New Book: School Commercialism

Posted by on November 10, 2006

[posted from Public Education Network newsblast]

SCHOOL COMMERCIALISM: FROM DEMOCRATIC IDEAL TO MARKET COMMODITY

In a new book on school commercialism, Alex Molnar examines how various commercial initiatives — from the advertising-driven Channel One, to exclusive vending machine contracts in school districts, to for-profit schools run by companies like the Edison Project and other market-centered charter schools — threaten the future of American education. Schools are an ideal and hugely desirous location for targeting kids. In one institution, an otherwise disparate market segment is captive and organized by age. Even more, because children experience school-based advertising in what is otherwise thought to be a public institution, legitimacy is conferred on marketers? actions. By participating in schools, in other words, corporate America is able to buy a degree of community good will while selling directly to kids in a focused environment. School commercialism also serves two other functions: it provides a podium to disseminate corporate ideas and values; and, most significantly, it provides an essential venue for spreading the notion that consumption itself is the most important framework within which personal and social happiness, meaning and fulfillment can be found. This latter function is really where corporate activity poses a significant challenge to the integrity of schools. As Molnar explains, through the increased presence of corporate culture the work of schools shifts from a site that develops young people as engaged learners and active citizens to a site that produces consumers who are brand conscious and brand loyal, and at an increasingly younger age. “The more corporate special interests are allowed to influence what schools teach — and, by extension, limit what they cannot teach — the less students are seen as active citizens-to-be, and the more they are seen as passive consumers-to-be-sold.”

http://edrev.asu.edu/reviews/rev488.htm