Advertising to children is then a kind of immoral war on childhood, waged for the profit of adults who should be childhood’s guardians. Furthermore, when advertising is conducted in schools the immorality is compounded because the power of the state is twisted to the service of special interests, the ethical standing of educators compromised, and orientation of the school shifted toward mis-educative experiences.
Commercial activities now shape the structure of the school day, influence the content of the school curriculum, and determine whether children have access to a variety of technologies. Moreover, it appears from a number of citations that there is an emerging trend for marketers to attempt to bundle together advertising and marketing programs in schools across a variety of media and thus gain a dominant position in the schoolhouse market. Channel One, among other media properties that have an advertising impact on schools and classrooms.
And Channel One has signed on as content provider for America on Line’s teen web site. The effort to more fully integrate the schoolhouse into corporate marketing plans by securing control over as many school-based advertising media as possible may well be the trend to watch over the next decade. If so, we can expect schools to serve as launch pads for marketing campaigns that resemble high profile movie releases complete with multiple tie-ins for a variety of products and services aimed at children and their families.
As a measure of how far short the professional education community, it is telling that, despite the pervasiveness of schoolhouse commercialism and its rapid growth in the nineties, the education press has had very little to say about the issue. At a time when commercialism in schools and classrooms is increasing dramatically, educators have been largely silent or, worse, cheerleaders for the trend. The education community attempt to understand and assess the impact of commercial activities on the character and quality of schools and their programs.
This was a very good post Yu Fu. I had never realized these type of things that you described in this post. It is very important that we make sure the children of America have all the adequate tools to make them as successful as they can possibly be.
ReplyDeleteThis is a very interesting post. Commercials do have a big affect on children at a small age. I feel that some commercials have a little to much in them for children, but its also up to the parents on what they will let their children watch.
ReplyDeleteWow. This was a big topic in my high school i the 1990's when Channel One gave every classroom a television and journalism classes cameras and other equipment. We could not have otherwise had the equipment, and, in all honesty, most of the kids were talking during the required sponsor ads before the daily announcements. Still, it does raise an ethical question of whether or not to have classrooms equipped by corporate sponsors: textbooks brought to you by Coca-Cola, Smart Boards brought to you by Snickers... yuck.
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