ABSTRACT
The story of schooling and consumerism begins in the United States in the 1890s and early twentieth century when U.S. economists articulated the need for a consumerist society, professional advertising was born, and U.S. schools began to teach consumerist values in home economics courses and in planned eating experiences in school cafeterias. Consumerist ideology emerged in the twentieth century as a mixture of earlier ideas about the value of work, the accumulation of wealth, and equality of opportunity; and later, notions that progress should be measured by economic growth development of new products, and consumer spending. Consumerism, as expressed by economists like Patten in the early twentieth century, was the answer to a Puritan concern that industrial expansion and mechanized agriculture would result in less work, more leisure time, and eventual moral decay. In the aptly titled 1907 book, The New Basis of Civilization, Patten argued that the desire to buy the new products of technological advances and commodified leisure would spur people to work harder. Patten (1968) argued, “the new morality does not consist in saving, but in expanding consumption” (p. 215). He explained:
In the course of consumption . . . the new wants become complex . . . [thus] the worker steadily and cheerfully chooses the deprivations of this week . . . Their investment in to-morrow’s goods enables society to increase its output and to broaden its productive areas.
