Sold Out: How Marketing in School Threatens Children's Well-Being and Undermines their Education

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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 childrens 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.

Author Bio

Alex Molnar is a Research Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he serves as Publications Director of the National Education Policy Center (NEPC) and Director of the Commercialism in Education Research Unit (CERU). His work has examined curriculum and instruction topics, market-based education reforms, and policy formation. In addition to numerous articles, his earlier books on commercialism in schools are Giving Kids the Business: The Commercialization of Americas Schools (2001) and Commercialism in education: From democratic ideal to market commodity (2005). Faith Boninger is a Research Associate at the University of Colorado Boulder, in the universitys National Education Policy Center (NEPC) and Commercialism in Education Research Unit (CERU). Her work focuses on commercialism in schools, to which she brings a background in social psychology (Ph.D., Ohio State University), particularly an interest in persuasion and communication processes.