If you strip away the rosy language of “school-business partnership,” “win-win situation,” “giving back to the community,” and the like, what you see when you look at corporate marketing activities in the schools is example after example of the exploitation of children for financial gain. Over the long run the financial benefit marketing in schools delivers to corporations rests on the ability of advertising to “brand” students and thereby help insure that they will be customers for life. This process of “branding” involves inculcating the value of consumption as the primary mechanism for achieving happiness, demonstrating success, and finding fulfillment. Along the way, “branding” children – just like branding cattle – inflicts pain. Yet school districts, desperate for funding sources, often eagerly welcome marketers and seem not to recognize the threats that marketing brings to children’s well-being and to the integrity of the education they receive. Given that all ads in school pose some threat to children, it is past time for considering whether marketing activities belong in school. Schools should be ad-free zones.

Product Description: The Corporate Assault on Youth examines childhood as a social construction increasingly influenced by corporations and commercialism. Through case studies, critical analysis, and historical/philosophical research, the essays collected here expose the degree to which children are unwitting targets of marketing...read more

Product Description: First Published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Product Description: Since 1965 an increasing preoccupation with money has resulted in the inversion of its role in higher education, from a practical means to an end that crowds out all others. No longer do students and parents choose the best education that "money can buy...read more

Product Description: This book challenges readers to consider the consequences of commercialism and business influences on and in schools. Critical essays examine the central theme of commercialism via a unique multiplicity of real-world examples. Topics include: *privatization of school food services;*oil company ads that act as educational policy statements;*a parent's view of his child's experiences in a school that encourages school-business partnerships;*commercialization and school administration; *teacher union involvement in the school-business partnership craze currently sweeping the nation;*links between education policy and the military-industrial complex;*commercialism in higher education, including marketing to high school students, intellectual property rights of professors and students, and the bind in which professional proprietary schools find themselves; and*the influence of conservative think tanks on information citizens receive, especially concerning educational issues and policy...read more

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Product Description: The commercialization of public education is upon us. With much fanfare and plenty of controversy, plans to cash in on our public schools are popping up all over the country. Educator and award-winning commentator Alex Molnar has written the first book to both document the commercial invasion of public education and explain its alarming consequences...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: First Published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company. (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: What happens when kids are held captive to an endless stream of MTV-like television commercials? Armed with a tape recorder, Roy F. Fox, a language and literacy researcher, spent two years interviewing over 200 students in rural Missouri schools...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)