The word corporate Republicans like most is "conservative." They constantly use it as a fig leaf to hide their true ideology -- the supremacy of commercialism over values more spiritual, nurturing, moral, and truly conservative. In no area does marketing madness run roughshod more than in its insidious grip on childhood and children's traditional sanctuaries. In no area is the distinction between avaricious corporatism and authentic conservatism clearer. For no other age group is it more important for true conservatives to declare their independence and take a stand against these modern day Mammons. No other trend is more subversive of parental authority, more penetrating at an early age of the mind and body of the child, and more deliberative in strategic planning for expanding the violent, addictive and pornographic world of the child.
A New Byrd School
Let's look at an inner city fifth-grade class to provide a contrast to these forces .of greed and profit, and to illuminate the hypocrisy 'of Bush's "leave no child behind" policies also embedded within the testing industry. Recently, after speaking to an assembly of students at Columbia University in Chicago, a young fifth-grade teacher, Brian Schultz, gave me a folder describing "Project Citizen: A New Byrd School." In early December 2003, Schultz asked the 16 African American students in his class to select a project. They chose to study their Robert E. Byrd Academy School, documenting its decrepit condition and launching an initiative for a new school. Since Schultz has these pupils the entire day, the project became the epicenter for teaching the various core subjects like math, data analysis, politics, economics, reading, and writing. Attendance is at a high for the school -- 98 percent. Motivation is intense. Discipline problems have almost disappeared. They developed the Action Plan that included, in their words, "researching, petitioning, surveying, writing, photographing, and interviewing people we think can help us fix the policy." Ranging in age from ten to twelve, and living in the low-income Cabrini Green housing projects, the students focused on five major conditions, starting with filthy restrooms (often without soap, paper towels, or garbage cans). "We do not have doors on the stalls and have no privacy. The sinks have bugs in them and water is everywhere. As an example of how bad they are, sinks move and water leaks on the floor. The hot water faucets have cold water."
Next was temperature in the classrooms. "The heat is not turned on. It is really cold in the classrooms," the students report, adding that they have to put their coats on "during class because it is so cold. They cannot fix it because the pipes are broken. It is uncomfortable and hard to learn. Our hands are cold and we cannot write. This needs to be changed!"
Next came the windows cracked with bullet holes, held together by tape. "We cannot see through the windows and it is dark in the classrooms," wrote the children, "We can hardly see what we are doing because it is so dark. This is not a good place to learn."
There is no lunchroom; children eat in a hallway, which is distracting to ongoing classrooms. The school has no gym, no auditorium or stage. The school borrows a gym across a busy street. In their letter to dozens of people, the students plead: "We would like to invite you to see our school for yourself We do not think that you would let your kids come to a school that is falling apart." Vice-President Richard Cheney responded to the children in a letter supporting a new elementary school. Mr. Cheney, vigorous supporter of the wasteful defense budget, did not mention any federal financial support. But the students are not stopping at letters to politicians; they are organizing everyone they can envision helping, including fifth graders from other more fortunate schools and a wide array of persons with various occupations and positions. They circulated a petition and obtained more than 900 signatures. Children are learning citizen skills, maturity, self- reliance, seriousness, dedication, and ingenuity in. this classroom and from their most immediate surroundings -- their school.
For five months, this project has become the entire day's curriculum, Schultz told me. He has the full approval of his principal, and the other teachers are supportive. He can do this because his students meet the conventional standards for their grade without having to go through the rote memorization process that youngsters find so tedious. All this decay and the resurgence of demand for decent facilities takes place in Chicago, whose motto is "The City that Works"; Chicago, a metropolis gleaming with tax-subsidized office buildings, undertaxed business executives and companies, gallerias and cultural institutions. Its schools and clinics for low-income people• are not given comparable attention. This neglected school and its children should shame and inspire us at the same time. Each school day the minds of these children expand and they learn to think, not vacuously believe. Tax dollars are short for teaching needs and facilities, but available for bureaucratic layers that don't educate Our young. Our country has creative teachers like Schultz and more will come forward if learning impulses and the innate curiosity of youngsters are accorded priority. (The reflections of Barbara A. Lewis, a fifth-grade teacher in a Salt Lake City school, in her book Kids and Social Action also shows what can be done effectively and inexpensively.)
