outside the (toy) box

God, how self-absorbed can I be? (very.) 

My concerns with the commercialization of childhood have to do with the damage done to kids by socializing them to be not only consumers, but consumerist, to define themselves and others by what the clothes they wear, the cache of their cell phone, the bag they carry, the gaming system they have, the sneakers they own, and/or their MP3 player, instead of their talents, interests, behaviors, and insights. 

Before reading Juliet Schor’s Born to Buy, I thought this made them shallow and spoiled.  I thought it created disturbing parameters of social exclusion.  I thought it made a lot of work for parents.  I thought it was used to promote lousy brands that harm kids rather than help them.  All true.

But reading Schor showed me three things that made me go crazy:

1. that involvement in consumer culture actually causes emotional and mental health problems for children - depression, anxiety, low-self-esteem, psychosomatic problems
2. that advertisers explicitly use techniques that undermine parental and teacher authority, to ally themselves with children.  The adults in your life are controlling morons, but fruit by the foot understands you.  Think about the consequences of this — sure, brand loyalty, but more broadly, if your parents are clueless dorks why should a child look to them for guidance or insight?  Why should they share their most deeply held concerns?  If teachers are oppressive and stupid, then, by implication, so is school.  Not good.
3. that marketing, the vehicle that pulls children into consumer culture most directly is everywhere. Parents make the mistake of thinking that our children experience the advertising that they experienced. Not even close. Take the advertising you knew, up it’s emotional pull by adding insights from neuromarketing and ethnographic market research, put it on steroids, and then insert it everywhere from schools, to church, to friendships, to media, to conversations with “friends” in chat rooms, to youth clubs, to public effing space.  Yes, yes, I’ve said this before.

This made me insane. I was furious and equally furious with the lameass “parental responsibility” comeback given by those in the industry.  Come on. Give me a break.  This is a consumer culture and we live in it.  As a parent, what am I supposed to do — homeschool, forgo religious community, keep kids out of public spaces, prohibit the use of all media, and oh, right, make friendship off limits?  It’s all my fault - any good parent would clearly be willing to keep their child in a cardboard box.  Just use a blindfold on drives to the doctor’s office - no one makes house calls anymore.

We need social structural solutions to what is clearly a social structural problem.  Making schools commercial free is the most obvious place to begin, seeing as how they are supposed to support children and developing brand loyalty shouldn’t be a learning goal.

I’m right, of course, about what it would take to improve things, but I have been realizing lately that I’ve been focused on only one major problem, when there are really two.

I’ve been focused on what advertising in general, and advertising in schools in particular, does to kids.  Then, I started thinking about what it does to education.  Duh.  What took me so long? 

Schools become very defensive about the prospect of going ad-free because they need the money (paid to them for pouring rights or for a named gym, or in exchange for piping ads into school buses -gag.) and the goods (free books, for example, in the case of Scholastic) and the teacher support (ick, corporate sponsored curricula - the worst of the worst) for overworked, and sometimes underprepared, teachers.   

What’s corporate sponsored curriculum?  How about this example - a lesson plan for middle schoolers called “10 steps to self-esteem” written by proctor and gamble, and supplemented by samples of clearasil.  Yes, kids, step number one: fix that horrible face of yours. No wonder you’re in the dumps.

Reliance on in-school marketing has become the dirty secret of administrators and school boards.  Some districts even have admin staff dedicated to corporate relations.  Nope, not lying.  Given the state of funding for education, it’s hard to blame them.

But, wait. 

If this becomes the widely used and accepted crutch to fund public education, and private education for that matter (yes, there are ads in many private schools and preschools too), what are the logical outcomes?

Well, for one, we can safely wager our homes on the fact that schools who are in the poorest areas will be most likely to permit the highest amount of advertising in their schools.  That’s great. So, the children who are already the most likely to get substandard education will also be the most likely to learn about earth science from American Petroleum. 

And, secondarily, we can expect that the marketers will distribute their investments unevenly.  Let’s look to television, newspaper, and magazine advertising as an example.  What do advertisers want?  First thought - the largest possible audience?  Some do.  But more want access to a particular type of audience — those with disposable income.  Remember the show Murder She Wrote? This is the classic example (thanks to Croteau and Hoynes).  Murder She Wrote had amazing ratings and was cancelled anyway.  Why?  Because senior citizens on a fixed income don’t spend enough money and the network couldn’t sell advertising that they felt was adequately profitable.  I don’t want to go too far off on a tangent here, but look at the landscape of television faces.  They look a lot like the coveted affluent 18-34 year olds that marketers target, don’t they?  And they’re also pretty pale in the skin.

So, I would be interested to see which schools are getting the high end, value-added type of corporate presence — the named gymnasiums, the science and tech centers, and shiny new multi media equipment.  What about those playgrounds home depot is building — are they in the poorest communities?  Doesn’t sound like it to me.  So, if the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior (that’s STRAIGHT from Dr. Phil, btw), then we can expect the revenue to chase affluence.

We need social science research to track the flow of advertising funding, but I’m willing to bet that we see a fairly egregious cycle that will, unchecked, only exacerbate inequalities in public education.

Education funding is without a doubt in a sorry state of affairs, but allowing advertising to ameliorate the situation, places us on the proverbial slippery slope.  That’s F#@kd Up.

So, my concerns about commercialized schools - only the tip of the iceberg.

Okay Amy, Lisa, Josh — who’s going to do the research?  Let’s get one of these, I’m game.