There is a new type of theme-park that eager children across the world are giddily lining up to enter. This isn’t the easily imagined theme-park of our youths—where roller-coasters loop cursively against the clouds and sky, where bulbous, life-size characters frolic and greet pedestrians, or where you wind through materialized scenes of the most popular films. There isn’t even an arcade. Indeed, from Mexico to Mumbai, children at Kidzania are entertained by role-playing as adults.
Kidzania is a scaled-down, corporate metropolis. On entering, children are assigned bank accounts, given 50 Kidzos (the currency at Kidzania) and wallets to holster their debit cards by Zupervisors. To remain solvent, children can make additional Kidzos by joining activities and taking up certain occupations like becoming a dentist, fireman, judge, fast food worker, or pilot. These occupations are sponsored by multi-national corporations. If the children work in a restaurant, then it’s Burger King or Pizza-Hut; there’s a smoothie making activity that is sponsored by Coca-Cola. If they wish to become dentists, then it’s in an office endorsed by Crest.
In a recent article in The New Yorker, Rebecca Mead, who visited the first created Kidzania in Santa Fe, wrote, “Children can spend their kidzos on renting a car—small electric vehicles moving around a go-kart track that is sponsored by companies like Mercedces-Benz or Renault—or at the mini city’s department store, which bears the name of a regional chain and is stocked with covetable trinkets.”
That isn’t all: Kidzania is a nation. It has Congrezzmembers, Rightzkeepers, an anthem, a flag. Mead commented that, in one of the quasi-governments proceedings, the children looked “like participants in synchronized performance celebrating the birthday of Kim Jong-un.” Children are chosen to represent the body-politic through an online selection of regular attendants that is tinkered with by clinical psychologist and marketing experts.
Most of the argument that has been offered in support of Kidzania has been cloaked pragmatism: it is useful and healthy to teach children how to properly manage their finances, to get a job, and to be active in the political process. Initially, this seems enticing. While it must be admitted that it is important for children to eventually learn how to navigate the world they occupy, it’s not difficult to criticize the manner it’s being done in at Kidzania.
The most alluring feature of Kidzania should be it’s most horrifying: its realism. It would be an error to think that it’s innocuous for children to role-play as adults in the uncreative and structured way they do at Kidzania. For every activity, there is an implicit, corresponding ideology. When, for example, children work as fast food workers at Burger King or dentists at the Crest office, when they are compensated unequally and one is allowed to have more than the other—perhaps he rents a Mercedes-Benz when the other can’t—it occurs to the children that society ought to be structured the way that it is. In other words, there should be economic inequality and a class system. When they participate in the political process, it’s affirmed that a government ought be comprised of a congress and a president.
Put another way, Kidzania becomes a quiet vouch for the status quo.