There is underinvestment in many public school systems. However, regular tax rebellions by residents against school bond issues or tax increases occur because they hear horror stories about what is going wrong and they resent bearing the financial burden. Public schools are part of civil society. They will rise or fall in correlation with the participation of parents, together with boards of education, principals, and teachers who define their success not by fraudulent multiple-choice standardized test results, but by the multiple intelligences that are aroused, informed, and sharpened within the developing minds of their students.
The Corporate Barrage
There are no shortages of corporate investment dollars in direct marketing to those same youngsters. There is little spared in separating impressionable children from their parents so that they can be sold on deliberately seductive advertising and programs. "For the first time in human history, most children are born into homes where most of the stories do not come from the parents, schools, churches, communities, and in many places even from their native countries, but from a handful of conglomerates who have something to sell," wrote George Gerbner in the Prospectus for the Cultural Environment Movement.
The inability of young children to distinguish television programming from its advertising led, years ago, to Western European nations prohibiting the use of children in television ads. Now, in our country, ads and their characters often are so interspersed within the programs themselves that even adults can miss the distinction.
It is in the nature of commercialism to push the envelope, to know no boundaries or self- restraint. Nearly ten years ago, our researchers asked some marketers where they would set the limit in weekly hours for children's television programs -- twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, or sixty. They declined to answer. Instead, they said, whatever the market can attract is the guide. It is not up to them; it is up to the children and their parents. It is not the seducer but the seduced little ones who guilt-trip their often absent-at-work parents. When a creative ad person from Madison Avenue develops a children's ad, a "high nag factor" is considered a plus. Each year some $20 billion is directly spent by children twelve and younger, while around $200 billion is spent by the parents goaded by their "nagging" children.
The premeditation and planning that transformed .these companies into proficient electronic child molesters shock parents. The old days of occasional bubble gum, ice cream cones, and a Saturday afternoon movie at the Bijou theatre have been replaced by 24/7 entertainment and product placements and logos that pepper the brains of children two- ears-old on up. Assisted by applied and developmental psychologists, companies target every psyche, every child vulnerability, every sensual sensitivity, every peer group development these hucksters can contrive to foment or grasp and turn into dollars. To get a sense of their laser-like zealotry, a marketing report in 1994 was titled "Kids are not just kids! 0-2, 3-7, 8-12, 13-15, 16-19: Accurate Targeting Through Age Segmentation." In the same year, Bob Garfield in Advertising Age wrote a column headlined "Nintendo Aims to 'Be Heard' by Exploiting Kids' Distress." In the past ten years, the pace of commercializing childhood and schools has quickened, pushing youth into growing up •even more commercialized in their bodies and minds. Advocates of holistic medicine weighing the mind-body connection would not imagine the advanced Pavlovian states of conditioned responses coming out of these marketed to children.
There's a great deal of hypocrisy at work. To take just one example, Steven Spielberg admitted he would not let his eight-year-old watch Jurassic Park, but he did not complain that many children that age and younger were seeing his hit movie. In a similar vein, the same corporations whose executives pontificate about the need to upgrade standards in the schools are part of the marketing madness that undermines education.
A new coalition of parents and friends called the Center for a New American Dream is organizing public opinion and resistance. According to a poll commissioned by the Center, 70 percent of parents with children ages two to seventeen believe that marketing negatively affects kids' values and worldview, making them too materialistic and putting pressure on them to purchase things that are harmful to them. More telling, over half of the parents polled admitted to buying things for their children that they disapproved of, because the youngsters felt they needed the product in order to fit in with the crowd.
Why are parents losing the war over their children? It's partly a matter of resources, and the destructive use of those resources dictated by the perverse logic of the marketplace. Driven by billions of dollars in sales, profits, bonuses, and stock options, the men atop giant companies are in a race to the bottom with their competitors, ever expanding the range of filth and junk they peddle through ever more manipulative delivery systems. Parents cannot match the vast sums of capital, technology, and influential connections of these highly focused men and their battalions, and parents have other obligations to tend to -- working to make ends meet and dealing with the various stresses of workplace, household, and community. Unless they throw out their televisions, radios, VCRs and DVDs, and home-school their children, parents cannot insulate kids from the marketers' multilevel commercial assault.
