- McGraw-Hill prints a six-grade math textbook that includes brand names in its math equations. The book is currently used in at least 16 US states, building brand loyalty for Nike, Disney, and Burger King, among others. Many school boards, such as the California State education department, give the book a hearty thumbs-up, finding the book superior to earlier textbooks because kids recognize and identify with the brand-name touchstones.
- Companies create "free" ready-made lessons for teachers to use on students. Chips Ahoy has a counting game for little kids where you have to figure the number of chocolate chips in their cookies. Kelloggs has an art project where you make sculpture out of Rice Krispies. Procter & Gamble sponsors lessons on oral hygiene that include giving away Crest samples. Campbell's Soup created (then shamefully recalled) a science lesson where students compared the viscosity of Prego sauce to rival Ragu. The Consumers Union has stated that 80 percent of these "lessons" contain wrong or misleading information.
- Companies profit by changing the way you think. Representatives of the drug Prozac will come to your school to "teach" you about depression. Exxon has ecology curriculum that shows how clean the environment of Alaska is. Some schools actually sell ad space in the hallways, on the sides of school buses, or billboards out in the yard.
- Companies collect information about you at school. In New Jersey, elementary school kids filled out a 27-page booklet called "my all about me journal," basically a marketing survey for a television channel. Students in Massachusetts spent two days tasting cereal and answering an opinion poll. ZapMe! corporation puts "free" computers and internet hookups in schools. Then they monitor your web browsing habits and sell the information, neatly broken down by age, gender and postal code, to their customers.
- Channel One gives schools "free" televisions and audio visual equipment. The catch is that you and 8 million other students have to watch their daily news broadcasts, including the commercials.
- Youth Stream has message boards in 7,200 high school locker rooms. They carry product advertisements and try to sell you on visiting the company's website, where even more advertising can be seen. The boards reach almost 60 percent of US high school students.
So, maybe you don't like the idea of school becoming one giant rat maze for the marketing lab. But what will you do about it? Start by figuring out the chain of command -- teacher, principal, school board officials, state and federal education department officials, and so on. Then complain as far up the ladder as you need to go until you get results. Contact the news media. If you call the local newspaper and tell them you are being forced to watch TV commercials during school, for instance, you'll get attention fast. Jamming meetings, protesting outside schools, hanging banners from classroom windows -- it's at least as much fun as doing homework, and you'll probably learn more.
exerpts from article by Allan Casey
Adbusters Magazine, Winter 2000
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