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

314 ESSAIS CRITIQUES / REVIEW ESSAYS
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