Speaking about World Consumer Rights Day, celebrated yesterday with the theme Our Money, Our Rights, Consumers Minister Jason Azzopardi spoke on the importance of educating children, as tomorrow’s consumers, to help them become more aware of their rights and duties.

Providing children with such education will, of course, be a step in the right direction. However, the kind of education children need in this sector is somewhat complex. Indeed, the basis of such instruction should be to help children understand today’s consumer culture and learn to respond to its ever-increasing pressures intelligently and responsibly.

We live in an era of what can perhaps be defined as super development. It is an era where one finds an excessive availability of every kind of material good. Such an environment can easily make people practically slaves of “possession” and of immediate gratification. People’s horizons might gradually become the multiplication or continual replacement of things already owned with others still better or more “trendy” This is the so-called culture of consumption or consumerism, which, many a time, involves so much spending, changing, throwing away and waste.

Seeking an existence that is quality-wise more satisfying is of itself legitimate. There is nothing wrong in wanting to live better. What could be wrong is the quest for a sort of lifestyle that is presumed to be better when it is directed towards having rather than being and which wants to have more, not in order to be better but in order to spend life in enjoyment as an end in itself. One cannot bypass the responsibilities and dangers that may arise in such a situation.

Children are coming into the picture from an early age. The market for children’s products is enormous. They are being increasingly influenced by commercialism. Parents have a hard time raising children away from certain unnecessary or not truly desired spending.

Government authorities and campaigners do strive for better child advertising standards and regulations. However, the industry, which prefers self-regulation, although this rarely is convincing, often argues that it is individual choices and parents that are the issue.

There may be a certain amount of truth in this. People endeavouring to satisfy blindly the desire for happiness of the new generations by showering them with consumer goods and transitory gratification are a reality that needs to be addressed too.

Society’s response, therefore, requires an educational plan that also helps the young guide themselves by a comprehensive picture of the human person. It should be an approach that respects all the dimensions of the person’s being and which subordinates his/her material and instinctive dimensions to an interior balanced judgement.

One of the essential aims of education is the formation of the person to enable him/her to live to the full. Such holistic education should include a branch on consumerism, which tends to ensnare people in a web of superficial gratification rather than being helped to experience their personhood in an authentic way.

In an age where every educational task seems more and more arduous and precarious, educating the new generations in consumer abilities is no easy undertaking. It is an additional educational challenge. Nonetheless, it is part of the educators’ role, or, rather, the mission entrusted to them and their general duty to offer to the young generations true values that give life a firm foundation. Educators in this case must also include the parents themselves who would, at times, have to exercise tough love.