Overmediating our children.

I DON'T GO IN MUCH for conspiracy theories, but I don't think it took a covert conspiracy for us to end up in the current educational morass.

The "ricochet" generation (offspring of the baby boomers) started arriving in schools just about the time that political fortunes turned local governments against the idea of "throwing money" at problems. (For "throwing money," read "government spending on resources and services not readily available on the average school district's budget.") Educators and administrators, strapped for funds by relentless yearly cuts in taxes and revenue sharing distributions, increasingly give in to the temptation of "educational programming" offered by corporate advertisers, especially when the help comes in the form of much needed equipment and "content" to supplement expensive textbooks. Combine that with the constant distraction of more and more rigorous government "testing" standards, and add in the kind of MTV/Xbox stimulation kids seem to require to hold their attention and you have, well, the current educational morass.

Many of us who no longer have school-age children might not have heard of some of these truly disturbing trends, so let me mention a few others:

* Channel One -- This is the granddaddy of modern TV school advertising. Starting in 1989 with a test market of six schools, Channel One offered "in exchange for airing the [12 minute "news"] program each day ... a satellite dish, a cable hookup, a television monitor for each classroom, and an agreement to service the equipment for three years." (1) Channel One provides content and supplements curricula for cash-strapped schools, but at a price. Each news story or study exercise comes with several advertisements, just like TV, in a ratio that looks weighted more towards advertising than regular programming. I watched a report on the possibility of drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska and found the reporting fairly balanced, but interrupted about every three to four minutes by a 30-second ad. The report ended with a "Question of the Day" sponsored, in this case, by Cingular Wireless, which awards a GoPhone and 3 months of service to students whose comments are selected for airing at a later time. To me, this qualifies more as a program for recruiting new consumers than as a serious effort to reduce the cost of effective education.

* Food and beverage services -- Many schools across the US have contracted out their school food service programs to chains like McDonald's, Dunkin Donuts, and Taco Bell, and their vending machines to Coke, Pepsi, and Mountain Dew. While this usually meets with the approval of the kids, many of whom get an incredible 50% of their calories from fat and refined sugar, the schools like it because they make more money through the franchise than they do when they do the cooking and serving themselves. If you think the corporations just magnanimously want to help schools, this might change your mind:

  "The school system is where you build brand loyalty."--John Alm,
  president and chief operating officer, Coca-Cola Enterprises, quoted
  in the Atlanta Journal Constitution, April 6, 2003

One can only guess at the immediate consequences for kids--lethargy, inattention, schoolroom jitters, decreased energy, increased weight. In the bigger picture, kids most likely get the message that food(1) "is equivalent to" food(2). Imagine trying to teach nutrition or health under such circumstances. In one room, kids hear they need six to eight servings of vegetables a day. Down they hall, the school offers them Big Macs and fries! Anyone with even a small acquaintance with genetics and evolution will note that our bodies happily gorge on all that fat and sugar because we evolved in an environment where we never knew when we might see meat again. To me, education in part has to do with lifting us above our simple animal natures and teaching us how to adapt our impulses to our current circumstances. When you reliably get three meals a day, none of those meals should contain enough calories to carry you through a two-day fast.

* Corporate sponsorship of sports -- The idea of business sponsorship of school teams goes way back, to local Little League and ads in the high school yearbook. But today's version involves millions of dollars and more intense competition among sponsors than among the teams themselves. Sporting goods companies like Nike and Reebok donate equipment and uniforms, while even companies without an obvious sports connection can get in the act as well. A school district in California recently offered corporate donors the right to affix their name to a brand new football field and arena in exchange for a donation large enough to cover the cost of building it. On one level, we might view this as a sensible, even clever solution to the problem of paying for repairs, renovations, or expansion of school property. On another level, however, we must consider unintended consequences, like the possibility of corporate control over activities, and the likelihood of professional teams scouting of younger and younger athletes. Many kids in certain circumstances already believe that a professional sports career will serve them better than a college degree, despite the fact that they have far more opportunities for getting into college than they have of signing a substantial professional sports contract.

* Computer equipment and software -- The big three computer-related companies, Microsoft, Apple, and Intel, learned years ago that kids exhibit strong brand loyalty when it comes to computers. So they know that the sooner kids start to use their products, the longer they will remain customers. The rest of the computer and software industry has learned a similar lesson. This has resulted in strong pressure to provide computer equipment and internet access to all students, despite a lack of evidence that computer use in the classroom provides benefits not otherwise attainable. Many of the arguments seem irrefutable--larger and larger areas of the job market require computer skills, the internet provides access to information students could never get any other way, computers provide opportunities for students who don't learn well through standard classroom methods, etc., etc. However, too often, the programs, driven by corporate representatives with well-honed marketing skills, sail through school board meetings without scrutiny or challenge. Many programs involve no record-keeping, data collection, or analysis of benefit. Most don't even consider whether to question their efficacy. The reasoning seems so logical, the program simply must work as imagined. The consequences, including reduced time for non-computer-mediated learning, and unexpected hidden costs like security, networking, and software maintenance fees, don't factor into the initial decision and sometimes don't show up until the donating company has moved on to the next school district.

* BusRadio -- Through one of those serendipitous series of clicks around the web, I came across this latest marketing threat to schoolchildren. (2) The company wants to "provide a service" by hammering kids on their way to and from school with what they refer to on their website as "dynamic programming." The rest of that sentence reads "providing advertisers with a unique and effective way to reach the highly sought after teen and tween market." (Emphasis mine.) Somebody discovered students getting a brief respite from the constant beam of consumer training already directed at them at school and in the home, and decided to "help" them fill in the time. With BusRadio in place, students will receive a continuous diet of advertising from the moment they leave home until they return several hours later.

Of course, getting home doesn't turn off the stream. In many homes these days, the TV remains on continuously during waking hours (and beyond, no doubt, in some cases). Alongside the TV, the family computer connects kids with the Internet, that smorgasbord of information, much of it subsidized by corporate America. If you rarely surf the web, or if you mostly stick to the handful of sites you have found of interest, you may not appreciate the degree to which companies have staked out territory in order to take advantage of all those "eyes."

Nearly every website a kid might visit these days includes banner ads and an "Adsense" stripe somewhere on the page. Adsense is a Google feature that scans the current article for keywords and incorporates "relevant" ads to catch your primed attention. (Not surprisingly, the computer-based process can yield some hilarious or puzzling results. Read an article on "in vitro fertilization" and you might see an ad on the edge of the screen for "Egg Salad Recipes" or "Search for fertilizations on eBay.") Newspaper sites fill their pages with "flash" ads, animated messages embedded in articles precisely so they can catch the readers' eyes with a provocative bit of motion and color.

However, while these obvious attempts to catch their attention should cause us some worry, children face a more insidious threat from corporate media in the form of the many and varied corporate tie-ins with children's movies and TV shows. These days, they don't just watch TV, an activity we used to decry just for itself. Now the shows all have their own corporate sponsors and websites, where kids go to "vote" on characters and plots, play games tied to products, compete for corporate trinkets, and buy, oh most of all, to buy corporate "gear." Besides the obvious first-order effect of training children for unquestioning consumerism, this relentless focus on what we "need" will likely distract these kids from learning the skills needed to scrutinize local and global issues and evaluate advertising claims and news stories.

When I think about Korzybski's warning that "Those who rule the symbols, rule us," I usually apply it to the overt and direct control of symbols, such as when the newspaper presents a picture of broken bodies next to a headline about terrorism, or when a governor couches an argument about immigration in terms of securing our American way of life. To me, these represent overt attempts to manipulate the reactions of listeners.

Now I realize that the warning includes this kind of indirect manipulation of a future crowd of listeners and viewers by the early indoctrination of beliefs and opinions. Why wait until your audience has grown up, when it will take real effort to craft your message to affect public opinion? Why not just build a ready-made audience of receptive consumers ahead of time?

These encroaching technologies and advertising programs can easily threaten to undermine the efforts of parents who prefer to build not consumers but critical thinkers. To defend against this growing tide, some schools have attempted to disconnect the corporate advertising "gifts," with only limited success. Sponsors accuse such school districts of "crippling" their children by limiting their ability to "compete" in their inevitably corporate future.

Given that these assaults will not likely go away any time soon, parents can use the simple techniques of general semantics to help their kids develop a healthy skepticism and become more "advertiser-proof." To counter the daily barrage of advertising, parents can read with their children from alternative news sources to show them that no one source of information says "all" about anything. Parents can model resistance to advertising in their own daily choices, and help children examine the available information about products to assess the accuracy of the ads they have seen. Children who regularly hear their parents ask "what do you mean?" and "how do you know?" will come to apply those tactics to the barrage of messages they must endure.

We all have a stake in seeing that children have the tools they need to counter these potential symbol-rulers. This trend should worry us not only because these children will eventually grow up and continue the cycle, but because each succeeding generation brought up this way will have fewer and fewer skills for independent evaluation and thought. If kids have fallen into line as good little consumers by the age of three or four, what kind of parents will they one day become? What kind of corporate leaders? What kind of mayors, senators, or presidents?

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

NOTES

1. http://www.ericdigests.org/1996-3/advertising.htm

2. http://BusRadio.net