In single-parent homes, the over-worked, over-stressed parent finds it impossible to shield her children. The situation is not much better in two-parent homes where both parents work full-time and can't adequately monitor their children's activities or exposure to commercial culture. Frequently, parents learn about such exposure only after the fact, when they see their children imitating behavior and language picked up from television, radio, and movies. With parents absent or too busy to inculcate values, children adopt values from the entertainment industry.
Granted, there are some fine commercial videos for children, along with some wholesome children's programming, mostly by the Public Broadcasting System. and a handful of educational channels. However, the Big Business, the Big Profits, the Big Promotions are those programs and products that target children at the lowest rungs of the sensuality ladder -- taste, texture, supersonic. scenes, sound, color, and an assortment of visceral stimuli requiring very little reflection or digestion from the mind, but instead instant reflexive response. It is almost impossible to count the change of pictures from an MTV video or advertisement per minute. The eyes of the viewer are pulled so quickly that the brain doesn't have a chance to digest and react. The brain surrenders.
The latest of several studies conclude that children age two to four who watch more television than the average child register higher rates of attention-deficit disorder by the time they are seven and in school. Overdosing on television or videos at a very young age shrinks attention spans, impedes socialization, and hinders development of vocabulary. All these effects, of course, produce in their wake further deleterious consequences for slower development and personality afflictions.
Nevertheless, direct and indirect sales to the kids' markets are booming, as are related conventions, seminars, consulting firms, and endless marketing studies and publications. Just what are these companies pushing? The fast-food companies persuade children to eat large portions of fatty and sugary food and desserts that will increase their weight and predispose them to diabetes, high blood pressure, and other diet-related ailments. Child obesity has doubled since 1980 and diabetes is surging also. The situation is so out of control that it has even alarmed Bush's Department of Health and Human Services. The U.S. Surgeon General has estimated that about 350,000 deaths a year can be attributed to obesity in adults. Trial attorneys are moving to file lawsuits charging fast-food chains with deceptive advertisements and labeling beamed directly at vulnerable children. They want the nutritional truth to be conveyed, not images and words connoting health and strength, whether by omission or commission.
The soft drink companies induce children to drink their sugary concoctions even for breakfast. Nutritionists warn that the decline in full fruit juice and milk consumption diminishes bone strength. Over the years, the tobacco and alcoholic industries have slyly and not so slyly been reaching youngsters. They know that the earlier kids can be hooked on these powerful drugs, the more likely addiction to or over-consumption of their brands will ensue. The illness and fatalities from such addictions are enormous. Yes, the addicted have a central responsibility, but the addictors going after young persons are malicious. Their thirst for profits seemingly blinds them to the tragedy of over 400,000 American deaths each year from tobacco-related disease -- and 100,000 fatalities from alcoholism.
Children's commercial television programming conveys the message that violence is a solution to life's problems, and pushes low-grade sensuality, from junk food and drink to pornography and addiction, as a way of life. Children stare at screens while munching on damaging, fatty foods. Violent video games are sadistic and ghoulish and the T-rated games for children thirteen and over find their way to younger children. Harvard University researchers reported in 2004 that the number of "deaths" per hour in eighty-one "T-rated" video games they analyzed averaged a hundred and twenty-two. Ninety-eight percent of the games contained intentional violence, with 42 percent showing blood, according to their tally. Sixty-nine percent rewarded the youngsters for killing characters or required them to do so. The technology of interactive mayhem is replacing the spectator role in ever more vicious and mutilating ways. Billions of dollars flow into company coffers every year.
Retired Lt. Colonel and West Point Professor Dave Grossman's book Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill relied on hundreds of scientifically designed studies linking video game violence and aggressive behavior. Before these videos, studies abounded linking television violence to violent behavior by some young viewers mimicking in real life what they saw in virtual reality.
