Essai Critiques / Review Essays Out of the Garden and Into the Mall

Essai Critiques / Review Essays 

Out of the Garden and Into the Mall 

Out of the Garden: Toys, TV and Children’s Culture in the Age of Marketing 

by Stephen Kline 

Toronto: Garamond Press, 1993. x + 406 pages. 

REVIEWED BY CARMEN LUKE, JAMES COOK UNIVERSITY 

Stephen Kline’s Out of the Garden: Toys, TV and Children’s Culture in the Age 

of Marketing has special significance for me. Kline works in the Department of 

Communication at Simon Fraser University. As a 1980s graduate of SFU’s 

Department of Communication, I have carried my interests in cultural and communications 

studies with me across continents and into the disciplinary area in 

which I now work. Since taking up my post at this Australian university some 

ten years ago, I have been teaching media and popular cultural studies to undergraduate 

and graduate students in an Education faculty. My teaching and research 

focus has always been to give teachers theoretical and analytic tools for teaching 

the young about media and popular culture: how they construct identities and 

understandings of the social world, and how social life is organized through the 

texts, artefacts, and cultural practices of popular and media culture. 

Having come to this country with a strong background in the kinds of media 

literacy work being conducted at the time in Ontario, in Alberta, and to some 

extent in British Columbia, I have long been an advocate of media and popular 

cultural literacy studies at all levels of schooling, including university studies. As 

a result, the Education faculty where I now work is one of a few in this country 

which have media and popular cultural studies structured into the core undergraduate 

teacher training curriculum (Luke, 1993). My biggest dilemma, however, has 

always been to find appropriate books to set as course readings. Each year I end 

up putting together a collation of journal articles and book chapters to provide 

students with adequate theoretical grounding in issues of culture, representation, 

childhood, political economy, and descriptive studies of children and popular culture. 

Out of the Garden is the first book that is well suited to my undergraduate 

and graduate courses. 

Educational theorists and researchers tend primarily to locate childhood and 

the child in theoretical models of cognition, learning, or socialization. Key social 

305 CANADIAN JOURNAL OF EDUCATION 19:3 (1994)

306 ESSAIS CRITIQUES / REVIEW ESSAYS 

and textual sites for childhood socialization are commonly seen as the family, 

school, children’s literature, and school texts. Few academic educators theorize 

childhood in terms of how it is structured and experienced in the marketplace of 

contemporary culture. In North America, the few critical educational theorists 

who do acknowledge and attempt to incorporate a “cultural studies” into curriculum 

and pedagogy, however, have pretty much operated at the level of generalized 

calls to incorporate a cultural politics into classroom discourse. Among 

educators, children’s popular culture is commonly dismissed as a negative influence 

on literacy, cognitive, moral, and social development (cf. Postman, 1982). 

The cultural culprit: capitalist mass commodification of childhood experience 

through the media texts, iconography, toys, video games, and spin-off merchandise 

that make those experiences concrete through ownership, and the linguistic 

and behavioural/play repertoires they enable. In much contemporary work, then, 

not a great deal is available that would lead us to critical theorization of childhood 

in relation to contemporary Western popular culture. 

The introduction to Out of the Garden maps the general argument and aims 

of this book. Kline surveys work on childhood in psychological, psychoanalytic, 

anthropological, educational, and sociological theory in order to show how those 

discourses have theorized the child. In the models of these disciplines, the child 

is conceptualized primarily as an object of family and school control and socialization, 

all of which neglect to consider the historically variable influences of 

cultural commodities (including, for instance, books) on children’s personality 

and social development. Kline then locates his theoretical point of departure, 

which has its roots in the works of Canadian communication theorists Harold 

Innis and Marshall McLuhan, and in neo-Marxian analyses of culture industries. 

This latter theoretical framework guides the few other recent works available on 

media and children, most notably Susan Willis’ (1991) A Primer for Daily Life, 

and Marsha Kinder’s (1991) Playing with Power in Movies, Television and Video 

Games: From Muppet Babies to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. 

