE function of education.  However, I believe that social reproduction can occur in other ways, and that the formal education system just arbitrarily happens to also be useful for these purposes.  The idea here is that the educational system "resonates" with upper/middle-class culture (as that is who maintains the system).  This causes lower status students to become alienated, achieve less, and settle for lower skilled, lower paying jobs, while more privileged students, already primed for schooling, acquire a body of "symbolic capital" (see Pierre Bourdieu), including tastes, manners of speaking, literary/artistic knowledge, etc. that marks them as members of "higher society" and gives them access to strategic connections, better paying jobs, and political influence.  And it appears that all of the latter are acquired through merit (educational achievement) rather than inherited status.

An additional ancillary benefit of education is that it has produced an entire economic sector which can be mined and exploited by capitalist interests (that is why businesses have involved themselves more with education after the crisis of overproduction set in).  It also allows both parents to pursue employment outside of the home while their children are cared for during the day.

Of course, others involved in the educational system have contributed to the particular form it has taken, the manifold details of its existence, in the service of goals that are not actually forwarded by education.  Those goals include the use of education

-as preparation for democratic citizenship
-as a means of nurturing the holistic development of each child
-as a mechanism for eliminating social inequalities (if educational achievement gaps can be closed, then all children will have the opportunity to "lift themselves out of poverty")
-as a tool for inciting awareness of social problems along with development of critical thinking skills (activist educational researchers encourage students of oppressed groups to learn more about why they are oppressed so that they can challenge the system)

The first two are, in my opinion, too vaguely defined to ever be attainable.  The third is impossible because achievement gaps are only a shadowy effect of the brute conditions of poverty, and cannot serve as a point of entry for such deeply pervasive structural problems.  The fourth is not a totally unrealistic goal.  However, the forces that are aligned in opposition to such projects seem insurmountable.  And so far the system has not been challenged.  Thus, while these four goals have had some influence on the course that modern education has taken, they do not explain its actual material relationships to other institutions and social processes.

Bearing all of this in mind, I will attempt in the next series of posts to describe some pivotal moments of the last few decades of educational history.