Drug Pushers
Meanwhile, the drug companies are busy expanding their pediatric divisions and turning personality problems into newly characterized diseases that, viola, their products will treat. Some physicians call this barrage the "medicalization of childhood." Overmedication of children is not restricted to Ritalin and, the greatly expanded sales definition of attention- deficit disorder.
This field is literally exploding on youngsters, their frightened parents, and drug company promotion-saturated physicians. Consider the late arrival of real science confronting the deceptive corporate medical claims relating to the treatment of depressed children. Moving away from applying love and attention to these afflicted children, our society is driven to the drug (or drug abuse) solution. In early 2004, Australian researchers concluded, according to the New York Times, that "pediatricians and family physicians should not prescribe antidepressants for depressed children and adolescents because the drugs barely work and their side effects are often significant." The study, published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), zeroed in on three antidepressants, Prozac, Zoloft and Paxil, used on patients under age eighteen. While there is still more to be known, medical researchers point to increased incidences of suicidal thoughts and behavior associated with these drugs. The Food and Drug Administration, always cautiously averse to challenging the powerful drug industry, did issue a warning on March 22, 2004, that ten antidepressant drugs can lead to worse depression, mania, and violent activity, including suicide. The agency is reviewing more data.
There's no lack of certainty when it comes to overuse of antibiotics in our medical treatments and meat products. One result is more resistance by mutating organisms that cause life-threatening infections. Some of these bacteria are now resistant to all or all but one antibiotic on the market. The World Health Organization and outspoken pediatricians are increasingly fearful of returning to what they call a "pre-antibiotic era" in which fatalities would no longer be preventable. In 1998, the British House of Lords held extensive hearings on this accelerating problem of bacterial resistance. According to author John Humphreys, in his book The Great Food Gamble, the Lords' final report recognized a "vicious circle repeatedly witnessed during the last half of the century, in which the value of each new antibiotic has been progressively eroded by resistance, leading to the introduction of a new and usually more expensive agent, only for this in its turn to suffer the same fate." Tuberculosis, which takes over two million lives a year around the world, is now occurring in drug resistant strains, especially in the countries of the former Soviet Union.
Children, of course, are far more vulnerable to these drugs (and pesticides, herbicides, and many toxins for that matter). Yet, the overprescribing continues by uninformed, demanding parents, uncritical physicians, and a meat and poultry industry bent on routine therapeutic insertion of drugs into the daily meals of the animals that get into our stomachs. The incessant advertising and promotion of these drugs pours out of the frenzied marketing divisions of the large drug companies. The sheer profits render them oblivious to the medical literature. on their desks.
The overmedication, the legal drugging of our children, only gets worse by the year as many children march to the school nurse to pick up their pills. Shouldn't the schools be the sane, educational sanctuary for children and teenagers to learn good eating and good health habits? Not to the corporatists. Schools, public and private, are to them just another marketing opportunity. Their "free" materials have generated some parental opposition -- but not enough.
Consider the big business, Channel One, which has contracted with thousands of high schools to hijack twelve minutes at the beginning of the school day for MTV-paced news and two minutes of ads promoting junk food, soft drinks, underarm deodorants, sneakers, music CDs, and other such products. This amounts to awarding six full school days a year to the hucksters, paid for by taxpayers. The schools allow this because Channel One lets them use the television equipment that the company installs for its early morning access to public high school students for the rest of the day. As UNPLUG and Commercial Alert have repeatedly pointed out, this is a costly tradeoff Would these schools allow the nonprofit Urban League and the League of Women Voters to program twelve minutes of civic skills education, including stories about students improving their community by taking on injustice?
Now the rush is on, in Seattle and elsewhere, to conclude secret contracts between soft drink companies and entire public school districts and universities. Their aim is to obtain exclusive rights to sell the sugar, water, and formula to a captive student body. These contracts Usually provide that the company will make the decision about what other drinks will be allowed in the vending machines on school property. Company logos appear on school buses and the walls of the schools in Colorado Springs. Schools are even considering selling naming rights. Commercialization of big-time high school sports is also on the rise.
