Beyond Price Comparisons: Towards a More Critical Consumer Education for Adults through Informal Sites of Learning

Over a decade ago, Oduran (1993) argued that consumer education was an emerging frontier of adult education. While the Adult Performance Level (APL) project in the 1970s sparked some interest in consumer and life skills within adult basic education and English as a second language (Lankshear, 1993; Levine, 1986; Sandlin, 2000), and while this push has been seen more recently in welfare-to-work education and job preparation programs, the broader field of adult education has been almost silent on this issue. A review of adult education journals and conference proceedings over the past decade reveals very little interest in consumer education among adult education researchers. In this article, I argue that in addition to the recognized practice of consumer education in formal classroom settings (including some adult literacy programs, county extension, and welfare- to -work programs), consumer education for adults is happening in a wide variety of places outside the formal classroom. These informal sites of consumer education for adults mostly have gone unnoticed by the field of adult education or are not recognized or named as "consumer education." I believe adult educators should be aware of these informal sites of adult consumer education, especially because some of these sites have the potential to move consumer education outside of its traditional technical focus, and into more critical realms where learners develop "a different relationship to the marketplace in which they identify unquestioned assumptions and challenge the status of existing structures [such as consumer capitalism] as natural" (Ozanne & Murray, 1995, p. 522). Consumer education is an important and exciting arena that adult educators in a variety of settings could incorporate into their existing curricula. In addition, adult educators could become aware of and more involved in these more informal sites, thus bringing recognition to these sites as legitimate arenas of adult learning. In what follows, I briefly discuss traditional forms of consumer education and examine consumer education taking place in more informal arenas, focusing on sites of critical consumer education where consumers are learning and practicing ways to cut down on their overall consumption. This movement has several different trajectories, including the "voluntary simplicity" movement that urges consumers to cut back on consumption or to consume in a more environmentally-friendly way, and the "culture jammers" movement that uses various acts of public and private resistance to challenge and undermine the consumer culture in which we live. Just The Facts, Please! Traditional Consumer Education in Formal Settings The term "consumer education" conjures up images of learning how to perform price comparisons, make budgets, and balance a checking account. These are often the types of skills taught in "life skills" segments of adult literacy, ESL, and employment preparation programs (Auerbach & Burgess, 1985; Griffith & Cervero, 1977; Lankshear, 1993; Sandlin, 2000). Consumer education has been defined as the "process of gaining knowledge and skills to manage personal resources and to participate in social, political, and economic decisions that affect individual well-being and the public good" (Bannister, 1996, p. 1). Consumer education has a long history in the United States, beginning formally in the early 20th century, but having its roots in the 1700s, with Thomas Jefferson's advocacy of democracy and public education (Bannister). Throughout this history, consumer education practitioners have been concerned with improving the "economic level of living for all citizens" (Bannister, p. 5), and have focused on three broad areas of education: consumer choice and decision making, personal resource management, and citizen participation (Bannister & Monsma, 1980). The dominant message in traditional consumer education literature and practice stresses the positive benefits of consumer education, and the majority of empirical research on consumer education has tried to determine how consumer behaviors change after participating in consumer education programs. …