Tag Archives: policy

When “the Market” runs the school

advertising, media literacy, politics of education, ,

Over the years, there have been lots of examples of corporate interests making their way into classrooms. Teachers are well familiar with the posters oh so kindly donated by companies which plug their products in one way or another, or even go so far as to steer the politics of teaching.

Is this just the way schools get materials today, since we can’t seem to find the resources to fund our schools fully? Should we see this as schools getting the job done by whatever means necessary, or is it more nefarious than that? Even though, in states like Maine, soda and candy are being banned along with the advertising for them, there are more than enough loopholes to drive a delivery truck through. At the school where I taught, when the ban went through, they changed the sign at the athletic fields from a Pepsi logo to a different Pepsi brand. Inside, the soda machines were stocked with other Pepsi brands, from water to juices, but it is still a Pepsi brand on the side of the machine. Why does the school keep them at all? Because the distributor pays the school a portion of the profits from the machines.

There are also lots of other examples of corporate interests trying to create ‘brand loyalty’ at a young age and pushing their products. There are even companies set up to market to kids in schools. What, then, is needed, is media literacy and getting kids thinking about ways to understand what they see around them and the motives behind that, especially as online marketing to kids gets more and more sophisticated.

But what if the corporate interests in the classroom are not so obvious as that Proctor and Gamble poster trumpeting the glories of their products? In the world of pharmaceuticals, many drug companies are paying universities for research on their drugs. This, in and of itself, is fine, but what happens when they pay the university to create a course based on their products? Several years ago, the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Medicine and Public Health started coursework around the benefits of hormone therapy, even though a clinical trial had actually been halted five years early because of the dangers of this therapy. For six years, doctors took this online course that was sponsored by, you guessed it, Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, the makers of the hormone drugs! Now that someone asked questions about it, they’ve halted the course, but how many students (in this case doctors who will then go treat patients based on this information) were given information that is not only wrong, but potentially deadly to women who undergo this therapy?

There are plenty of subtexts here about how our culture values women (this sort of thing never seems to happen in clinical trials of men, or white people, does it….), but we need to find more effective ways to be sure that education is a completely free-standing institution that presents lessons based on the best information available, no matter if it’s 2nd grade or medical school.

questions or answers?

politics of education,

Questions are the most brilliant way to learn things. It has been said that when students ask more questions than the teacher, that is the definition of success in a classroom. I myself have too many questions and the older I get, the more experiences I gather, the more wisdom I accrue, the more questions I have. I think this is a good thing, and I certainly hope I can transmit it to students.

However, too much of our educational system is about answers. In the form of a number. And a class rank. We do such a disservice to students to lock them into numerical measures of success and tons of science indicates that what and how well students learn decreases when they are graded, but still the system persists.

What is the actual point of formalized education, then? If it is for students actually to learn, we would do whatever supports that goal, but unfortunately it is not. What is the actual goal? I don’t know exactly, but it seems to have to do with controlling the population. Don’t forget that the one of the reasons the original public schools in this country were conceived and created was to turn young people into better workers (ergo things like factory bells between classes).

If we actually revamped this system to create young people who can think for themselves and question critically, would that threaten the status quo? Would it threaten those in power? Is that why we don’t do that? Is that why standardized tests continue to prevail, even in the face of so much research showing they don’t actually measure learning?

Does that darn teevee reflect our culture?

politics of education, teaching cultural competencies, ,

The January issue of Harper’s Magazine, which has been out several weeks, has just made it to the top of my magazine pile. The delightful Harper’s Index, which routinely shows about 40 factoids that reflect in various ways our current culture, is, for this issue nearly trebled in size. (Harper’s is worth the subscription for the Index alone, fwiw.)

In this Index, two statistics jumped out at me about the “number of incidents of torture on prime-time network TV shows”:

From 1995 to 2002: 110

From 2002 to 2007: 897

These are the Bush Doctrine formative years, with Donald Rumsfeld at the Department of Defense (01-06) (and Paul Wolfowitz as his Deputy (01-05)), and the rise of Extraordinary Rendition and Guantanamo detainees and U.S. use of torture and U.S. citizens willing to give up rights to perceive some semblance of safety.

Of course, then, US policy affects how we treat each other as human beings.

Not necessarily because people are imitating what they see on TV, but because people come to feel that violence is a permissible response, because people come to feel that they cannot and should not trust each other, because people come to feel that we are not all working for the collective good, but for the good of ‘our people’. But how does one define ‘our people’? US citizens? Republicans? Men? White people?

So then: does TV cause us to be violent, or is it part of that big cultural biofeedback loop where US policy affects cultural views which affect TV portrayals which affect cultural views which affect US policy?

We must be mindful of these forces when we teach civics and history, as well as how we talk about interpersonal relationships. Our politicians are certainly aware of how to harness these forces to change public perception as a fore-runner to changing policy. But it is dangerous to teach students that policy changes happen in a vacuum, just as it is dangerous to allow students to assume that just because they see it on TV, that is how people interact with each other. One of the most important things we can teach students is critical thinking and the ability to question information and form their own opinions, right along with being respectful of others and trying to be aware of what others’ experiences are.