Just when you think you've heard it all, another outrage is reported. A few years ago, the lead industry tried to discredit and have fired Professor Herbert Needleman of the University of Pittsburgh, who did the groundbreaking scientific work on the deadly effects of lead-based paint and gasoline on little children. Over the past half century, millions of inner-city children have ingested this peeling paint. The lead has damaged their brains and other body organs. Whatever is being done to test and protect these children is due in no small part to Dr. Needleman's pioneering studies. Fortunately, his scientific colleagues came to his rescue, and he remains on the faculty.
Commercializing childhood seems to have no limits. Urging children directly to consume bad products and entertainment harmful to their physical and mental health and safety is bad enough, especially since it often leads to angry exchanges between parents and children. The companies are always on the prowl for ways to hook children; they just won't let childhood be. Who could have anticipated that when the gambling casinos in Las Vegas began marketing their hotels as "family entertainment," they would teach children how to gamble (though without money) in these comfortable surroundings? The companies prefer the term "gaming" to "gambling," for obvious reasons.
When a grade school teacher in Maryland held up a picture of George Washington and asked the children to identify him, a cluster of them said "he sells cars." Corporate hucksters have used former presidents, such as Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, along with Benjamin Franklin, as television commercial pitchmen for car dealers, furniture stores, carpet sellers, banks, and insurance companies. Teenagers have told reporters that "you are what you buy." The sense of the heroic for preteens is almost entirely drawn from celluloid celebrities such as the Ninja Turtles or the Power Rangers. Real history does not exist in their frame of reference, their aspirations, or their dialogue. Culture becomes commercial culture with children as spectators, not participants in community culture that nourishes family upbringing and togetherness.
In a 1996 survey on the Nickelodeon area of America Online, a majority of children said they trusted their computers more than their parents. Corporations are taking children away from their parents and into a commercial world that knows no time restraints, shows no concern for the child's development, and is under little or no regulation. Accordingly, companies figured out how to overcome or circumvent parental control over spending. First, they entice children to nag their parents. Second, they take advantage of the absence of parents who travel or work long hours outside the home. Third, they undermine the authority, dignity, and judgment of parents. in the eyes of their children, thereby inducing kids to purchase or demand items regard less of their parents' opinions.
Pushing Back
The parents and clergy members who sound the alarm about the surrender of self- sustaining human values to commercialism must wonder how our society can fight back. There are plenty of ways outlined in books, pamphlets, catalogues, and advisories to recover our cultural traditions and build on them for our children. First, however, we must become more aware of what these conscious corporate predations are doing to our children and will do in an evermore intrusive way if they are not rolled back. Parents must then become deeply receptive to ways they can recover control of their children from the grips of commercialism. Marketing Madness, a Survival guide for a consumer society (as mentioned earlier) by Michael. F. Jacobson and Laurie Ann Mazur is a book that all parents would benefit from reading.
A larger picture can provide the activating civic jolt. All this money -- the marketing energy, overwhelming advertising and promotion to sell, sell, sell so much violent, addictive, useless, harmful, tasteless, deceptive junk that happens to connect with the provoked sensualities of children or the consent of harried parents -- produces a quarter of a trillion dollars a year in sales and much more in unintended consequences. Children's attention spans and vocabularies shrink, and the necessities, needs, and legitimate nurturing of children go begging. Schools crumble, books and other educational materials are short on budgets, cutbacks in arts and physical education are announced, conditions in juvenile detention facilities deteriorate, foster care abuses are rampant, millions of children are without health insurance or proper nutrition, housing, or clothing. Well-to-do youngsters feel purposeless -- their parents grow afraid of what they might do to themselves.
What's going on here? Why have we lost so much control over our descendents, our future, our neglected, lonely, little loved ones? Where is our civic enterprise? Slogans by politicians will get us nowhere. Only deeds. Only determination by parents and other citizens. Cuts in taxes for the wealthy come at the same time as cuts in budgets for children's programs, as law professor Robert C. Fellmeth, head of the Children's Advocacy Center in San Diego, points out regularly. Fellmeth has brought together rich documentation of the brutish plight of children in the Golden State (it bears repeating) -- over 45 percent of them live in poverty or near poverty. The absence of mass indignation tells us something about public resignation in today's America.
