Stupid White Men-- and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation! - Michael Moore [49]
If turning the students into billboards isn’t enough, schools and corporations sometimes turn the school itself into one giant neon sign for corporate America. Appropriation of school space, including scoreboards, rooftops, walls, and textbooks, for corporate logos and advertising is up 539 percent.
Colorado Springs, not satisfied to sell its soul only to CocaCola, has plastered its school buses with advertisements for
Burger King, Wendy’s, and other big companies. Free book covers and school planners with ads for Kellogg’s Pop-Tarts and pictures of FOX TV personalities were also handed out to the students.
After members of the Grapevine-Colleyville Independent School District in Texas decided they didn’t want advertisements in the classrooms, they allowed Dr. Pepper and 7-Up logos to be painted on the rooftops of two high schools. The two high schools, not coincidentally, lie under the Dallas airport flight path.
The schools aren’t just looking for ways to advertise; they’re also concerned with the students’ perceptions of various products. That’s why, in some schools, companies conduct market research in classrooms during school hours. Education Market Resources of Kansas reports that “children respond openly and easily to questions and stimuli” in the classroom setting. (Of course, that’s what they’re supposed to be doing in a classroombut for their own benefit, not that of some corporate pollsters.) Filling out marketing surveys instead of learning, however, is probably not what they should be doing.
Companies have also learned they can reach this confined audience by “sponsoring” educational materials. This practice, like the others, has exploded as well, increasing 1,875 percen t since 1990.
Teachers have shown a Shell Oil video that teaches students that the way to experience nature is by driving there—after filling your Jeep’s gas tank at a Shell station. ExxonMobil prepared lesson plans about the flourishing wildlife in Prince William Sound, site of the ecological disaster caused by the oil spill from the Exxon Valdez. A third-grade math book features exercises involving counting Tootsie Rolls. A Hershey’s-sponsored curriculum used in many schools features “The Chocolate Dream Machine,” including lessons in math, science; geography—and nutrition.
In a number of high schools, the economics course is supplied by General Motors. GMwrites and provides the textbooks and the course outline. Students learn from GM’ s example the benefits of capitalism and how to operate a company—like GM.
And what better way to imprint a corporate logo on the country’s children than through television and the Internet beamed directly into the classroom. Electronic marketing, where a company provides programming or equipment to schools for the right to advertise to their students, is up 139 percent.
One example is the ZapMe! Corporation, which provides schools with a free computer lab and access to pre-selected Web sites. In return, schools must promise that the lab will be in use at least four hours a day. The catch? The ZapMe! Web browser has constantly scrolling advertisements—and the company gets to collect information on students’ browsing habits, information they can then sell to other companies.
Perhaps the worst of the electronic marketers is Channel One Television. Eight million students in 12,000 classrooms watch Channel One, an in-school news and advertising program, every day. (That’s right: EVERY day.) Kids are spending