School Commercialism: From Democratic Ideal to Market Commodity / Edition 1

by Alex Molnar

Overview

Pizza Hut's Book It! program rewards students with pizza for meeting their reading goals. Toys R Us paid a Kansas school five dollars for each student who took its toy survey. Cisco Systems donated internet access to a California elementary school, asking in return for the school choir to sing the company's praises while wearing Cisco t-shirts.
Kids today face a barrage of corporate messages in the classroom. In School Commercialism , education expert Alex Molnar traces marketing in American schools over the last twenty-five years, raising serious questions about the role of private corporations in public education. Since the 1990s, Molnar argues, commercial activities have shaped the structure of the school day, influenced the curriculum, and determined whether children have access to computers and other technologies. He argues convincingly against advertisers' assertion that their contributions are a win-win proposition for cash-strapped schools and image-conscious companies.
From the marketing of unhealthy foods to privatizing reforms such as the Edison Schools and Knowledge Universe, School Commercialism tracks trends that are more pervasive than many parents realize and shows how we might recapture schools to better serve the public interest.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780415951326
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	06/23/2005
Series:	Positions: Education, Politics, and Culture
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	5.44(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Alex Molnar is the founder of the Commercialism in Education Research Unit, the only research unit in the world dedicated exclusively to school commercialism. An expert on market-oriented school reforms such as private school vouchers, for-profit schools, and charter schools, he is author of four books and professor and director of the Education Policy Studies Laboratory at Arizona State University.

Table of Contents

Series Editor's Introduction1. Every Child a Consumer2. The Sky's the Limit: Trends in Schoolhouse Marketing since 19903. Let Them Eat Hamburgers: Using Schools to Promote Illness4. Controlling the Masses or Liberating Them? Edward Bernays and John Dewey Considered5. Whittle or Virtually Nothing: The Emergence of Edison Schools and Knowledge Universe6. Futures Trading: Buying and Selling Education in the Global Marketplace

What People are Saying About This

Michael W. Apple

"Alex Molnar has been an acknowledged leader in helping us all understand what the dangers are in the rampant commercialization in schools today. School Commercialism demonstrates why his voice is listened to. It is a clear and powerful statement about who the winners and losers are in our seemingly never-ending willingness to commodify all of school life."
—John Bascom Professor of Education at the University of Wisconsin, Madison

Paul Shaker

"No one writes on school commercialism at the level of Alex Molnar. His data are global in scope, historical in sweep, and fully grounded in the leading theorists of the past and present. Molnar expertly details today's relentless attack on the guiding ideals of our public schools and their ongoing replacement by the amoral logic of the corporate marketplace. "
—Dean of Education at Simon Fraser University of British Columbia.

Editorial Reviews

"Molnar’s book is extremely well documented. With help of multiple and sometimes stupefying examples, he examines the various types of commercial ‘exploitation’ of children in schools."

"Alex Molnar develops a merciless and systematic critique of these commercial practices, particularly those linked with the drink and food business to which he dedicates a special chapter (‘Eat, drink and be diabetic’). He shows that the financial benefit for schools if often far from what was expected. He denounces, with many concrete examples, the dangers that those practices imply for the integrity of education administrators."

"In his superb fourth chapter of School Commercialism, he operates a thorough and interesting comparison between the ideas of Edward Bernays , the founder o f the concept of ‘public relations’ and modern marketing, and the views of John Dewey, one of the greatest American progressive pedagogues." — Nico Hirtt, in European Educational Research Journal

From the Publisher