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Captive Audience

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Member Reviews

This is a book that is sometimes interesting and sometimes boring. It’s interesting to learn a bit about what went on in Canada’s schools in terms of the exploitation of students through corporate advertising. But I felt that the arguments of proponents & opponents for/against advertising in schools were repetitive and mentioned in multiple chapters with the same messages. It’s infuriating that the general public refuses to properly fund and support education in many countries - Canada and US included - and therefore leave openings for corporations to manipulate the minds of children with in school advertising. I personally don’t remember much blatant advertising in my schools, thankfully (besides Scholastic book fairs, Pizza Hut reading program, Box Tops, school bus ads, and yearbook ads - but I didn’t feel the need to buy their products due to the ads). I like that this book sheds light on the issues here even though it made my blood boil (due to the information on events that happened - not the author’s writing). I just think that some of the quotes from supporters and opponents felt excessive.

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This was an interesting read on the pull advertisers have had in schools - particularly in Canada. I appreciated the historical case studies, the analysis of both sides of the debate and the opinions of students and educators clearly recorded.

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At the start of the 20th century, companies began to take advantage of poor schools. Beyond the classroom and the teacher, there was often literally nothing. There were no books, teaching aids, visuals, or materials for projects. So companies began to offer them – branded of course. Parents objected, commissioners objected, even some teachers saw through the Trojan Horse, but companies were filling a need. Naturally, it escalated from there.

Catherine Gidney’s Captive Audience is the history of this vast supposed giveaway, meant purposely not to enhance education but to imprint brands and create lifelong customers with fond memories of childhood.

The recitation of products (maps, kits, books, samples) and services (tours, penny bank accounts, citizenship classes at the store, banks of food dispensers) is endless. It actually became an industry. By 2000, Gidney says, school boards were hiring fulltimers to manage the corporate-school partnerships. Private sector brokers popped up to place corporate largesse in public schools. It became so perverse that schools began looking at their children as customers, and wanting a goodly share of wallet from them. They sold junk food in cafeterias and machines and banned fast food franchises from around the perimeter of the premises. So they could have it all to themselves.

Meanwhile, back on the equipment front, the most famous invasion of schools was Apple’s massive, continent-wide installation of its brand of computers in schools. It was proudly announced and proclaimed; Apple was locking in the next generation of its customers. It gave the computers away – but not enough to fill the computer lab. But not to worry. There were massive discounts if the school wanted to do the rest of the job right.

Others saw the potential in a video-crazed generation, and created made-for-school videos transmitted daily via satellite. With a couple of minutes of commercials, of course. The captive audience had no choice but to watch. Teachers noted that the kids quoted the commercials and sang the jingles of the commercials, but not the stories, which they charitably claimed “sucked”. Some challenged the legality of selling students’ time in exchange for television and communications equipment, which was the attraction to the schools. Certainly not the educational value.

The book is a gathered history of such shenanigans across Canada, with the occasional dip into the USA. Gidney is fair and neutral about it all. There is nothing like the sledgehammer a Marion Nestle takes to this topic. As such, the book is rather flat, without peaks and valleys. It is an overview of what has been tried, how it was fought, and how “innovative” it gets.

The province of Quebec wins hands down in preventing corporate involvement. It has taken away the rights of principals and ensured schools are for learning without corporate branding. Quebec has the lowest consumption of sodas and junk food by kids. There might be a correlation there somewhere.

As schools try everything they can get away with to raise money to provide educations and learning environments, the one obvious solution goes completely unmentioned. Corporations should be taxed to pay their fair share of the cost raising new customers and employees. If they have so much money sloshing around that they can afford five and six figure grants to elementary schools, while taxpayers pay through nose and still have inadequate schools, an adjustment should be made. There is no excuse for governments’ constantly cutting back school funds. They are impoverishing public schools and forcing them to do deals with the corporate aggressors. The world is not better when the library, the computer lab and the ball field sell naming rights to junk food hawkers.

David Wineberg

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