Chapter 1 takes up the concept and practices of marketing strategies. Marketing 

strategies, following Raymond Williams, are never simple and straightforward, 

or conspiratorial. Rather, like audience uptake, they are highly differentiated 

and open to renegotiation and change within broad-based “regularities” and 

“similarities” of cultural expression. Although persons from different sociocultural 

locations and reading positions may well construct different meanings 

from the same text, such as a Coke commercial, there is nonetheless a regularity 

of meaning associated with the genre of the soft-drink ad, or the larger universal 

symbolic meanings associated with the Coke icon and the lifestyle and cultural 

connections it signifies. Marketing strategies, Kline explains, are similar: they 

organize symbolic sign systems and information (a) to promote a product or 

service to the widest possible audience, and (b) to sell a “unified” audience 

segment to the market.

ESSAIS CRITIQUES / REVIEW ESSAYS 307 

Advertising is not just about selling products and audiences. Indeed, marketing 

communication has taken on a life of its own, commanding huge human and 

financial resources, and riding the cutting edge of technological and computer 

innovation. Importantly, marketing is the conduit — the cultural glue — between 

representations of products (and associated lifestyle benefits) and the cultural 

practices of shopping, mall lounging, consumption, and reinvention of the self 

through product acquisition. In short, advertising links cultural ideas and symbols 

to the cultural referents and social practices within which we experience self and 

other(s). Much as goods are more than material objects, so marketing strategies 

offer more than the product: they provide us with a narrative of culture and 

social relations within which we can read ourselves and which give symbolic and 

material substance to everyday experience. When we buy that cosmetic product, 

car, or computer game, we buy into both a cultural narrative as well as set of 

real and material relations with the product (we drive it, wear it, or play with it), 

and the person(s) with whom we share social relations around that product. 

Drawing from works by childhood and cultural historians, Chapter 2 is an 

ambitious and synthetic survey of the western history of children’s culture beginning 

in the Renaissance. A shift in adult affect toward children characterized new 

interests in childhood throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, which was reflected 

in increased output of children’s literature, toys, and clothing. Industrialization 

at the end of the 19th century saw the expansion of manufactured goods specifically 

for children. Educational reform movements, beginning with the Protestant 

Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation, contributed significantly to 

notions of childhood. This educational dimension of historical concepts of 

childhood is closely linked to the advent of the printing press in the late 15th 

century, which generated various mass literacy campaigns throughout Europe. 

The perceived need for mass literacy, initially to ensure individual readership of 

“The Word,” generated a parallel need for systematic schooling for print literacy. 

Print technology revolutionized learning, and the coding and dissemination of 

knowledge. From a Foucauldian perspective, the printing press, literacy, and 

schooling constructed an historically new social subject — the educable secular 

child. This new focus on childhood brought about a distinctive childhood culture 

through the advent of books for children, household and parenting guides, school 

textbooks, and a whole bureaucratic discourse centred on the institutionalization 

of children, learning, and knowledge in schools (Luke, 1989). This historical 

strand is taken up in somewhat more detail in Chapter 3. 

The advent in this century of radio and TV again brought about a revolution 

in ideas about and the social organization of the family and childhood. Radio and 

TV relocated the family around a new technological hearth providing both information 

(consumer advertising, news, etc.), cultural stories, and entertainment. 

Advertising for a remodelled domesticity and post-war visions of progressive 

parenting produced new consumer products, cultural narratives, and social identities 

for a new generation of children and adults. Cultural discourses cashed in on


economic progress, technological innovations, and the sensibilities of a new 

educated middle class charged with nurturing the next generation into the atomic 

age. The first wave of baby-boom children was born into an economically stable 

and leisure-oriented society in which progressive “good parenting,” much like 

good housekeeping, was seen as the cornerstone of a valiant new social order: 

educated, affluent, industrious, and industrialized. Reflecting this new social 

formation, the 1950s and 1960s family sit-coms modelled the discourses and 

desires of suburban, white, and nuclear family life. 

