Between consumer society and the teacher’s destitution: Considerations on the present crisis of school knowledge

Abstract

The article analyzes the current vicissitudes that a consumer society brings to school culture. Particularly, it seeks to understand how a society organized around the buying and discarding of goods – and in which there is a deliberate obsolescence both of the industrial objects and the lifestyles disseminated by the mass media – can significantly affect the relation between students and the school knowledge. On the basis of educational and sociological frames of reference, particularly Zygmunt Bauman’s theorizing about contemporary society, it elaborates on reflections that reveal the destitution of the teacher’s knowledge vis-à-vis youths and adolescents within a culture in which the past has lost its authority and information takes on a status of knowledge. The author concludes that in the prevailing societal context the teachers’ initiatives designed to debate and relativize, together with the students, the value frameworks of the consumer society become relevant. At the same time they may relate their knowledge to the dilemmas of a culture in which we are all immersed. 

Key words: young individuals, adolescents, consumption society, authority, teacher knowledge.