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The authors discuss what teachers need to know to guide young adults as they negotiate ubiquitous pressures to consume.
Recently we completed a course designed to expand and deepen our knowledge about America's consumerocracy and the methods that give it the immense power it has.1 As a result of our reading and shared thinking in this course, Teaching Adolescents in a Consumer Society, we feel strongly motivated and better prepared to craft educational responses to the relentless, all-encompassing pressure to buy-from which, we've discovered, neither we nor our students have any safe haven. In this article, we present ideas from our course that we believe readers of English Journal may find useful as they design units on consumption and critical thinking for their students.
The goal of our course was to inform ourselves about the corporate competition we face in guiding teens and young adolescents toward adult citizenship in a fundamentally democratic, but increasingly consumerist, society. We learned that the schema of the "free market" grew in influence for more than three decades in the United States before the recent economic crash and is responsible for both the peaks of our society's substantial wealth and the deep valleys of its considerable poverty. Corporate growth in revenue in such a competitive environment requires constantly increasing sales through more creative ways to market goods and services and extend brand loyalty among consumers. As a result, corporate influence on and intrusion into our lives is significant.
When we turn on a television, it's there. When we turn on a radio, it's there. When we surf the Internet or play video games, it's there, too-and not just at home, where we choose to turn it on and also have the power to turn it off. When we stop for lunch, televisions surround us. Few casual restaurants are now without several sets, making it impossible to avoid watching them. We have even seen small television screens in hotel elevators. When we walk or drive we pass a multitude of signs and billboards designed to grab our attention and spur us to buy; buses plastered with ads move next to us. We are both blatantly and subliminally pushed to consume. If we don't, we aren't good citizens because our thrift...