Of related interest are Lyn Spigel’s (1992) Make Room for TV and Spigel and 

deMann’s (1992) Private Screenings, which extend the debate about TV as 

domestic appliance, ideological node, and family cohesion device in the new 

post-war domesticity. Programs narrated the cultural stories and advertising 

promised to fill the wants and desires generated by those narratives. These 

included marketing the cultural goods and symbols which would ensure that 

children’s learning and development — enabled by the appropriate children’s toys 

and teen gadgetry — began early in life and continued after school hours. Marketing 

to children through the parental purse was meant to ensure that children 

displayed the same material affluence the parental house or car signified, and that 

the merchandise of childhood — strewn on the front lawn, embodied in clothing, 

or consumed in the family kitchen — would reflect the material and emotional 

investments in childhood which Dr. Spock had preached to millions as the hallmark 

of progressive parenting. Growing up during the 1950s and 1960s in 

Canada in an immigrant household, I remember well what I would now call my 

experience of “cultural dissonance.” I watched my assimilated aspirations on the 

small screen and was envious of the stuff other kids had because I was outside 

the cultural mainstream in a household where mixmasters, the latest toys, 

electronic toasters, colour TVs, or sweater sets with pearl buttons à la Father 

Knows Best and Donna Reid were off-limits. To these products and to that culture, 

migrants and indigenous peoples are both outsiders and vicarious insiders. 

Even where consumption per se is beyond their reach, they come to participate 

in the gendered networks of desire of product and program (Luke, in press). 

Chapter 4 maps the social and economic history of “the book” and print literacy 

in relation to literacy’s moral and socializing function for children. The 

construction of the literate child historically has been shaped by social, moral, 

and cultural imperatives institutionalized in the discourses of schooling since the 

advent of the printing press and the transportable book. Whether 17th-century 

religious or secular school books, 18th-century travelogues, nursery-verse or story 

books, or 1940s and 1950s comic books — the aim of children’s books and children’s 

literacy has always been to tame the uncivilized, pre-literate unruly child 

through pedagogical and moral didacticism. Kline describes how English publisher 

John Newberry opened the way in the mid-18th century for lighter children’s 

literature and poetry which retained a strong instructional character but gave


children their own genre of light-hearted fantasy and humour. Throughout the 

1800s, Stevenson, Greenaway, Kingsley, Milne, and the Grimm and Anderson 

brothers generated a subtle revolution in children’s literature and brought about 

a dramatic increase in publications of children’s nature and fantasy narratives and 

poetry, and folk and fairy tales. By the end of the 19th century, the children’s 

book market had evolved into an independent and separate cultural industry, 

reflecting reformist and early progressivist adult attitudes toward the child’s inner 

imaginary world. The comic book of the 1940s and 1950s marked an important 

transition to children’s mass-marketed cultural industries which both broke with 

the traditional narrative genre of the book and opened the way for the electronic 

forms of children’s narrative enabled by TV and the animated cartoon. 

Chapter 5 steps back historically to begin with the history of film before 

reconnecting to the history of children’s animated cartoons and feature-length 

films. It offers a detailed analysis of the role of Disney Studios in promoting 

animation as a new narrative form that would serve as a popular vehicle for 

moral instruction — particularly of the American virtues of truth, justice, and 

liberty — targeted at adults and children. Disney’s wholesome values and narratives 

provided mass entertainment via film which would soon find its way to the 

toy-store shelves in the form of licensed characters that swept the imagination 

of children around the world. The advent of TV swept through suburbs like wildfire 

in the early 1950s and Disney was quick to move from cinema to the small 

screen. In Kline’s words: “The Mouse Club’s commercial success issued a siren 

call to children’s marketers” (p. 123). The paucity of good quality and entertaining 

children’s TV throughout the 1950s enabled Disney’s Mickey Mouse 

Club magazine format program to lead the way in children’s TV: both as incentive 

to other writers and producers to capture a potentially lucrative child market, 

and as a model of successful genre and product marketing to children. Throughout 

the 1960s and 1970s, the volume of children’s advertising increased steadily, 

and animated programs, along with such cross-over prime-time programs as The 

Rifleman, Mary Tyler Moore, or Bonanza, grabbed the lion’s share of the children’s 

production dollar. 

