Stealing Innocence: Corporate Culture's War on Children (review)

Stealing Innocence: Corporate Culture's War On Children Henry Giroux St. Martin's Press, 2000

Going where too few intellectuals and (ironically and woefully enough) educators have gone, Henry Giroux's latest book links contemporary moral panics about the so-called disappearance of childhood with the crisis of democracy itself. Stealing Innocence: Corporate Culture's War on Children brings into sharp relief the decidedly mystified relationship between the challenge of public education, the seemingly ubiquitous ethos of corporate culture, and the politics of childhood innocence. Drawing upon the intellectual legacies of the Birmingham School, Antonio Gramsci, Paulo Freire, and the latest theoretical iterations of Stuart Hall, Giroux structures his book around the demystification of three interrelated myths. According to Giroux, these myths, "the end of history," "childhood innocence," and "disinterested scholarship," effectively subvert the material actualization of democratic principles, children's welfare, and the production of socially engaged scholarship (1). The book's primary strength is Giroux's ability to convincingly demonstrate the relationship among these seemingly disparate elements, doing so with such intensity and acumen that if nothing else, the book (in part) achieves rhetorically what might be otherwise too radical to achieve practically.

The first of these myths, the end of history, conflates late capi- talist market economy success with the success of representative democracy. Giroux's primary concern here is the power of citizenship atrophying into the power of consumption, obscuring the contradictions inherent in their relationship, thereby relegating values critical to democratic life such as "justice, respect for children, and the rights of citizens" to the margins of not only public discourse, but also of public consciousness altogether (2). Giroux rightly situates public education at ground zero of this distressing transformation, and provides an insightful and disturbing analysis of its contemporary commodification. As an increasing number of public schools are advised—or threatened—to operate as bottom-line corporations (lest they lose state and federal funding), and company-run schools become more commonplace (if not yet profitable), the concept of public education becomes less a public good for all than a private good for some. Giroux argues that the big winner in all of this is today's globalized marketplace, as students are trained for its minimum-wage jobs and educated, above all, to consume (85).

Clearly, the official raison d'être of the public school system to educate a civic-minded, critically thoughtful citizenry has not always been inclusive, nor perfectly translated into practice. However, Giroux's well-documented "history of the present" foreshadows the "de-monopolized" education system that is to come if corporate culture's mythmakers continue to define the parameters of the debate, and spells out what is at stake for both children and the possibility of a future, robust public sphere: Corporate-produced, or at least corporate-friendly, curriculums render even more remote the possibility of a critically thoughtful citizenry as students are taught to master discrete bits of information through rote memorization of depoliticized facts and figures. Standardized teaching models circumvent questions concerning the relationship between knowledge and power and an understanding of the complex, systemic nature of their functioning, leaving children ill-equipped to critically "see" the cultural forces and edifices that give shape to their lives, thus undermining both their agential and defensive capacities for power (92).

Giroux's analysis is bleak, but not utterly pessimistic. His call for educators, students, parents, and community members to form coalitions and organizations to challenge this corporate ascendency is more than idealistic crusading. Although receiving scant attention in the media, such campaigns in Seattle, San Francisco, and Berkeley have successfully defended public schools as commercial-free spaces where not only are children to be free from the increasingly corporatized world, but they are to be equipped with the critical knowledge and skills to question it. Giroux's impassioned critique should be required reading for all teachers, school officials, students, parents, PTA members, and state legislators. Standing on its own, this section...