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Taken from an anthology
Source: Rereading America
Editors: Gary Colombo, Robert Cullen, and Bonnie Lisle
Publisher: Bedford/St. Martin's
City: Boston/New York
Year: 2005

Benjamin Barber "The Educated Student: Global Citizen or Global Consumer?"

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Before the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon,
Benjamin Barber was a respected social scientist with a series of wellreceived
scholarly and popular publications to his credit. After the attacks,
he was trumpeted in the media as a prophet who had predicted the
inevitable conjict between the "post-modem" culture of Western global

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capitalism and the more traditional tribal cultures that still dominate w c h
of the Middle East, Asia, and Afnca. In the aftermath of 9/11, Barber's Jihad
vs. McWorld (1995) became a touchstone for interpreting the motives behind
the al-Qaeda assault on the most famous symbols of American corporate
and militay power. In this selection written a year later, Barber refEects
on how the events of 9/11 have forced us to rethink basic ideas like
citizenship and independence and, ultimately, how American schools should
respond to the challenges associated with l$e in a "globalized world.
Barber is the Gershon and Carol Kekst Professor of Civil Society at the University
or Maylund and principal of the Democracy Collaborative in Nau
York. His fifteen major publications include Strong Democracy: Paticipatory
Politics for a New Age and The Truth of Power: Intellectual Affairs in the
Clinton White House (2001). This selection was excerpted from an address
Barber originally delivered to the American Association of Colleges and
Universities at its annual meeting in 2002.
I want to trace a quick trajectory from July 4, 1776 to Sept. 11,2001. It
takes us from the Declaration of Independence to the declaration of interdependence
- not one that is actually yet proclaimed but one that we educators
need to begin to proclaim from the pulpits of our classrooms and administrative
suites across America.
In 1776 it was all pretty simple for people who cared about both education
and democracy. There was nobody among the extraordinay group of
men who founded this nation who did not know that democracy - then an
inventive, challenging, experimental new system of government - was dependent
for its success not just on constitutions, laws, and institutions, but
dependent for its success on the quality of citizens who would constitute the
new republic. Because democracy depends on citizenship, the emphasis
then was to think about what and how to constitute a competent and virtcous
citizen body. That led directly, in almost every one of the founders'
minds, to the connection between citizenship and education.
Whether you look at Thomas Jefferson in Virginia or John Adams in
Massachusetts, there was widespread agreement that the new republic, for
all of the cunning of its inventive and eqerimental new Constitution, could
not succeed unless the citizenry was well educated. That meant that in the
period after the Revolution but before the ratification of the Constitution,
John Adams argued hard for schools for every young man in Massachusetts
(it being the case, of course, that only men could be citizens). And in Virginia,
Thomas Jefferson made the same argument for public schooling for
every potential citizen in America, founding the first great public university
there. Those were arguments that were uncontested.
By the beginning of the nineteenth century this logic was clear in the
common school movement and later, in the land grant colleges. It was clear

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in the founding documents of every religious, private, and public higher education
institution in this country. Colleges and universities had to be committed
above all to the constituting of citizens. That's what education was
about. The other aspects of it -literacy, knowledge, and research-were
in themselves important. Equally important as dimensions of education and
citizenship was education that would make the Bill of Rights real, education
that would make democracy succeed.
It was no accident that in subsequent years, African Americans and 5
then women struggled for a place and a voice in this system, and the key
was always seen as education. If women were to be citizens, then women's
education would have to become central to suffragism.' After the Civil War,
African Americans were given technical liberty but remained in many ways
in economic servitude. Education again was seen as the key. The struggle
over education went on, through Plessy vs. Ferguson2 in 1896 -separate,
but equal- right down to the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Ed~cationw,~h ich
declared separate but equal unconstitutional.
In a way our first 200 years were a clear lesson in the relationship between
democracy, citizenship, and education, the triangle on which the
freedom of America depended. But sometime after the Civil War with the
emergence of great colporations and of an economic system organized
around private capital, private labor, and private markets, and with the import
from Europe of models of higher education devoted to scientific research,
we began to see a gradual change in the character of American education
generally and particularly the character of higher education in
America's colleges and universities. From the founding of Johns Hopldns at
the end of the nineteenth century through today we have witnessed the professionalization,
the bureaucratization, the privatization, the commercialization,
and the individualization of education. Civics stopped being the envelope
in which education was put and became instead a footnote on the
letter that went inside and nothing more than that.
With the rise of industry, capitalism, and a market society, it came to
pass that young people were exposed more and more to tutors other than
teachers in their classrooms or even those who were in their churches, their
synagogues - and today, their mosques as well. They were increasingly exposed
to the informal education of popular opinion, of advertising, of merchandising,
of the entertainment industry. Today it is a world whose messages
come at our young people from those ubiquitous screens that define
modem society and have little to do with anything that you teach. The large

