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

Overview & Synopsis

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, the author argues 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." She believes 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).