Corporations in the Classroom?
Wednesday, June 20th, 2007By Mimi Rothschild
Children all over the United States and Canada are being bombarded in their own public schools by a slew of marketing messages from corporate America. Public school students can no longer walk down the hallway, ride the bus, or even open up their textbooks without being subjected to a message that essentially tells them that they need to buy something.
“Corporations in the Classroom” is a one-hour documentary that profiles the increasing covert influence that big business is exerting on public school children in America and Canada. Marketing to school age students is estimated to be a 2 billion dollar industry. The film raises questions about the lack of regulations that are in place that would protect our children from the aggressive corporate marketing campaigns that are often masquerading as classroom lessons.
The problem that I see with this new “curricula,” that is being perpetrated on our children, is not necessarily the idea that corporate sponsorships are inappropriate ways to fund education. Just like public television has brought millions of people excellent programming through corporate sponsorships and fundraising efforts, it is not inconceivable that appropriate advertising could be used to pay for quality education.
The problem is that it is being done in the public schools where the taxpayers are already paying for the education. If corporate sponsorships were to replace the taxpayer funded system, there may be a new level of accountability that would improve the school system.
As home schoolers who are forced to pay for our local schools even when we have rejected them as unworthy of our children, eliminating the taxpayer funded public schools would give home schooling families significantly more money to invest in their home school children’s education.
A new school system that was funded by private enterprises would mean that the quality of the schooling would rise because families would have choices in where they send their children. The fundamental principle of our free market system is that when people are free to create businesses that offer services or products then those businesses are forced to offer the highest quality product because of the competition they face from other businesses trying to do the same thing. That competition is what makes the price go down and helps increase the quality. In our public schools, there is virtually no competition except for the rich who can afford a five figure tuition. The illegal monopoly that our public schools enjoy over education is what makes it so poor. Eliminate the monopoly, allow enterprise to flourish the way it does in every other industry and that is one of the solutions to our failing public educational system.
View “Corporations in the Classroom” here.