Fast Food Nation - Eric Schlosser [31]
The school marketing efforts of the large soda companies have not gone entirely unopposed. Administrators in San Francisco and Seattle have refused to allow any advertising in their schools. “It’s our responsibility to make it clear that schools are here to serve children, not commercial interests,” declared a member of the San Francisco Board of Education. Individual protests have occurred as well. In March of 1998, 1,200 students at Greenbrier High School in Evans, Georgia, assembled in the school parking lot, many of them wearing red and white clothing, to spell out the word “Coke.” It was Coke in Education Day at the school, and a dozen Coca-Cola executives had come for the occasion. Greenbrier High was hoping for a $500 prize, which had been offered to the local high school that came up with the best marketing plan for Coca-Cola discount cards. As part of the festivities, Coke executives had lectured the students on economics and helped them bake a Coca-Cola cake. A photographer was hoisted above the parking lot by a crane, ready to record the human C-O-K-E for posterity. When the photographer started to take pictures, Mike Cameron — a Greenbrier senior, standing amid the letter C — suddenly revealed a T-shirt that said “Pepsi.” His act of defiance soon received nationwide publicity, as did the fact that he was immediately suspended from school. The principal said Cameron could have been suspended for a week for the prank, but removed him from classes for just a day. “I don’t consider this a prank,” Mike Cameron told the Washington Post. “I like to be an individual. That’s the way I am.”
Most school advertising campaigns are more subtle than Greenbrier High’s Coke in Education Day. The spiraling cost of textbooks has led thousands of American school districts to use corporate-sponsored teaching materials. A 1998 study of these teaching materials by the Consumers Union found that 80 percent were biased, providing students with incomplete or slanted information that favored the sponsor’s products and views. Procter & Gamble’s Decision Earth program taught that clear-cut logging was actually good for the environment; teaching aids distributed by the Exxon Education Foundation said that fossil fuels created few environmental, problems and that alternative sources of energy were too expensive; a study guide sponsored by the American Coal Foundation dismissed fears of a greenhouse effect, claiming that “the earth could benefit rather than be harmed from increased carbon dioxide.” The Consumers Union found Pizza Hut’s Book It! Program — which awards a free Personal Pan Pizza to children who reach targeted reading levels — to be “highly commercial.” About twenty million elementary school students participated in Book It! during the 1999–2000 school year; Pizza Hut recently expanded the program to include a million preschoolers.
Lifetime Learning Systems is the nation’s largest marketer and producer of corporate-sponsored teaching aids. The group claims that its publications are used by more than 60 million students every year. “Now you can enter the classroom through custom-made learning materials created with your specific marketing objectives in mind,” Lifetime Learning said in one of its pitches to corporate sponsors. “Through these materials, your product or point of view becomes the focus of discussions in the classroom,” it said in another, “… the centerpiece in a dynamic process that generates long-term awareness and lasting attitudinal change.” The tax cuts that are hampering