Commodification of Child/hood and Education

It is inevitable, we are living in the consumer society. Things are mass produced, sold, bought and wasted. All products hold their own value and function. They are created and displayed in certain ways to hail consumers. Commodification was originally termed in Marxism, it is the process by which material objects are turned into marketable goods with monetary (exchange) value. The process cannot be done within the products themselves, rather, they have to go through many hands including advertisement, production management and labour before they are finished. The finished products must fulfill necessary conditions such as function, performance and/or quality. Jack Zipes (2010) emphasizes that displays of the child has become a good, to be sure, a human good, that can make choices and maybe highly creative and intelligent. But these choices are defined by market condition. Marketing and sale of goods and commodities depend on display and dissemination of the displayed goods. Moreover, according to Becker (1976), in the midst of neoliberalism, everything is reduced to economics, 'all things desired or valued - from personal attributes to good government - are commodities, including children. All commodities can be expressed in monetary terms, at prices determined through market, and traded on the market. In the book, Ethics and Politics in Early Childhood Education (Dahlberg & Moss, 2005, p.34~51), the authors address how these new economic conditions, neoliberal capitalism, brings contemporary influence into the labour force as well as the education system.
A culture of commodification does more than undermine the ideals of a secure and happy childhood; it also exhibits the amiss faith of a society in which, for children, "there can be only one kind of value, market value; one kind of success, profit; one kind of existence, commodities; and one kind of social relationship, markets"(Grossberg, 2005). Children now inhabit a cultural landscape in which they can only recognize themselves in terms preferred by the market. What is image of the children in such a businessified education system with free market fundamentalism? How is the space of a early learning classroom taken for granted? Yet, Dahlberg & Moss (2005) emphasizes: children’s spaces as spaces for children’s own agendas, although not precluding adults agendas, where children are understood as fellow citizens with rights, participating members of the social groups in which they find themselves, agents of their own lives but also interdependent with others, co-constructors of knowledge, identity and culture, children who co-exist with others in society on the basis of who they are, rather than who they will become (p.106). How ‘children’s space’ rather than ‘children’s service’ (p.106) form child’s identity in a way that the image of the child in neoliberal society- market- can be disrupted? 

Main researchers whom I am inspired by are:
Gunilla Dahlberg, Pat Petrie, Peter Moss
Text:
1) From Children's services to Children's Space: Public Policy, Children and Childhood
2) Ethics and Politics in Early childhood Education

Dahlberg, G., Moss, P. (2005). Ethics and Politics in Early Childhood Education. Technology as first Practice (p. 36). New York: RoutledgeFalmer 

Moss, P., Petrie, P. (2002). From Children’s Services to Children’s Space. Public Policy, Children and Childhood. New York: RoutledgeFalmer.

Zipes, J. (2010). Children and their Representation: Re-tooling and Reconfiguring Children: Conflicts in the Civilizing Process. 

Retrieved from http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2010/02/rethinking-children-childhood-in-the-21st-century-children-and-their-representation/