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screens of the multiplex promote content determined not just by Hollywood
but by multinational corporations that control information, technology,
communication, sports, and entertainment. About ten of those corporations
control over 60 to 70 percent of what appears on those screens.
Then, too, there are those medium-sized screens, the television sets
that peek from every room of our homes. That's where our children receive
not the twenty-eight to thirty hours a week of instruction they might receive
in primary and secondary school, or the six or nine hours a week of classroom
instruction they might get in college, but where they get anywhere
from forty to seventy hours a week of ongoing "information," "knowledge,"
and above all, entertainment. The barriers between these very categories of
information and entertainment are themselves largely vanished.
Then, there are those little screens, our computer screens, hooked up to
the Internet. Just fifteen years ago they were thought to he a potend new
electronic frontier for democracy. But today very clearly they are one more
mirror of a commercialized, privatized society where eveqdnng is for sale.
The Internet which our children use is now a steady stream of advertising,
mass marketing, a virtual mall, a place where the violence, the values-for
better or worse-of these same universal corporations reappear in video
games and sales messages. Ninety-five to 97 percent of the hits on the Internet
are commercial. Of those, 25 to 30 percent are hits on pornographic sites.
Most of our political leaders are deeply proud that they have hooked up American
schools to the Internet, and that we are a 'wired nation." We have, however,
in effect hooked up our schools to what in many ways is a national sewer.
In the nineteenth century, Alexis de ~ocquevilleta~lk ed about the "im- 10
mense tutelary power" of that other source of learning, not education, but
puhlic opinion. Now puhlic opinion has come under the control of corporate
conglomerates whose primary interest is profit. They are willing to put
anything out there that will sell and make a profit.
We have watched this commercialization and privatization, a distortion
of the education mission and its content, going to the heart of our schools
themselves. Most American colleges and universities now are participants -
and in some ways beneficiaries - hut ultimately victims of the cola wars. Is
your college a Pepsi college or a Coke college? Which do you have a contract
with? And which monopoly do your kids have to drink the goods of? While
yon are busy teaching them the importance of critical choices, they can only
drink one cola beverage on this campus. Choice ends at the cafeteria door.
Go to what used to he the food services cafeteria of your local college
or university and in many cases you will now find a food court indistinguishable
from the local mall featuring Taco Bell, Starbucks, McDonalds, and
Burger King. Yes, they are feeding students, hut more importantly, they are

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creating a venue in the middle of campus for what is not education, but an
acquisition-of-brands learning. Brand learning means getting young people
on board: any merchandiser will tell you, "If we can get the kids when they
are in high school and college to buy into our brand, we've got them for
life."
Consequences of De-funding
Part of privatization means the de-funding of public institutions, of culture
and education, and the de-funding of universities, and so these institutions
make a pact with the devil. A real mischief of the modem world (one
that colleges haven't yet encountered) is Channel One, which goes into our
nation's junior high schools and high schools -particularly the poor ones,
those in the inner-city that can't afford their own technology or their own
equipment. It makes this promise: 'We're not going to give it to yon, but
we'll lease you some equipment: television sets, maybe a satellite dish, some
modems, maybe even a few computers, if you do one thing. Once a day
make sure that every student in this school sits in the classroom and watches
a very nice little twelve-minute program. Only three minutes of it will be
advertising. Let us feed advertising to your ldds during a history or a social
studies class, and we will lend you some technology."
Most states - New York state is the only one that has held out - in
America have accepted Channel One, which is now in over twelve or thirteen
thousand high schools around the nation. Our students sit during class
time, possibly a social studies or history class, and watch advertising. I dare
say, if somebody said they were going to give you some equipment as long
as you watch the message of Christ or the church of Christ for three minutes
a day, or said they were going to give you some equipment as long as
yon listen to the message of the Communist Party or the Democratic party
during class for three out of twelve minutes, there would be an outcry and
an uproar. Totalitarianism! State propaganda! Theocracy! But because they
have been so degradingly de-funded, we have allowed our schools to he left
without the resources to resist this deal with the devil.
Tell me why it is in the modem world that when a political party or a 15
state takes over the schools and spews its propaganda into them and takes
over every sector of society, we call that political totalitarianism and oppose
it as the denial of liberty. And when a church or a religion takes over every
sector of society and spews its propaganda forth in its schools, we call it
theocratic and totalitarian and go to war against it. But when the market
comes in with its brands and advertising and takes over every sector of society
and spews its propaganda in our schools, we call it an excellent bargain
on the road to liberty. I don't understand that, and I don't think we should
put up with it, and I don't think America should put up with it. I know the
people who sell it would not sit for a minute if their own children, sitting in
private schools somewhere, were exposed to that commercial advertising.

