Institutions with designs: Consuming school children

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the ways in which schools in Australia are participating in their own commodification. It identifies the main features of this process, and focuses specifically on the ways in which a group of working class/under-class students in both primary and secondary schools in a provincial Australian city read their schools’ commodification practices and write themselves in and out of such identity scripts in inter-textual ways. It shows how young people are constructed by and construct themselves as consumers of school education. It also shows how these students help to position their schools in the deregulated market environment. The first section of the article provide..