The Student as Shopper

"Rochdale,...in Toronto, may be a sign of what is to come."

–Jerry Farber, 1967

This year is the two hundredth anniversary of the publication of "The Student as Nigger" by Jerry Farber, the essay which shocked entire continents and inspired a generation of young people.

Okay, it's not the two hundredth anniversary. I'm just trying to get your attention. It's actually the forty-second anniversary. But Mr. Farber did shock entire continents etc., and a look back at his essay tells us something about how life has changed over the last third of a century.

It might as well be the essay's two hundredth anniversary, too, for all the difference it makes to us. The schools continue, as Mr. Farber put it in one of those characteristic turns of phrase which endear the Sixties to so many, to "put a dying society's trip" on students. All that shock and inspiration went for nought.

Mr Farber was right about the society being moribund. The society in which he wrote "The Student as Nigger" has died. A society of conformity has been replaced by one of diversity. While many of us quite naturally are sickened by the constant invocation of diversity in the same spirit as that in which one used to invoke God, motherhood, and apple pie, I think most of us find that a society of diversity is more to our taste.

But the schools are still agencies of indoctrination, and more openly than they ever were. Inculcating wholesome attitudes is now commonly thought of as an essential role of the school. Mr. Farber foresaw a future in which students owned and ran the schools, but that future is as far away now as it was in 1967, and seems even farther.

To be fair to Mr. Farber, he clearly intended that his essay should provoke discussion of serious but neglected issues in education rather than prophesy. He also clearly thought that any real change in the schools would require radical changes in students' goals and attitudes which were by no means certain. Nevertheless, the schools didn't change and now, with the benefit of 36 years' hindsight, I'm going to give you the same reasons Mr. Farber probably would to explain why they haven't changed.

One of the reasons Mr. Farber failed to foretell the future is that he made the common mistake of assuming the future would be just like the past. As McLuhan said, we look at the present through a rear-view mirror, and so we march backwards into the past.

Mr. Farber's conception of schooling is one appropriate, as McLuhan would also say, to a society of mechanical technology. While the societies of the Sixties had extensive electronic technology, they were still run as if they were based on mechanical technology. Mechanical technology requires standard inputs, and those inputs include the people who work it. Society was conformist because standard training and characteristics were thought to be necessary if society was going to work.

So Mr. Farber conceived of school as a factory – a monolithic enterprise which moulded students into a standard form – and that conception is not without validity as a conception of the school system of the 1960s. However, not only was the society of the 1960s a dying society, the school system of the 1960s was a dying school system.

Even as Mr. Farber was writing "The Student as Nigger" the monolithic school system of the 1950s was crumbling under pressure from the diversifying forces of electronic technology. Really. I wouldn't kid you about this. Electronic technology permits diversity, and the common 60s demands for a wider-ranging curriculum and for interdisciplinary studies came in part from a realization that technology now made such things possible. At least, they could have come from that realization, and whatever the reason may be, the school system diversified with astonishing speed.

By the early 1970s the variety of courses offered in secondary and postsecondary schools was being greatly increased. Where high schools used to offer one English course per grade, they started offering a half dozen or a dozen. High school students were allowed much greater freedom in choosing courses. Universities added whole new departments and faculties.

Apart from embracing electronic technology – we old folks can remember how in the late 60s you could say that literacy was going to die out in the next generation because film and television would replace books and people wouldn't respond by saying you were a great raving halfwit but instead think of you as a clear-eyed thinker with a firm grasp of social change – people also became extremely alienated from the old mechanical values. Like Mr. Farber, they rejected a society in which people were moulded into a standard form. They sought to do their own thing, as they so eloquently put it.

As Tom Wolfe observed in "The Me Decade," people adopted a gnostic philosophy which held that their salvation would come from within themselves (he did not say people became self-centred or selfish; that misinterpretation was foisted on the public by the usual culprits – journalists). So people sought to be unique, and electronic technology helped them to think that they were.

All of which put paid to Mr. Farber's vision of student strikes overthrowing the owners of the educational means of production (I wasn't fooling when I said he conceived of the school as a factory). People doing their own thing don't engage in common action – as we all know, that was the Achilles heel of 60s activism, and one of the reasons all those young fighters for social justice in the 60s became yuppies in the 80s.

Today's school is more like a shopping mall. If you don't like what's on sale in one department or course you go look in another. Yet you respect the choices of other people who might want to shop in the department which you didn't like, because we respect each other's choices and differences. That's what happens when the owners of the means of production adapt to electronic technology. They can make use of diversity, too.

So Mr. Farber missed the boat. He was right about the dying society, but the injustice he wanted to rectify was a dying injustice. And in the end he was attacking it in the wrong place. The schools aren't that important.

As McLuhan also pointed out, the educational efforts of the public schools are dwarfed by those of the large corporations. Their advertising and television shows bombard children relentlessly. Those television shows include not only all the witless situation comedies and dramas which teach children that the important things in life are being pretty, wearing fashionable clothes, driving a sharp car, and having lots of sex with other pretty and fashionable drivers of sharp cars, but also the television news shows which treat as important events the doings of manufactured celebrities and the openings of branches of chain retailers.

In the 1960s marketing to children was an important industry, but since the 1960s marketers have succeeded at enormously increasing the number of markets in which children consume. In particular, children start to consume fashionable clothing and music at much younger ages than in the 60s. The consumerist approach to life that they come to acquire is more likely to have been acquired from the people who promote consumption than from the people who run schools.

Society today is one big mall. You don't have to think about politics any more. Instead you just shop around and buy the platform that makes you feel the best (what else could explain Quebec separatism?). You don't have to wrestle with the principles and dilemmas of religion any more. You just shop around for some beliefs which make you feel accepted and "spiritual." You don't even have to think about life any more. You just shop around till you find some motivational speaker who makes you feel good about yourself.

School is the creature of this society, not its creator. It's just another store in the mall, and it's not one of the anchor stores. By the time students reach university, which was the chief subject of Mr. Farber's essay, the die has been cast. They are there to shop – chiefly for jobs, but also for social status, sexual experience, and "self-fulfilment."

What the universities have to fear these days is not the awakening of the student body to the the consumerism which they believe helps them express their diversity and uniqueness, but which actually controls them and makes sure they behave in ways approved by important commercial interests. What the universities have to fear is that students will become even more consumerist. When students start demanding money-back guarantees, the university's day is over.

The Student as Shopper © John FitzGerald, 2003