[T]he really insidious ideological processes are those which treat a phenomenon as so self-evident and natural as to exempt it completely from a critical inspection and to render it inevitable.  
 
Vestergaard and Schroder 

There is...an implicit encouragement of the tendency to accede to the given, to view what exists around us as an objective "reality," impervious to individual interpretation. Finding it difficult to stand forth from what is officially (or by means of media) defined as real, unable to perceive themselves in interpretive relation to it, the young (like their elders) are all too likely to remain immersed in the taken-for-granted and the everyday. For many this means an unreflective  consumerism; for others, it means a preoccupation with having more rather than being more. 
        
Maxine Greene 

 But-- just what does the role of "customer" potentially mean to students? If conversations with my students are any indication, it implies a certain passivity. That is, when actually inhabiting the role of customer, consumers don't usually have to take a test as a prerequisite to purchasing the product. Nor is the "homework" they do prior to purchasing a new stereo, a pair of shoes, or car (comparing specs, etc.) committed to long term memory and/or manipulated across domains. (Most people don't comparison shop anymore anyway.) This translates, in their role as students qua customers, as a reinforcement of their already-in-place sense of their participation in their own education as a game of trying to get away with exerting as little effort as possible. (One of my students confided to me that he thought he was pretty good at "reading" a teacher and figuring out how little he could do and still get a C.) And now, here we are, attempting to legitimatize that sense of distance from, that depersonalization of, their educational experiences. That is, as customers, they no longer have to view their participation as a game; rather, getting the most for the least amount of effort (understood as the equivalent of getting the most for the least amount of money) is the really real, the way its supposed to be. They were beginning to suspect that they didn't have to personally invest themselves in their education. Now they know-- it's true! 

 But let me present another potential downside to the student as customer metaphor which may conceivably come to pass as it moves from its current role as models of to its inevitable function as models for, a consequence that might make a little more sense to those administrators who have yet to question this practice. Let us imagine this scenario— 
 

 Customer A buys product X after determining that said product will do certain things for her. She discovers, however, that product X in fact does no such thing. She immediately takes the product back for a refund. After all, products are meant to do something and if they don't perform as expected, don't do what their advertising promises, well, a refund, at the least, is the standard procedure. Or, at the most, the customer's dissatisfaction may result in a suit over false advertising. Either way, the producer of X is held accountable-- even if the customer is foolish enough to misuse the product (and we all know there is precedent for that). 

 In the latest issue of  The Humanist (May/June  1995), the corporatization of education is critiqued. This is, of course, the other side of our metaphorical coin. Not only are we asking our students to take on the role of customer, but we are also apparently asking ourselves to take on the roles of managers and laborers, with the student as product. (Does this strike anyone else as a little schizophrenic?) The encroachment of Taylorism into education has already burdened us with the practice of teaching to the test, of rationalizing large portions of a subject out of existence (such as English and the fine arts) in order to render the content testable by forced-answer methods, and the evaluation of teachers and schools by rows of numbers which "re-present" some sort of success rate based upon, among other criteria, GPA's and percentage of faculty published. But now we are looking to embrace Taylorism and the business model as a source of our own identity. Obviously, these two sides are on the same coin, the coin of consumerism, of profit motive, of greed-- i.e., the coin of the realm. 

 But there are those who are sensitive, as well, to the dangers of importing the discourse of business into education from this perspective. As Deron Robert Boyles, the author of The Humanist article, "The Corporate Takeover of American Schools," warns— 
 

It seems ironic then that "corporate culture" advocates [in education] readily overlook the possibility that in their system, which so much depends on the inculcation of the proper "myths" [read: metaphors?], the overriding myth might actually be the validity of "corporate culture" itself. ........This language of economy is utilized to advance the idea that schools should serve to supply business with qualified workers (22).

But no one seems to be asking whether the activities of business and the activities of education are in any sense co-equal. Rather, "[t]he 'corporate culture' mentality has become increasingly dominant among educational policy makers, with schools as businesses, administrators as managers, teachers as workers, and students relegated to the role of product....The result is hegemony; the school itself becomes a factory poised to produce workers for growing companies and competitive enterprises" (22). 

Kind of like the deal the NFL, NBA, and professional baseball have with colleges, eh?