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They're not paying $25,000 a year to have their ldds watch advertising in the
classroom. But, of course, it's not their children's schools that are at risk; it's
mostly the schools of children of families who don't have much of a say
about these things.
Imagine how far Channel One has come from Jefferson's dream, from
John Adams's dream, the dream of the common school. And how low we
have sunk as a society where we turn our heads and say, 'Well, it's not so
bad, its not really, it's just advertising." Advertisers know how valuable the
legitimizing venue of the classroom is and pay double the rates of prime
time to advertise on Channel One, not because the audience is so broad
but because it is the perfect target audience and because it gets that
extraordinq legitimization of the American classroom where what ldds believe
you "leam" in your classroom has to be true.
Commercialization and privatization go right across the board. You see
them in every part of our society. You see cultural institutions increasingly
dependent on corporate handouts. Because we will not fund the arts, the
arts, too, like education have to make a profit. In our universities and colleges,
scientists are now selling patents and making deals that the research
they do will benefit not humanity and their students, but the shareholders
of corporations, and so their research will otherwise be kept private. Again,
most administrators welcome that because they don't have to raise faculty
research budgets. The corporate world will take care of that.
These practices change the nature of knowledge and information. They
privatize, maldng research a part of commercial enterprise. That's the ldnd
of bargain we have made with our colleges and universities. We hope that
somehow the faculty will remain insulated from it. We hope the students
won't notice, but then when they're cynical about politics and about the administration,
and cynical about their own education, and when they look to
their own education as a passport to a hot job and big money - and nothing
else - we wonder what's going on with them.
But of course students see everything; they have noses for hypocrisy.
Students see the hypocrisy of a society that talks about the importance of
education and knowledge and information while its very educational institutions
are selling their own souls for a buck, and they're doing it because the
society otherwise won't support them adequately, is unwilling to tax itself, is
unwilling to ask itself for sufficient funds to support quality education.
That's where we are. That's where we were on September 10.
What We've Learned
On September 11 a dreadful, pathological act occurred, which none- zo
theless may act in a brutal way as a kind of tutorial for America and for its
educators. On that day, it suddenly became apparent to many people who'd
forgotten it that America was no longer a land of independence or sovereignty,
a land that could "go it alone." America was no longer capable of surviving
as a free democracy unless it began to deal in different terms with a

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world that for 200 years it had largely ignored and in the last fifty or
seventy-five years had treated in terms of that sad phrase "collateral damage:'
Foreign policy was about dealing with the collateral damage of America
being America, America being commercialized, America being prosperous,
America "doing well" in the economic sense-if necessary, at
everybody else's expense.
September 11 was a brutal and perverse lesson in the inevitability of interdependence
in the modem world - and of the end of independence,
where America could simply go it alone. It was the end of the time in which
maldng a buck for individuals would, for those that were doing all right, be
enough; somehow the fact that the rest of the world was in trouble and that
much of America was in trouble - particularly its children (one out of five
in poverty) - was incidental. After thirty years of privatization and commercialization,
the growing strength of the ideology that said the era not
just of government, but of big government was over; that said, this was to be
the era of markets, and markets will solve every problem: education, culture,
you name it, the markets can do it.
On September 11 it became clear that there were areas in which the
market could do nothing: terrorism, poverty, injustice, war. The tragedy
pointed to issues of democracy and equality and culture, and revealed a foreign
policy that had been paying no attention. In the early moming of September
12, nobody called Bill Gates at Microsoft or Michel Eisner at
Dimey and said "Help us, would you? You market guys have good solutions.
Help us get the terrorists." Indeed, the heroes of September 11 were public
officials, public safety officers: policemen, firemen, administrators, even a
mayor who found his soul during that ~eriodT. hose were the ones we
turned to and suddenly understood that they played a public role representing
all of us.
Suddenly, Americans recognized that its citizens were the heroes. Not
the pop singers, fast-ball and the guys who make all the money in
the NBA; not those who've figured out how to make a fast buck by the time
they're thirty, the Internet entrepreneurs. In the aftermath of 9/11, it was
particularly those public-official-citizens. All citizens because in what they
do, they are committed to the welfare of their neighbors, their children, to
future generations. That's what citizens are supposed to do: think about the
communities to which they belong and pledge themselves to the ~ublic
good of those communities.
Hence the importance of the civic professions like teaching. In most
countries, in fact, teachers and professors are public officials. They are seen,
like firemen and policemen, as guardians of the public good, of the res publica5,
those things of the public that we all care about. On September 11 and
the days afterwards, it became clear how important those folks were. As a
consequence, a kind of closing of a door occasioned by the fall of the towers
became an opening of a window of new opportunities, new possibilities,

