Schoolchildren as captive audience: Marketers went there long before Obama
A quick memo to parents concerned that their children will be a captive audience to President Obama’s speech to school children today: I understand your worries.
My full-time job is in public education, so I’ve heard from lots of folks concerned about what their children might hear.
In between calls from parents last week, I also found out that a shoe buyer from Minneapolis’ Target Corporation was hoping to make appointments to stop by some Minneapolis schools to check out what the kids are wearing on their feet.
Talk about captive. Don’t parents want to know if their children are going to be used as research subjects?
But such is nature of public schools. Some children will be a captive audience today; most children are a captive audience every day. Corporate capitalists have long had free access to children in schools, teaching them to be loyal to brands without question. That owning more will make you successful and happy. And that good Americans are good consumers.
How? Take the shoe-selling Target brand and its famous red logo. Target awards grants to help schools pay for field trip transportation. But, as part of the deal, kids return from their trips carrying a black Target-logoed backback, essentially making every one of them a walking ad.
Of course it’s not just the Target Corporation. Junior Achievement is allowed free access to your kids, as are companies like Bus Radio (to and from school), PepsiCo (in the lunchroom), Procter and Gamble (in health class), McDonald’s (on report cards), Piper Jaffray (in high school), and Scholastic (everywhere), among many others.
So, parents, I understand your concerns. Sanctioned messages that go against my values appear in my children’s classrooms all the time.
Thankfully, it looks like the President’s speech will be pretty innocuous.
My advice? After the speech, which they will probably hear or read at some point, talk to them. Ask them what they heard. Tell them what you think about what President Obama said. Point out any differences in the values you hold for your family and the message that they heard.
Because after all, as I’ve been told many times, you can’t shield your child from the evils of the outside world.
But you can talk to your kids. At least that’s what I do.
September 8th, 2009 at 6:34 pm
McDonalds comparison to Junior Achievement is very accurate: “Numbers served is the bottom line.”
September 8th, 2009 at 8:28 pm
Gee, I don’t know, Lisa. I appreciate your even-handed, sincere message. Conversing with your kids about President Obama’s speech instead of just railing against it, unheard or unread, is, well, fair and balanced.
Still, call me a pinko, but I think equating the far-right’s a priori fears of what the president would say with your family’s concerns about corporate America’s largely ignored footprint on children legitimizes the right’s tactics, paranoia, irrationality, and hatred of not just Obama and his policies but his office.
This is the Michelle Bachman wing of the Republican Party. Was there really anything worthy of “debate” here, any more worthy than a debate about whether a little boy should be treated for cancer or left alone to die, whether being gay is a curable mental illness, and whether the earth is 5,000 years old?
Funny. Ha ha. By th’ way: I heard one conservative parent complain his kid would be ostracized if the rest of the class watched the president’s speech and he pulled his kid out of class. Funny. Ha ha. Remember that, Bubba, the next time you seek to mandate school prayer.
September 9th, 2009 at 3:54 pm
I can certainly see the link between corporate and political proselytizing, but I’m not convinced that equating far right paranoia with concern over corporate advertizing means legitimizing the right’s uninformed arguments. It’s a matter of proportion: the influence that corporate advertizing has on school kids day in and day out dwarfs the influence of one speech by the president.
In fact, the knee-jerk antagonism to Obama’s innocuous stay-in-school-study-hard message seems to say that the “Bachman Wing” is as indoctrinated by media as they’re allowing their kids to be. Much of the “fearless leader,” “cult of personality” rhetoric originated with talk radio and the Republican Party itself.