Increasing social and academic criticism throughout the 1960s of the effects 

of TV on children’s behaviour, school achievement, creativity, and imagination, 

supported by evidence marshalled by U.S. Senate Committee Hearings, culminated 

in the late 1960s with efforts to make TV more socially useful and pedagogically 

relevant to children’s lives. The advent of Sesame Street in 1969 was one 

such initiative. Sesame Street marked a watershed in children’s television, the 

learning effects of which remain disputed. Chapter 5 closes with a survey of the 

phenomenal marketing success of children’s TV in the 1980s, when kids’ programs 

became 30-minute commercials for licensed toys and characters, and when 

the postmodern aesthetic came into its own. The elimination of boundaries 

among communications technologies, media forms, genres, products, and markets


means that anyone anywhere can see the movie or the video, watch the spin-off 

TV program, buy the licensed merchandise, eat the cereal promoting the characters, 

and enter the fast-food-chain contests for a possible winning prize to meet 

the characters at Universal Studios. Whether one buys into Jurassic dinosaurs, the 

Beverly Hills 90210 gang, or Ninja Turtles, the larger discourse of contemporary 

childhood culture is available globally, in every conceivable merchandise transformation, 

and in a variety of print and electronic narrative genres. Kline is right: 

“one factor has tended to be overlooked: that the rise in character marketing has 

all but eliminated images of real children playing in the normal course of their 

lives — in dramas or narratives about and for the young” (p. 141). 

Chapters 6 and 7 recapture the marketing of childhood in historical perspective. 

Both chapters are useful for teachers and/or academic educators to use as 

a model for students to investigate the history of childhood culture and markets. 

Kline’s analysis of the cross-media and cross-corporate marketing of media tie-in 

merchandise is a fascinating look at postmodernist capitalist re-alignments and 

relations, and a way of understanding what Foucault meant by the historical 

construction of social subjects. Kline’s historical mapping of the development of 

childhood culture and markets provides an accessible way to understand how 

concepts of the child and childhood experiences have changed historically. In the 

last few decades, communications technologies and changing consumer and 

marketing relations have enabled the “making” of a “new” concept of the child 

and childhood experiences (cf. Luke, 1990). In some ways, the arrival of the late 

20th-century postmodern, high-tech child parallels the emergence of the printliterate 

and educable child of the 16th century. As Foucault explained to us, 

social subjects appear, disappear, and reappear in discourses and social and 

cultural practices throughout the course of history. 

In Chapter 8 Kline outlines the potential and limits of marketing ideas and 

products. The near total reliance on media promotions (through TV ads and programs) 

for successful toy launches and retail dominance means that profit returns 

at broadcasting, manufacturing, and retail levels need to be guaranteed. It also 

means an increasingly aggressive push into global media and retail markets. 

What this globalization of play suggests is the universalization of primarily 

American (middle-class and white) childhood culture. This universalized and 

normative — albeit highly gender-differentiated — discourse has significant pedagogical 

consequences for inducting children into standardized linguistic, behavioural, 

and play repertoires. Even in their Care Bear, My Little Pony, or Strawberry 

Shortcake “warm fuzzies” variations, these toys — and the ad narratives in 

which the symbolic connections to sharing, love, and emotional bonding are 

structured — remain a sanitized discourse and experience. “Preschool plush,” as 

Kline puts it, is a calculated pale imitation of the rich emotional texture of young 

children’s real creativity and imagination. Despite some 20 years of feminist 

research and policy intervention into business-as-usual, the gendered discourse


of toy and play remains as committed as ever to upholding traditional stereotypes 

(Luke, 1994). If that old toy standby — the water squirt — has been resurrected 

as Supersoaker, which comes shaped like a handgun for boys and like a lipstick 

and nailpolish bottle for girls, then how far have we come? What does the recent 

spate of video games — in which women are pursued, terrorized, dismembered, 

and vaporized by hooded males with laser death-guns — tell us about the postmodern 

aesthetic, the allegedly liberating and enabling potential of electronic 

information media, or issues of social justice and equity (Green & Bigum, 1993)? 

