Schools Are Becoming Infomercials
Seattle decided that education does not go better with Coke. Parents are pressing the Seattle school board to reverse a decision last year to accept advertising in the public schools.
It was a pleasant victory in a disgusting struggle over the minds of schoolchildren across America. School is where young people are supposed to think critically about the world. Increasingly, they are surrounded by critical compromises.
As America refuses to fund its public schools, companies are plastering them with graffiti. In some Colorado school districts, ads for Mountain Dew, 7-Up, and Burger King are on school buses and in hallways. A school message board in one suburban Pittsburgh district is sponsored by Pepsi and Mars National Bank. In a nearby district, Coke beat out Pepsi for exclusive sales rights in schools and at events.
In a district in suburban Dallas, Coke beat out Dr. Pepper with a multi-million-dollar deal that gives Coke exclusive rights to advertise on scoreboards, vending machines and cafeteria walls in exchange for $1.2 million a year for the next 15 years and another $900,000 for a multipurpose building.
Across America, 31,000 schools get book covers for free, sponsored by the likes of Calvin Klein, Nike, Gatorade and Lego. In 15 states, 100 schools have contracted for a Muzak-type system for its hallways, a system that has 12 minutes of commercials every hour. Various math “curriculums” have children counting Tootsie Rolls and Domino’s pepperoni pieces.
One child software teaches reading through recognition of Kmart, McDonald’s, Hi-C and Cap’n Crunch logos. Kids get antidrug curriculums from Kentucky Fried Chicken. Education about your skin comes courtesy of Clearasil.
The worst example is Channel One, the 12-minute show that blares into homerooms in 40 percent of public secondary schools in the United States, reaching 8 million students. A recent study by professors at Vassar and Johns Hopkins University found that only 58 percent of the show was news. The remainder was ads, promotional activities, anchor banter, and a news quiz.
Channel One will tell you that it has won 100 educational and journalism awards, including a Peabody. Corporations will tell you they are giving to schools because they care about children. They would not be there if children ages 6-19 were not a commodity, whose spending and influence on their parents’ spending is worth nearly half a trillion dollars a year.
They would not be there unless they knew, unspokenly, that many of these children face limited options in life. The Army, for instance, advertises on a Channel One web site. There are not many ads for the Army in private prep schools.
“The news is not the point of Channel One,” said Mark Crispin Miller, professor of media studies at Johns Hopkins. “It is no more than filler … meant primarily to get us ready for the ads.” Miller said the ads teach children to “surrender to your craving right away.”
School ought to be sacred. When superintendents and teachers approve of corporate ads and curriculum, it becomes implausible to expect them to help young people question the other side of commercialism. America’s youth are already stunningly out of shape and devoted to junk foods. They are not likely to get much of an environmental critique from the free curriculum of Exxon, Shell, DuPont, International Paper, or Pacific Lumber, nor learn much about human rights from a free education package about Indonesia (provided by, of all people, Scholastic). They are not likely to learn about the horrors of war from G.I. Joe, whose logo is on a reading program, nor about racist or sexist hazing at the Citadel, which advertises in Colorado Springs.
Schools are allowing their children to become sex (Sales EXploitation) objects at cheap prices. The total of school budgets in America is $293.7 billion. The total of corporate involvement in education is $1.3 billion. Even in Colorado Springs, one of the more vocal defenders of ads in the schools, the money from them last year was only $85,265 out of a budget of $155 million. The ad money amounted to $2.60 per student. That is a mere preface in a textbook.
Besides Seattle, the San Jose school board last year kicked Channel One out of a high school. But other cities, like Dallas, New York, and Tampa, are being seduced by school bus ads or adopt-a-school logo schemes. We already have a nation where students are more likely to know a style of sneaker, a brand of burger, and a jingle of a soft drink than where Chicago is or the name of a member of the Supreme Court. We need less, not more of it. If education by Coke was “the real thing,” we would have slurped from that well long ago without an ad in the hallway.
xxxx