I am reminded of what one of Canada's wisest social essayists, John Raulston Saul, wrote in his best-selling book The Unconscious Civilization:
The place to begin is with the more basic questions of need, advantage and viability.... Each way we look, the need is not for reforms but for a change in dynamics. ... One way of examining our dynamics and how they might be changed is to ask ourselves what it is that we reward and punish in our society. I think you would be surprised if you drew up your own lists to discover that most of what we reward works against the public good and most of what we discourage or even punish would work in its favour.
I have spoken from the beginning about our slippage into the unconscious and our susceptibility to imbalance. We could call this the unconsciousness of imbalance or unbalanced unconsciousness. They feed each other. But if a society insists upon rewarding primarily that which weakens it and punishing that which can strengthen it,. surely it is a clinically identifiable victim of both imbalance and the unconscious.
Yes, we need consciousness, balance, attention to the common good, the recovery of common sense, prudence, and reassertion of parental authority. We need to replace the false deity of corporatism that is bringing up Our children. But first our voices must be heard. For corporatism dominates the very public airwaves and cable channels that we the people own or license and are excluded from twenty-four hours a day. Shut out. People have the power to put their children first. Do We have the time, dedication, and horizons to defend and rescue Our children? It is assuredly a matter of perceived values and priorities.
We can stretch our familial imaginations away from the coarseness of corporatism. We can delve into the literature of small, human-scale, community and neighborhood self-reliance. As Andrew Kimbrell says, that means being more a creator than a consumer. He explains: "With the food I buy I'll create a different kind of earth, a different kind of farming system.... Instead of consuming music, I'll make music. Inc stead of consuming poetry, I'll write poetry." There are alternative economies evolving in local areas of Our country, using both old and new knowledge to commune with the local natural resource base to meet material needs in sustainable and renewable ways. The E. F. Schumacher Society ( www.smallisbeautiful.org ) provides a wealth of practical approaches. Children need to be given vistas other than television and computer screens. They need to be introduced to nature-their forgotten natural habitat. Gardening, hiking, swimming, field studies in the woods open their senses to the sounds of nature as respites from the technological and entertainment noises that saturate them day after day. Father Thomas Berry has written about raising a child in harmony with the grandeur of nature -- our commonwealth: "The star-filled sky, meadows in bloom, tumbling rivers, soaring raven songs -- all of these are needed to shape the spirit of the child who is capable of growing up to an emerging creativity with the commons."
We must strive to become good ancestors.
Commercial Alert ( www.commercialalert.org ).a fine citizen's organization, backs various measures to restore balance to our ultra-commercialized society. The organization, which I launched, recently announced a campaign for a worldwide ban on marketing of junk food to children 12 years of age and under. This sensible proposal, championed by director Gary Ruskin, would combat the rising global epidemic of childhood obesity -- and thus help save or enhance millions of young lives. Numerous health professionals and organizations have called on the World Health Organization to incorporate such a ban into its global anti- obesity initiative, or to enact the ban through international health regulations. (Such regulations are legally binding on countries unless they affirmatively opt out.)
Commercial Alert is also pushing a package of measures it calls a Parents' Bill of Rights to help combat the destructive commercial influences on children, promote wholesome values and products, and resist the epidemic of marketing-related diseases (including obesity, alcoholism, addictive gambling, and deadly smoking-related illnesses).
This Parents' Bill of Rights includes nine proposed pieces of legislation (a few of which have already been introduced in the Congress) for federal and/or state legislatures:
• Leave Children Alone Act, banning television advertising aimed at children under twelve years of age.
• Child Privacy Act, giving parents the right to control any commercial use of personal information concerning their children, and the right to know precisely how such information is used.
• Advertising to Children Accountability Act, requiring corporations to disclose who created each of their advertisements, and who did the market research for each ad directed at children under twelve years of age.