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new citizenship: an opportunity to explore interdependence. Interdependence
is another word for citizenship.
Citizenship in the World -
The citizen is the person who acknowledges and recognizes his or her 25
interdependence in a neighborhood, a town, a state, in a nation-and
today, in the world. Anyone with eyes wide open during the last thirty to
forty years has known that the world has become interdependent in ineluctable
and significant ways. AIDS and the. West Nile Virus don't carry
passports. They go where they will. The Internet doesn't stop at national
boundaries; it's a worldwide phenomenon. Today's telecommunications
technologies define communications and entertainment all over the world
without regard to borders. Global warming recognizes no sovereignty, and
nobody can say he or she won't have to suffer the consequences of polluted
air. Ecology, technology, and of course economics and markets are global in
character, and no nation can pretend that its own destiny is any longer in its
own hands in the manner of eighteenth and nineteenth century nations.
In particular, this nation was the special land where independence had
been declared, and our two oceans would protect us from the world. We
went for several hundred years thinldng America was immune to the problems
and tumult and prejudices of the wars of the world beyond the oceans.
And then 9/11 -and suddenly it became clear that no American could ever
rest comfortably in bed at night if somewhere, someone else in the world
was starving or someone's children were at risk. With 9/11 it became apparent
that whatever boundaries once protected us and whatever new borders
we were trying to build including the missile shield (a new technological
"virtual ocean" that would protect us from the world) were irrelevant.
Multilateralism becomes a new mandate of national security, a necessity.
There are no oceans wide enough, there are no walls high enough to protect
America from the rest of our world. What does that say about education? It
means that for the first time a lot of people who didn't care about civic education-
the education of citizens, the soundness of our own democracy, the
ability of our children to understand the world-now suddenly recognize
this is key, that education counts. Multicultural education counts because we
have to understand the cultures of other worlds. Language education counts
because language is a window on other cultures and histories.
Citizenship is now the crucial identity. We need to think about what an
adequate civic education means today, and what it means to be a citizen.
We need education-based community s e ~ cpero grams. We need experiential
learning, not just talldng about citizenship but exercises in doing it. We
need to strongly support the programs around the country that over the '80s
and '90s sprang up hut have recently been in decline.
But we also need new programs in media literacy. I talked about the
way in which a handful of global corporations control the information chan

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channels
of television, the Internet, and Hollywood. We need young people who
are sophisticated in media, who understand how media work, how media affect
them, how to resist, how to control, how to become immune to media.
Media literacy and media studies from my point of view become a key part
of how we create a new civic education. Of course history, the arts, sociology,
and anthropology, and all of those fields that make young people aware
of the rest of the world in a comparative fashion are more important than
ever before.
We are a strange place because we are one of the most multicultural 30
nations on Earth with people in our schools from all over the world, and yet
we know less than most nations about the world from which those people
come. At one and the same time, we are truly multicultural, we represent
the globe, and yet we know little about it.
Coming Full Circle
In coming full circle, the trajectory from the Declaration of Independence
200 years ago to the declaration of interdependence that was
sounded on September 11 opens an opportunity for us as educators to seize
the initiative to make civic education central again. The opportunity to free
education from the commercializers and privatizers, to take it hack for civic
education and for our children, and to make the schools of America and the
world the engines of democracy and liberty and freedom that they were
supposed to be. And that's not just an abstraction. That starts with addressing
commercialization directly: confronting Channel One and the food
court at your local colIege, the malling of your cafeterias, and the sellout of
corporate research.
There are things that every one of us can do inside our own colleges
and universities. If we do, our students will notice. And if we really make
our colleges and universities democratic, civic, independent, autonomous,
international, and multilateral again, we will no longer even need civics
classes. Our students will take one look at what we've done in the university
and understand the relationship between education and democracy. That
must he our mission. I hope that as individual citizens, teachers, administrators,
you will take this mission seriously. I certainly do, and I know that as
before, the future of liberty, the future of democracy in both Amelica and
around the world, depends most of all on its educational institutions and on
the teachers and administrators who control them. Which means we really
are in a position to determine what our future will he.