Kline begins Chapter 9 with an in-depth content analysis of 25 animated 

programs. Contrary to what most media researchers and even laypersons would 

anticipate, Kline’s analysis shows that the narrative and ideological content of 

most of these programs is not as formulaic and simplistic as commonly believed 

(Buckingham, 1993). Instead, he finds that the staging of conflict and/or social 

or moral problems is framed in multiple narratives pivoting around a complicated 

world of technological wizardry, characters’ personal ambitions, and a substantial 

amount of task-oriented dialogue. According to Kline, children’s animation can 

only be considered formulaic in its narrative categories, as these are targeted at 

gender- and age-differentiated audience segments. The pre-school TV diet, 

however, is another matter. As Kline rightly observes, “it has become almost 

impossible for most parents to watch the inane dialogue and stultified animation 

with their children” (p. 289). Market analysts and strategists have come to realize 

that young children are not all that enamoured with “simple” story-lines or 

one-dimensional character toys. For example, once the bumbling and rather inane 

folk community of the Smurf mushroom patch was reconceptualized through 

story-lines that emphasized conflict and the tensions between good vs. evil, 

viewer ratings and blue dwarf retail sales apparently soared. 

But for older children, according to Kline, TV and film hero characters do 

little more than model an oppositional discourse of battle, military, and cyberspace 

engagements, all enabled by extra-terrestrial powers, superhuman strength, 

and the latest in high-tech cybertronic weaponry. Although almost all the “good 

guys” — from She-Ra, GI Joe, and He-Man, to Wonder Woman, Ninja Turtles, 

Voltron, or Superman — are on high moral missions to save innocent people and 

communities from evil swamp creatures or inhumanoids, the wall-to-wall message 

in toyland and on children’s TV advocates the use of violence to combat 

violence. TV provides kids with virtually no access to narratives about social 

relations based on negotiation, slices of culturally hybrid community life, or 

insights into characters who are not obsessed with the continuing battle for truth, 

justice, and the American way. For a “gentler” but more inane and profoundly 

sexist fantasy world, one can turn to the rainbow and candy-cane world of Strawberry 

Shortcake, My Little Pony, or Jem, the queen of style wars. Kline admits 

that current TV offerings provide a range of heroes and folk stories, parables, 

and moral tales. But the marketing and profit success of tying TV animation to


licensed characters (tied further to the global and multiple cross-marketing 

networks through the food, clothing, toy, and fast-food industries), has all but 

eliminated from the small screen real children with real-life problems living in 

real communities. In Kline’s words: “Live drama has been all but banished from 

children’s television. Whereas drama once provided paths to the understanding 

of personal experience, fiction now only digs deeper channels to fantasy” (p. 

314). 

In the concluding chapter, Kline makes several important points particularly 

relevant for teacher educators and educational theorists. At the outset, Kline 

reminds us that we need to acknowledge that TV serves many different functions 

for children’s different social and maturational needs. Children’s TV programs 

and their spin-off merchandise have not displaced play or peer-group interaction, 

or eliminated children’s imagination and creativity. What TV and the toy industry 

have done, however, is to position TV as the entry point for children’s experience, 

and that entry point — that window into childhood — “promotes particular 

patterns of social understanding, attitudes and self-expression” (p. 317). And the 

only representational form in which TV represents the social world to children 

is through the dramatic narrative or fantasy fiction. In other words, because 

merchandise marketing is the root logic underlying the development of children’s 

programs, the dramatic narrative and fantasy formula has been the most successful 

conduit in connecting the child audience and consumer market via TV to 

the marketplace. Other genres such as the documentary, news, magazine-format 

current affairs, educational programs, or even children’s soaps (such as Lassie 

or the Lone Ranger) cannot provide the kind of narrative terrain required to 

translate story-line into a vast array of consumer goods. As Kline reminds us, we 

have few insights into the long-term consequences of TV’s promotion of fiction 

and fantasy as a mode of consciousness influencing children’s experiences and 

expressions. 

