This Little Kiddy Went to Market

Donald Fisher, founder of The Gap said: “I’ve had the experience of building a company from nothing to 4,000 stores. Why can’t we do the same with schools and do it with excellence?”

To find out why they (businesspeople) can’t and, more importantly, why their attempts should be resisted, read Sharon Beder’s excellent book This Little Kiddy Went to Market: The Corporate Capture of Childhood.

The extent of corporate involvement in schools and the aggressive targeting of children is really quite frightening. It also has very negative effects on children:

In 2005 the UK National Consumer Council (NCC) found that British children were ‘the least happy generation of the post-war era’… [UNICEF’s] assessment of the well-being of children in 21 affluent nations… found that children in the US and the UK were worse off than in any of the other nations in the study…

This book will show that nearly all of the problems facing children today are a direct result of the efforts of corporations to make profits from children and to shape and socialise them to suit business interests.

And these efforts don’t end when children get older. Jeff Schmidt’s Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Battering System That Shapes Their Lives shows how these efforts continue into graduate school and the workplace.

If you’re studying in Sweden, you can order both books through the fantastic Libris site and pick them up at your nearest library: This Little Kiddy Went to Market, Disciplined Minds.