ABSTRACT
Both teachers and students are the primary targets of consumer materialism in American schools and both groups hegemonically contribute to the successful replication of consumer materialism in schools. With schools firmly entrenched in management hierarchies, they emphasize consumer-materialist expectations: efficiency, authority, and good "end-products." Schools are sites for consumer materialism, in part because of the nature of the organization and in part because the history of American schools includes the relatively recent bifurcation of the purpose of American schools: general education for citizenship versus specialized training for economic production. Perhaps the roots of the push toward consumer materialism can be traced to arguments given in the nineteenth century by Horace Mann in favor of common schools. He advanced the "wealth position": individual wealth depends upon the general wealth of the community and schools are places where the traits that make productive workers can best be instille.