In response to decades of criticism of TV violence, the frequency of 

aggressive and violent acts has indeed been reduced on children’s TV. In their 

place, however, has been an accentuation of narratives based on militaristic and 

combative story-lines. Because these scenarios take place primarily in the 

fantasylands of hyperspace or mythic swamps and forests, the violence and 

aggression which structure the characters and social relations are considered 

mythic, fantasy, fictional, and hence not “real-life.” But how children interpret, 

internalize, and apply TV’s imaginary worlds to their own social relations is 

something that teachers and parents tend to be quite clear about. Children do 

replicate the terminology, values, and actions of their TV heroes in their play at 

home, in the street, and in the schoolyard. TV-inspired discourses dominate 

children’s talk, play, games, and litany of wants and aspirations. In one of 

Kline’s studies, for instance, he found that children’s play dialogues and dramatic 

imaginings were “thin and repetitious . . . rarely used comic or ironic narrative,


preferring to stick to the prevailing mood of action drama and fashion pretension” 

(p. 339). 

Peer acceptance is crucial to all children’s self-esteem and social development. 

Knowledge of TV and toy narratives is a prerequisite to being included in the 

group to play, and being able to participate in peer talk about wanting or having 

the right toy is all part of peer acceptance and identity formation. “Watching 

television has therefore become a primer for learning the particular mental 

prerequisites of play” and the toys, in turn, model a particular play style and peer 

play protocols (p. 323). We need a better understanding of the ramifications — 

social, cultural, and cognitive — of the dynamics between TV and toys which 

connect expressive and interpretive experiences through the common narrative 

structure of fantasy. Although fictional characters and fantasy imaginary worlds 

do help young children to play out their fears and anxieties, and to emulate and 

rehearse social roles and relations, the worry for many educators and researchers 

is that the dominance of fantasy as the only genre structuring kids’ TV programs 

and toys, provides them with no other interpretive (viewing) and expressive 

(play) models for learning about the social world. From a market point of view, 

however, what this conflation of TV and toy narratives enables is a powerful 

induction, from a very early age, into a knowledge base of the consumer market 

and, importantly, induction into the social relations and desires prescribed by the 

commodity network. 

Finally, then, does all this harm children by inhibiting their social and 

cognitive maturation? According to Kline: “Clearly not, for these children are 

simply being socialized into the way of life of our consumer culture” (p. 349). 

Unlike much research and social commentary on children and TV, Kline takes 

a balanced view of the relationship between children, media, and popular culture. 

Commodification and consumerism are, after all, the root logics of everyday life 

at work, at home, and at play in any capitalist order. Why, then, would we 

expect childhood public culture to be exempt from the market strategies and 

promotion of cultural values around the ethos of consumption? Counter-strategies 

to the market’s incorporationist agenda vary nationally. Some countries have 

legislated limits on the commercialization of children’s culture, others support 

mechanisms for industry self-control, and many continue to argue for the need 

for curricular implementation of media literacy programs. Parents, however, 

continue to be positioned by educators and legislators as primarily responsible 

for the varied influences media and toys have on children because, finally, it is 

parents, not kids, who hold the purse strings, and who are in charge of children’s 

TV viewing. 

