In analysing a Brazilian daily television programme for children and young people Bambuluá I present this cultural artefact as a device used for integrating the pedagogical apparatus of governmental societies, teaching people many things, including a set of truths which make up the curriculum through which we learn to divide the world. I argue that media pedagogies and other artefacts of the cultural industry carry out much of the identity shaping that is undertaken by contemporary neoliberal societies. Authors like Shirley Steinberg, Douglas Kellner and Stuart Hall, along with researchers from a field called Foucaultian studies (Jorge Larrosa, Nikolas Rose, Alfredo Veiga-Neto), have helped me to understand these artefacts as languages which invest in entertainment as a way of producing convenient meanings for political, social and cultural hegemonic projects, putting into operation governmental techniques which conflate consciousness and shape behaviour. They are part of a cultural policy that deploys people and groups hierarchically in the societies in which they live.
media and education; education and televison; cultural pedagogies; cultural studies; curriculum