Review of Trevor Norris, Consuming Schools: Commercialism and the End of Politics University of Toronto Press, 2011 David I. Waddington Published online: 12 December 2010 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010 In 1978, the National Film Board of Canada released a short film about consumerism, ‘‘L’Affaire Bronswik.’’ The plot revolves around a brand of television, the Bronswik, which contains a transponder that drives people into a frenzy of consumption. Chaos ensues as people rush out and buy things they don’t need. These days, the message of the film—namely, that television makes us buy things—is rather familiar. However, what is remarkable about this film is the portrait of fevered consumption that it offers. After being exposed to the Bronswik transponder, one woman buys 18 boxes of detergent, while another rushes out to buy 22 bottles of salad dressing. In 2010, 30 years after the film was made, scenes like these—the stuff of science fiction in 1978—are ordinary events. Today, somewhere in North America, perhaps at this very moment, an entire pallet of salad dressing is being loaded into an SUV. It is in this context of accelerated, hyperactive consumerism that we turn to Trevor Norris’s Consuming Schools: Commercialism and the End of Politics. In this compact volume, Norris outlines some aspects of the problem of consumerism in schools and explores several relevant avenues of broader philosophical critique. Norris has a clear and concise style which makes the book accessible to a wide audience. While it is certainly the case that the book makes a contribution to educational theory, sections of it could also be useful in undergraduate foundations courses. Prospective teachers are often interested in discussing the problem of consumerism and in thinking about how they may help combat it. In the first chapter, ‘‘The Origins and Nature of Consumerism,’’Norris sets the stage for his larger analysis. He reviews a number of theories about the genesis of consumerism, and he points out that consumerism is not merely a tendency—he suggests that it actually functions as an ideology. One of the interesting ways that he substantiates this is by noting that our images of heroes ‘‘are increasingly taken from the world of consumption rather than from the world of work, modeled, on the ‘heroes of consumption’…rather than ‘heroes of production’ like Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford’’ (p. 14). If anything, Norris Portions of this review will also appear in a future issue of Theory and Research in Education. D. I. Waddington (&) Department of Education, Concordia University, LB-579, 1455 de Maisonneuve Blvd. W., Montreal, QC H3G 1M8, Canada e-mail: dwadding@education.concordia.ca 123 Stud Philos Educ (2011) 30:85–92 DOI 10.1007/s11217-010-9211-x