• Commercial-Free Schools Act, prohibiting corporations from using the schools and compulsory school laws to bypass parents and pitch their products to impressionable schoolchildren.
• Fairness Doctrine for Parents Act, applying the Fairness Doctrine to all advertising to children under twelve years of age, thereby providing parents and community with response time on broadcast television and radio for advertising to children.
• Product Placement Disclosure Act, requiring corporations to disclose, on packaging and at the outset, any and all product placements on television and videos, and in movies, video games, and books. This prevents advertisers from sneaking ads into media that parents assume to be ad-free.
• Child Harm Disclosure Act, creating a legal duty for corporations to publicly disclose all information suggesting that their product(s) could substantially harm the health of children.
• Children's Food Labeling Act, requiring fast food restaurant chains to label contents of food, and provide basic nutritional information about it.
• Children's Advertising Subsidy Revocation Act, eliminating federal subsidies, deductions, and preferences for advertising aimed at children under twelve years of age.
Our culture should actively teach children critical thinking and promote wholesome activities and learning experiences with family, neighbors, and teachers. Instead, concerned adults need to focus their energies on warding off the depraved commercial saturation of childhood. Still, the measures listed above would go a long way toward restoring parental control over child-raising, and countering the nefarious effects of rampant commercialization. But the significance of the work by Commercial Alert transcends the potential value of the proposed legislation it supports. The very existence of this and other citizen groups suggests that parents will not simply roll over and allow corporate America to subordinate the notion of a healthy childhood to the goal of mega-profits.
A new amalgam of both selling our children and selling out our children has provoked more and more parents and teachers to do anything but roll over. The Leave No Child Behind (LNCB) law bids to become the biggest "blowback" in the history of public education.
Ballyhooed through Congress by George W. Bush, his Republicans, and overly trusting Democrats, LNCB offered hope of greater accountability and higher educational standards.
Instead, it's spawned a miasma of bureaucracies, testing fanaticism, underfunded mandates, detonated expectations, massive evasions, rebellious state legislators, and a retreating Bush administration that remains resistant to the gathering storm of protest that is unifying more Americans than at any time since World War II.
At the core of the revolt are frequently administered standardized tests, which are a narrow, fraudulent measure of academic performance that distort the curriculum and other learning processes. We studied these tests' failures in our groundbreaking report, The Reign of ETS, by Allan Nairn in 1980. This federal regulatory tyranny, collapsing from its own freighted foolishness, comes from a numerically fascinated Republican administration that has ignored legions of sensible studies and innovative successes that show how to educate children so that they desire to learn themselves about the world around them. It is a super- irony that this octopus-like Washington regulation of local education comes in Republican garb, which puts the lie to traditional Republican ideology.
Commercialism is the lurking force that makes a business of replacing ideology with dreams of profits. For over a decade, the business of education has drooled over the prospect of taking over the $300 billion public education budget in America. The testing takeover is just one of several ways to set up the public schools for corporate management, consulting, contracting out, and eventual displacement with Edison-type commercial schools.
One of the fastest growing lines of commerce in the country is the test-making, test- preparing, and tutoring business. Who can afford them? Families with money. As author and educator Deborah Meier writes: "We use as our only measure of academic performance the one tool that most reliably reflects family assets: standardized, paper-and- pencil tests ... Meanwhile, pressure mounts to replace public schools with the private marketplace."
Down at the local school level, the idiotic complexions of LNCB are working their corrosive wills on teachers and students. Education anthropologist Dr. Penny Owen, whose success with demoralized elementary schoolchildren has excited teachers in Winsted, Connecticut, has this to say: "Testing children as young as third grade produces inaccurate results. I have seen students break down in tears, incapable of functioning when presented with yet another test. More significant than a child's anxiety level however is their own awareness that their brains develop at different times than other children, an awareness that adults do not seem to have no matter how much brain research has been done. Teachers call it the "Ah Bah" moment, the moment the light comes on and abstractions finally make sense to their students. Expecting all children to be at the same place at the same time defeats the children, their schools, and in the long run the country."
Children need our time. There is no quick fix, certainly not one that comes with a number. Or with a "For Sale" sign.