Consumerist education: What is it worth?

Whatever else education may purport to be, it involves, at least, the endeavour to transmit knowledge. Although it may be that not much of education takes place in a school, I shall argue that the values embedded in the dominant epistemology of institutional learning give rise to a number of educational myths, one of which is narrated in the currency of scientific materialism: an ideological coin whose other side is rampant consumerism. Because we end up commodifying everything, there is little, if anything, that has intrinsic value. We commodify both space and time and everything in these domains, and the value we ascribe to spatio-temporal things depends upon their potential capacity to be bought, sold, or leased. We commodify not only material goods but also the whole of culture. We commodify our relationships with each other and we sell to each other cultural experience, both manufactured and virtual to extend the sphere of commercialization infinitely. One consequence of the mythology of consumerism is that it lends ineluctably to futile, or endemically frustrated, aspiration on the one hand and increasing alienation on the other.