In Schooling as Entertainment, Randle Nelsen documents the relentless advance of "McSchools," where fast food, technology, standardized testing and bureaucratic ineptitude merge with popular culture. Once fused to popular culture, McSchools are precluded from challenging their shared core values of competition, materialism, vacuity and infotainment. In exchange, schools reap the loss of scholarship, reflection, critical thought and community. They become enjoined in maintaining and perpetuating the economic and social arrangements that keep power with the powerful even as the rest of us download assignments while watching "Entertainment Tonight."

Schools have always reflected their cultural contexts to some degree, but their cultural boundaries have become increasingly permeable. As education becomes appropriated as work-prep, the pressure to mimic "real-world" (i.e., consumer culture) characteristics intensifies. If life outside school consists of just-in-time, fragmented and digitized experiences, then schools will be judged by their ability, if not to be consistently entertaining, then at least to minimize the inconveniences endured by students.

In a consumer culture, utility consists of two parts: ease of acquisition of goods, and the association of these goods with the fulfilment of every human desire from affiliation to immortality. Education as infotainment thus reflects our own fears, not just the self-interested agenda of the elites who control the system. Too much rational thought, too much sustained consideration, too much independence and too much diversity will subvert the consumer culture of "entertainment" and thus endanger the entire house-of-credit-cards of contemporary society. It is not critical thinking per se that frightens us, but what we might think about.

Our ease comes at great cost. Education institutions remain complicit in advancing the interests of power, even though we have more tools to unmask our own exploitation than ever before. Rather than challenging (or even identifying) the replication of social control and economic exploitation rampant outside the classroom, the institutions of mass education further the alienation and unconsciousness of youth, not so much through teaching an ideology of compliance as through boring the life out of both students and their teachers. Most of the school's numbed-out "inmates" seem incapable of desiring resistance, let alone carrying out anything but the passive resistance of playing the school game.

As Nelsen reminds us, increasingly the game is on-line. Information technology serves to "soothe, subdue and train" both teachers and students, providing the justification and the means for vocationalizing education and standardizing what passes as knowledge.¹ As technology becomes the "core business" of the information age, its education "partner" must adapt to the ideology, politics and pragmatics of technocentricity.

Nelsen calls "the main drift" of technology the depersonalization of learning, in which ambiguity is treated as the enemy of the machine's innate binary logic. This imbedded dichotomy nurtures other false distinctions, between head and heart, for example, or objective and subjective realities. (p.15) Paradoxically, the same technology destroys distinctions that society has found of great value over time, including the separation between work time and other time, between children and adults, between information and knowledge and, of course, between learning something and being entertained.

Nelsen's theses are not necessarily original, but the subjects he explores to develop his arguments and illustrate edutainment's reach generate fresh insights. The author revisits several decades of his own scholarship on themes that at first seem unrelated. What could adolescent girls' preoccupation with friendship have to do with the history of corporate influence within 19th century universities? How could a discussion of Ritalin abuse illuminate the association between McLuhan's views of media and Denney's interest in leisure and social class? Yet if he is correct that the popular culture/education nexus is pervasive, then its footprints can be found everywhere. In general, Nelsen succeeds in linking these topics, if not always each to the others, then to his overarching themes.

Many paths, same door. But what's on the other side? The author's explorations of Bart Simpson and Homer's parallel experiences of managerial stupidity and boredom at work and school in the television show, "The Simpsons" (p. 71), and these characters' ineffectual, media-bound means of protest, are insightful. But what does it mean that this program remains the heavy favourite of 9-to-12-year-olds? Despite the best efforts of the institutions around them, is there incipient rebellion coming from the back seats of the SUV?

Despite my general agreement with Nelsen's theses, at several points I found I wanted him to discuss dissent and resistance, even if this discussion was to conclude that its success had been marginal.

For example, the author's discussion of the Youth News Network (YNN), a scheme designed to beam corporate propaganda arbitrarily divided between "news" and "advertising" into 5,000 Canadian schools, is incomplete without reflecting on the outcome. A coalition of individuals, community groups, unions and students successfully derailed this project even though it looked like a done deal in several provinces. Activists managed to force school boards and provincial governments to back out of signed agreements with YNN's parent corporation. Such success stories may be all too uncommon, but telling them provides an antidote to the hegemony of TINA (There Is No Alternative).

Other topics raised in the text, from corporate-sponsored research to in-school marketing are being challenged, with varying degrees of success, here and in other countries. No author should be obligated to present a blueprint (or, god forbid, a strategic plan) to guide his readers, but in my opinion, telling these stories without discussing the reactions they have generated leaves an unfortunately incomplete record.

At times, my attention wandered, and I wondered why the author was pursuing tangents that interested him rather than me. Aha. My reaction undoubtedly underscores Nelsen's learning-as-entertainment thesis. This book does not pander to the contemporary desire to wrap our information in minimalist, see-through packaging marketed to us in pleasant, efficient surroundings. It expects us to make the effort to participate in seeing our own feet stuck to the sticky web of which we are a part.

Heather-Jane Robertson, co-author of the best-selling Class Warfare: The Assault on Canada's Schools and author of No More Teachers, No More Books: The Commercialization of Canada's Schools, is vice-president of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

¹ Robertson, Heather-jane (1998). No More Teachers, No More Books: The Commercialization of Canada's Schools. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart.