George Will: Keep commerce out of the classroom

[Gary Ruskin]

Commercial Alert			May 6, 2001

Following is a column by George Will in today's Washington Post.

http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A47316-2001May5.html


'Consumer Cadets' 
by George F. Will

Children, according to one ebullient marketer, are "born to be
consumers," they are "consumer cadets" in whom "the consumer embryo
begins to develop in the first year of existence." Excited by evidence
that children as young as 12 months are capable of "brand associations,"
and guided by the principle of KGOY (kids getting older younger),
marketers study "marketing practices that drive loyalty in the preschool
market" and "the desires of toddler-age consumers."

A marketer says, "When it comes to targeting kid consumers, we at
General Mills follow the Procter & Gamble model of 'cradle to grave.' .
. . We believe in getting them early and having them for life." Another
marketer advises, "Advertising at its best is making people feel that
without their product, you're a loser. Kids are very sensitive to that."
Sophisticated behavioral studies (e.g., "The Nag Factor," "The Art of
Fine Whining") suggest how to turn children into controllers of parents.

Lifetime Learning Systems, an innocuously named company specializing in
partnerships between businesses and schools, says: "School is . . . the
ideal time to influence attitudes." At school, children are comfortable
and susceptible to promptings. Hence Channel One, a commercial satellite
network serving, if that is the mot juste, 12,000 schools.

Channel One tells advertisers that it is "viewed by more teens than any
other television program." It provides 10 minutes of news (broadly
defined, to include weather, sports, natural disasters, features and
promotions for Channel One) and two minutes of advertising. Children in
schools with Channel One spend time equivalent to a full instructional
week watching it.

Children ages 4 to 12 spent almost $27 billion at their own discretion
in 1998, and they are thought to have directly influenced $187 billion
in parental purchases and to have indirectly influenced another $300
billion worth. Teenagers spent $100 billion and influenced the spending
of another $50 billion, so we should perhaps be grateful that
advertisers spend "only" $5 billion on advertising aimed at children.

But gratitude did not motivate the authors of "Watch Out for Children: A
Mothers' Statement to Advertisers," from which the statements and
statistics above are culled. It is published by the Motherhood Project
of the Institute for American Values, which is the source of excellent
monographs about "the renewal of marriage and family life and sources of
competence, character and citizenship."

The report suggests a dreamy "code for advertisers" (e.g., no
advertising that promotes "an ethic of selfishness") and some bromides
about attentive parenting. However, the report's considerable value is
in sensitizing readers to how desensitized the country has become about
encroachments of commerce where it does not belong -- in schools,
especially.

At the birth of this commercial Republic, in which the perennial problem
of turbulent passions was to be solved by subsuming them in enterprise,
John Adams, hardly a complacent optimist, expressed a cheerful
expectation of stately long-range progress: "I must study politics and
war, that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy,
geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce
and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study
painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and
porcelain." Two centuries later, such a sense of the steady elevation of
the American mind seems too serene, in part because of the pull -- the
relentlessly downward pull -- of popular culture, including the forces
of commerce.

In 1976, this Republic's bicentennial, Daniel Bell, a sociologist at
Harvard, the university that helped furnish Adams's capacious mind,
warned about "the cultural contradictions of capitalism." Capitalism, he
said, depends on certain stern virtues, such as asceticism, thrift,
industriousness, self-denial, deferral of gratification. But capitalism
produces social surpluses, which beget luxury, which begets materialism,
self-indulgence, acquisitiveness, instant gratification.

"It is striking," Bell wrote 20 years later, "that in every major city
in the world, from New York to Helsinki to Tokyo, every large department
store one enters displays cosmetics and fragrances spread across its
ground floor." Striking, that is, because "the tension between
asceticism and acquisitiveness" has been resolved in favor of the
latter. Even more striking evidence of the self-corruption of capitalist
culture is this: Once charged with countering the self-centeredness and
egotism that de Tocqueville called democracy's temptation, schools are
becoming case studies in the commodification of everything.

It is fortunate, sort of, that advertising is so ubiquitous: It is akin
to wallpaper, even audible wallpaper -- always there, but unnoticed.
However, advertising in schools subverts a lesson children should learn
there: that commerce, although valuable, is subordinate to other values.
Which is why schools should be commerce-free zones.

<----column ends here----->

For more information about how to rid the schools of corporate
advertisers like Channel One, see Commercial Alert's website at
<http://www.commercialalert.org>.

Ralph Nader founded Commercial Alert in 1998 to keep the commercial
culture within its proper sphere, and to prevent it from exploiting
children and subverting the higher values of family, community,
environmental integrity and democracy. 

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-- 
Gary Ruskin | gary@essential.org
Commercial Alert | Congressional Accountability Project
http://www.commercialalert.org | http://www.congressproject.org
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