Out of the Garden is important for academic educators on several counts. In 

the field of Education, childhood and the child are the privileged objects of 

inquiry, and yet in most Education faculties that focus does not include the 

teaching of or research on children’s out-of-school cultural experiences. Culture,


in educational discourse, refers primarily to children’s peer, community, social 

class, and ethnic cultures. Children’s and youth popular culture is most commonly 

acknowledged by educators and educational theorists only in terms of its 

negative effects on learning, cognition, and social development. Yet, as Kline 

shows, things are not quite that simple. Children’s media and toy regimes have 

both enabling potential and limiting consequences. In my estimation, failure to 

address and properly theorize the various, and often ambiguous and contradictory, 

influences of popular culture on children during the pre-school years and 

for 12 years during their schooling, leaves educators to conceptualize the child, 

development, literacy, cognition, learning, and pedagogy according to outmoded, 

often romanticized, models of childhood experience — models historically descended 

from the grand onto/phylogenetic narratives of the 19th century. 

As Kline proposes, what is needed is a new critical framework for analyzing 

and theorizing the contemporary child and the politics of childhood culture. If 

those of us charged with the socialization and education of children value diverse 

cultural dimensions beyond current commodity-based forms, then we must articulate 

new understandings of childhood with new generations — with pre-service 

teachers and future educational scholars in our classrooms. In Kline’s estimation, 

this is our pedagogical and political responsibility: to transform the way educators 

think about children, and to challenge those aspects of children’s commercial 

culture which one-dimensionalize children’s experiences and entry into the 

social world. By extension such an agenda requires that educators challenge the 

media(ted) reproduction of inane cultural values, social behaviours and relations, 

and cultural and gender stereotypes. 

But at the same time we need to be wary of heading “back to the future,” of 

using critical pedagogies as a defense of a modernist, post-war childhood that no 

longer exists. This requires that we “dare to go” where educators and teacher 

educators typically have not dared to go before — to “seek out new [textual] 

worlds” and student bodies in the culturally hybrid communities and technologically 

mediated forms of life that are, however invisible in the texts of educational 

research and teacher education, in our faces every day: in classrooms, on the 

streets, and on the screen. 

If there is one lesson readers should take away from Kline’s book, it is to 

re-evaluate their own assumptions about TV, toys, and children, and to engage 

in learning and teaching about media and popular culture as a crucial and 

politically significant dimension of contemporary childhood experience. The 

study of TV and popular culture — at the level of schooling and university studies 

— is important not only because of its profound influence and pervasiveness, 

but because of its “naturalness” in the ways in which it is part of everyday life, 

and the way its imagery, information, and associated merchandise selectively 

(mis)represents the world around us. How media’s constructed and mediated 

information, imagery, and artefacts construct children’s and all our worldviews 

and social practices ought to be part of the common stock of every person’s


knowledge. It should be part of an education for responsible citizenship in an age 

where all communication and experience are increasingly visual, symbolic, commodified, 

and, explicitly, political. 

REFERENCES 

Buckingham, D. (1993). Children talking television: The making of television literacy. London: 

Falmer. 

Green, B., & Bigum, C. (1993). Aliens in the classroom. Australian Journal of Education, 37(2), 

119–142. 

Kinder, M. (1991). Playing with power in movies, television and video games: From Muppet Babies 

to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Berkeley: University of California Press. 

Luke, C. (1989). Pedagogy, printing and protestantism: The discourse on childhood. Albany: State 

University of New York Press. 

Luke, C. (1990). Constructing the child viewer: An historical study of the discourse on television and 

children. New York: Praeger Press. 

Luke, C. (1993). Media and popular culture in education. Teaching Education, 5(2), 41–57. 

Luke, C. (1994). Feminist pedagogy and critical media literacy. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 

18(2), 27–44. 

Luke, C. (in press). Childhood and parenting in popular culture. Australian and New Zealand Journal 

of Sociology. 

Postman, N. (1982). The disappearance of childhood. New York: Dell. 

Spigel, L. (1992). Make room for TV: Television and the family ideal in postwar America. Chicago, 

IL: University of Chicago Press. 

Spigel, L., & deMann, D. (Eds.). (1992) Private screenings. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota 

Press. 

Willis, S. (1991). A primer for daily life. New York: Routledge.

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