CSotD: All your children are belong to us
Skip to comments
Drew Sheneman with a commentary that matters, but seems a generation or so too late.
That teacher, and the parents of those kids, grew up with corporations already well-entrenched in the classrooms. Sheneman himself, who graduated from college in 1998, might have seen the tentacles stretching in, if he'd been in the right school district during his high school years.
In 1995, Consumers Union produced a report, "Captive Kids: A Report on Commercial Pressures on Kids at Schools," as a follow-up to a 1990 study. Here's how it began:
It’s a typical school day in America.
7:00 a.m. America’s School Kid rolls out of bed, rubs her eyes, and gets
ready for school. After grabbing a bite, she’s ready to go. But while
she’s walking out the door, she remembers that she left her algebra book
on the table. She runs back and grabs it, remembering it’s the one with
the bright Reebok cover that her school issued her.
8:00 a.m. A yellow school bus picks up America’s School Kid at the
corner. Its top and sides are painted with large signs advertising
7-Up –– "the uncola."
8:30 a.m. The yellow bus pulls up to school, and America’s School Kid
rushes through its doors, makes her way past a bulletin board beckoning
her to visit Jan’s Beauty Shop, and ducks into the homeroom class where
her teacher is writing today’s announcements on a class calendar
sporting an insurance-company logo.
As our kid settles down to do her homework, today’s 12-minute,
ad-financed Channel One news broadcast for students begins to air. Four
minutes into the program she looks up to see a hip-looking teen-ager
downing a Pepsi on screen — in the same ad currently being shown on MTV. [Editor's note: Thank god that beast has died.]
Book covers, billboards in school corridors, calendars, and broadcasts
— these are some of the places corporate America places ads for kids to
see in school. Commercial messages also reach kids in the classroom
through ad-bearing and corporate-sponsored educational materials.
If we tracked our school kid through the rest of the day, we might find
her learning about solid waste from worksheets provided free by Procter
& Gamble, the makers of Tide detergent, Pampers, Luvs, and other
products. The worksheets would guide her through a “product life cycle
analysis” and a discussion of how disposable diapers can actually be
more “green” than cloth ones. Later, she might see other materials on
solid waste from Browning-Ferris and the Polystyrene Packaging Council.
In health class America’s kid might use a learning kit compliments of
McDonald’s or Kellogg’s to help her learn about good nutrition. She’d
have no trouble identifying the sponsor because its logo would be
prominent on all components — poster, worksheets, and video. But she
might have trouble recognizing that much of the information has a
corporate slant. And if she expected to see something identifying it as
the company’s opinion, she’d find none.
The PTA was alarmed enough then to draw up fundraising guidelines, but I don't know how successful they've been.
In looking for them, I came across this on-line conversation, which lays it all out pretty well, from the parents furious that their children are being pressured to win prizes and by the size of the cut taken by professional fundraisers, to the boosters who say that, even with the company taking half, they raise more money with the slick, commercial programs than with locally produced efforts.
Keith Knight weighed in on the topic back in April, 2000:
That same year, Dan Wasserman also observed the trend of soda companies signing deals with school districts:
And Tony Auth chimed in three years later, with a prescient nod to not-yet-Mayor Bloomberg:
I was tracking all this because it was smack in the middle of the time I spent from 1993 to 2006 providing educational programs to schools on behalf of newspapers.
That had started out as community outreach, and, of course, the idea of turning young people into newspaper readers. I could live with that level of self-interest because we were fully transparent and because I thought — and still think — that kids should be well-informed.
But I kept sponsors at arm's length and was quite frank with kids in teaching them that commercial media were in the business of selling eyeballs, whether it was newspapers or television or radio or the new emering on-line media.
Part of our tour was a discussion of why Saturday morning TV featured commercials for McDonald's and sugared cereals while the network news had commercials for automobiles and Metamucil. (Fourth graders really didn't get it. Fifth graders crowed with delight at their own sharp insight.)
And we were supported by the Newspaper Association of America with a series of promotional fillers like this, in which a famous person talked about the importance of being well-informed:
This promo went on for two years, with Tabitha Soren, LLCoolJ, Christy Turlington, Barbara Bush, John Elway and Meryl Streep among the celebrities.
But then someone discovered this could be a profit center, and the nature of the "celebrities" featured suddenly changed. In December, 1999, we were told the good news:
And we got a picture of our little newspaper reader:
I was able to block this promo in part because the paper had not yet been taken over by a corporation and still had a real publisher who was part of the community and who understood how presenting clearly bogus endorsements undercut our credibility, and also because I suggested to the ad director that, if the movie theaters wanted to promote movies, selling them ads from his department was more in our interest than giving them free publicity from mine.
But ownership changed, personnel changed, company goals changed and eventually I didn't have enough fingers left to plug the holes, whereupon the dike collapsed and I gave up and left.
Frank Zappa was right: "All your children are poor unfortunate victims of systems beyond their control."
However, there is a difference between surrendering and picking your battles.
As part of the pushback against commercialization of childhood, there began to be a movement towards media education, which was right down my alley, and within the mission of groups like Action for Children's Television and The New Mexico Media Literacy Project.
It also included a group called "Adbusters" which began by teaching children to understand and question media but then morphed into an anarchist group that was simply against business in general and became the genesis of Anonymous and the Occupy Movement.
I don't believe in trashing the entire corporate world, but I have to admit, I didn't have much luck in trying to hold it back from its own worst practices. Even Sesame Street sold out, first as clothing and then as toy after toy after toy.
Kermit began hosting the Muppet Show in 1976, and if kids saw any division between that growing commercial empire and Children's Television Workshop, they had sharper eyes than the adults who flocked to purchase "Tickle Me, Elmo" twenty years later.
Tom the Dancing Bug didn't differentiate in 1999:
And here, a freakish outsider who grew up in a home with no television, talks about what she does for a living. We could use a few more like her:
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
Comments 1
Comments are closed.