ABSTRACT
The student as consumer has emerged as a common motif and point of contestation in educational philosophy over the past two decades, as part of the critique of the neoliberal educational reform agenda that followed Lyotard’s (1984) mapping of the postmodern condition. In addition, the consumer-orientated student has assumed a problematic presence in secondary-school classrooms and higher education institutions, a fact that has led to the general lament for the dehumanisation of education under a market logic. Expanding upon these narratives of ‘loss’, Bernard Stiegler’s account of the student as consumer builds upon the Lyotardian view to reveal the neurological, generational and psychical implications of what he terms the ‘battle for intelligence’, which is a result of the proletarianisation of knowledge via the imposition of marketing technologies on the psyche of the youth. This leads not only to a consumer mind-set co-opting education, but a process of ‘short-circuiting’ disrupting the educative process itself. This article will consider Stiegler’s apocalyptic vision of youth malaise in comparison to the previous notion of students as consumers in the classical and Marxist narratives he revises. It will then outline the new challenges this poses to contemporary educators, as well as the possibility of translating his utopian call to action to pedagogical practice, both of which constitute the 'problem of now'.
