Advertising in schools

Corporate advertising to school children is a big issue. I think it's just about impossible for a public school student to get through school without being exposed to some advertising. Some textbooks feature name-brand products. In some schools, fast food companies have mini-franchises, rather than a traditional school lunch program. Many PTA fundraisers are simply selling corporate crap. Loads of businesses are willing to provide books, volunteers, money, whatever, but usually their logo shows up somewhere. Then there's the infamous channel one--notorious for showing commercials to a captive audience of school children. And some "educational" websites that teachers use expose children to advertising.

This really bothers me. I've complained and written letters and even made two school principals read a back issue of Mothering that has a great article on this topic. And, while serving as PTO president this year, I made sure our fundraisers did *not* involve sellling corporate crap. My co-officers share my opinion of these types of fundraisers.

So, I don't think you're weird for wanting the dunkin' donuts logo taken down.

Daylily said

Quote:
Internet search engines all involve either overt or covert advertising. As a librarian I have to say that this seems to me a lot like selling advertising space on the card catalog. But what do I know?

I wonder why schools are so hipped on pushing Internet searching anyway? It is a tricky source of info and children usually don't have the background judgement to evaluate what they find. Is there a hidden agenda behind the "every child must learn how to use the Internet as early as possible" mantra? It does result in lots of additional advertising exposure at school and at home, without necessarily improving the educational content.

My take would be that children need to learn first how to search a library catalog, second how to search a serials index and then and only then start learning how to search the Internet. Why give them the worst quality of disorganized information source first? Of course my first two choices don't include advertising exposure...

A librarian's rant!
Nana :

I don't think you're weird; quite the opposite. I don't understand why parents nationwide aren't in an uproar about it. Teenagers see thousands of commercial images each day without help from schools. We seem to be abandoning children to commercial interests; growing children to feed a commercial matrix. Schools are being privatized as well to become commercial in nature as well . I read that some kids holding bake sales at some schools are not allowed to sell juice or hot chocolate because they compete with the beverages sold in the school's vending machines; machines there under contract from Pepsi or Coke.

"In the marketing world they're called tinys." At just six months of age, babies are already forming mental images of corporate logos. One in four children utters a brand name as their first recognizable word."

~ http://www.med.sc.edu:1081/babysfirstword.htm

And sometimes teachers are active participants in making children view ads. A typical Scholastic Bookfair is a good example of this. At dd's elementary school, during the bookfair, at each child's library period, the kids are forced to watch a Scholastic video--it's usually an interview with an author whose book--surprise, surprise--is available for sale by Scholastic. I made a huge fuss about the video, so they stopped it for a while, but instead a Scholastic representative would read passages from one of the books for sale, naturally stopping at an exciting part so the kids would want to buy the book. Dd came home from one such experience panting for me to buy her one of Eva Ibbotson's books. I didn't buy it for her, but we got it from the library, and after reading it she agreed with me that it wasn't worth what it would have cost. Sure, the school library makes money from these book fairs, but *most* of the money goes to Scholastic.

And, of course there are the Scholastic order forms that the teacher dutifully sends home every few weeks.

We don't have any kind of advertising at our school. And until reading this post, I didn't even know such a thing was happening! I'm glad I dropped in! I will certainly be more aware from now on. I would hate for my kids to be exposed to advertising at school.

As far as the pizza hut thing goes, I do know about it but our school doesn't participate in it. Our school doesn't offer any 'outside' rewards for school work. They concentrate on the teaching that rewards come from the child, themselves. The sense of pride they take in themselves for the accomplishments they make, etc.

As far as Scholastic goes...I, too, have noticed that there is more and more crap being sold. My kids seem to want all the junk. Our rule is that I will only purchase books and nothing else. And as far as a video/book reading during the book fair, I haven't seen that or heard anything about it at our school. I'll stay more aware of that, too. Our kids just take turns going through all the books and filling out the order forms. They love it and so do I. The books we get for the school from Scholastic have helped to build our library which is small, but growing. But I do agree that it is a shame that Scholastic has given way to selling anything but books.