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Students for Sale March 7, 2007
As reported by Mark Segraves of WTOP, Mayor Adrian Fenty and Council Chair Vincent Gray want to sell corporate naming rights to parts of DC public schools. Fenty said: "I think it's a good thing. I think there should be public-private partnerships in schools. I don't think the government should just try and do everything themselves."
This is dirty money and we can not allow Fenty and Gray to sell the schools out to corporate hucksters. Public education should be commercial-free. Companies want to advertise to school children because it is very lucrative. It is lucrative because children spend a lot of time at school, they are a captive audience, and advertisers use the authority of the school as a marketing tool. School is a good place for companies to brand children. Companies have even been known to use high schools to gather market research from teenagers, and pitch products to them, without parental consent.
Commercial advertising in schools has gone too far and is getting more intrusive, and should be scaled back. School-associated names, are traditionally reserved for heroes as a link between schools and civic virtue. Corporate naming rights would help replace this virtue with a commercialized vision where everything is for sale. Every educational material and school book, every wall poster, vending machine, TV monitor and administrative announcement, every library, cafeteria, auditorium and bus, every athletic field, gymnasium, scoreboard and championship game, and even the name of every school is a potential occasion for an advertisement.
The purpose of advertising is antithetical to the purpose of education. It promotes the wrong values to children and corrupts the integrity of public education. Children should not be for sale.
Shawn McCarthy |
