Commercials in Classroom - Essay Example

Commercials in room In the present time, displays of commercials in the room have become a major thing to worry. As we all know school is the place where we go to learn. School plays a major role in shaping our life. It helps in developing our character, nurturing our potentials, and shows the right path for our future life. Therefore environment prevailing in a school should be appropriate; it should help in serving the above mentioned purposes in a perfect way. But nowadays the prevailing atmosphere in the school premises becomes a major thing of worry. There is no doubt that the atmosphere in the school premises has deteriorated to a large extent in recent times. Many factors are responsible for it. But for the present, the focus will be on one major factor, displaying of commercials in classroom. The School premises have become an important playground for the companies. To increase their customer base, companies marketing strategy makers have been innovating newer and newer ways. For many companies children and teenagers are being viewed as the vital customer base. They are inventing various ways to attract teenagers towards their product. Among the newly innovated ways, one of the important ones is using commercial in different parts of school premises to attract children’s and teenager’s attention towards their product. Earlier companies used to attract customer’s attention by giving advertisements of their products on T.V., radio, news Paper, magazines, billboards in the road sides etc. But now companies are making direct interaction with children and teenagers through schools. The present paper is concerned with a review of Mr. Michael Sandel’s essay on “Commercials in the classroom”. This paper actually seeks to analyze the demerits of using commercials in the classroom and then will discuss which kinds of advertisement ought to be removed from the classroom along with explaining the reasons for doing so. Commercials in classroom – a threat to pupil’s future: Classroom no longer remained the place of learning only. This holy place also has not been left untouched by corporate marketing strategy. Marketing personnel of the companies are now seeing a huge client base among the children and teenager. They, therefore, have become very much desperate to attract those customers to their products. They have invented new process of advertising for their products. Advertising on T.V, radio, news paper, etc does not ensure that these will be watched by the audiences they are targeting. If children and teenagers are the targeted audience, then it would be difficult to capture their glances to the advertised products. The reason is quite simple. Children and teenagers spent their most of the time either in schools or colleges and coaching classes. So the best way to grab the attention of this huge customer base is to adopt that advertising strategy that will use nothing but the school premises. The interesting thing is that schools have also given their nod to this strategy of the corporate without evaluating its merits and demerits. Invasion of school premises and displaying of commercials seem to be a very effective strategy for the corporate as it has obtained a large number of captive audiences who are forced to see these advertisements. As mentioned in Sandel’s essay, companies have taken the strategy of providing videos, posters and learning kits of their products to the schools. The main motive of this strategy is to make their brand names well-known and warmly accepted by the huge customer base of children and teenagers. The result is that teachers are getting flooded with the videos available free of cost, posters of the products as well as learning kits which are specially designed for sanitizing corporate image and making children well aware of the band names. Thus students are now learning nutritional contents of different foods not from their text book, but from materials supplied by the companies like Hershey or McDonald’s etc. apparently this seems to be very interesting. But it is very much alarming too. Because when children learn about the nutritional content and food value of food products like, chocolates, burger, pizza, etc from the curricular materials provided by the companies, they can only learn about the positive things about these food products, they get to know about its quality or taste, they get little knowledge regarding what kind of negative effects can these products can bring about after once they are consumed. This thing happens only because companies are completely biased towards showing the positive thing of their products only; they consciously avoid the displaying of the negative effects that their product can produce. In recent times, researches have found that high consumption of foods with high calories, like chocolate, ice-cream, burger, etc. is very much responsible in bringing different types of complexities in the body. But learning of nutritional content from curricular material supplied by the companies hardly makes children aware of the negative sides of the consumption of these products. The surprising thing is that the school authorities are also allowing these kinds of advertising strategies without giving a though on its pros and cons. However, it would not be completely right to say that all kind of advertisements that are displaying in the classroom should not be welcomed. There are of course certain commercials which seem to be beneficial for the children. For example Exxon has provided a video to a number of schools to make students aware of the effects of oil spill in Alaska. Along with it, there are some other commercials too which do not carry any bad effect with it, like the Monsanto video which shows the how bovine growth hormone helps in increasing milk production, or the environmental curriculum supplied by Procter and Gamble’s which teaches the merits of disposable diapers. These types of commercials help in increasing general knowledge as well as environmental awareness of the children. However, the thing of concern is that most of the aids that the companies show in the classroom have not been designed to enhance students general knowledge regarding current affairs, or environment or society etc. most of the commercials have been designed to increase the children’s awareness regarding the respective brands. It can easily be found that most of the corporate sponsored educational free gifts do not promote any ideological agendas; they are only concerned with popularizing the brand names among the children. For example, in recent past “the Campbell Soup Company offered a science kit that showed students how to prove that Campbell’s Prego spaghetti sauce is thicker than Ragu. General Mills distributed science kits containing free samples of its Gusher fruit snacks, with soft centers that “gush” when bitten.” (Sandel, p.2)So the question arise regarding what role these commercial play in educating the students. Another serious thing can be encountered while examining the marketing strategy of corporate in the school premises. It has been found that while some companies only seek to suggest brand names only into the curriculum, some other companies take a more direct way to grab children’s attention. They just buy advertisements in schools. For instance, as mentioned in Sandel’s essay a few years ago the Seattle School authority had faced a serious financial crisis, and to cope up with such budget crunch it voted to ask for corporate advertising. The school authority expected to raise around $1 million a year corporate sponsorships. Although such attempt by Seattle school board had to be suspended under fierce protests from parents and teachers. But this kind of marketing strategy still exists in a great way in many schools. Nowadays logos of different products scream for students’ attention from school buses to covers of text books. “ In Colorado Springs, advertisements for Mountain Dew adorn school Hallways, and ads for Burger King decorate the sides of school buses. A Massachusetts firm distributes free book covers hawking Nike, Gatorade and Calvin Klein to almost 25 million students nationwide. A Minnesota broadcasting company pipes music into school corridors and cafeterias in fifteen states, with twelve minutes of commercials every hour. Forty percent of the ad revenue goes to the schools”. (Sandel, p.2) While one is talking about commercialisation in schools, then how can one forget about the Channel one? Channel One brought a commercial revolution in U.S. classroom around a decade ago. It started its operation in 1990 in around 400 secondary schools. At present, Channel One offers twelve-minute television news in around 12000 schools in U.S. It was introduced by Whittle Communications. Channel One Provides each school “a television set for each classroom, two VCRs and a satellite link in exchange for an agreement to show the program everyday including the two minutes of commercials it contains”. (Sandel, p.2)This kind of examples only shows that gravity of the issue of commercialization of classrooms. Class rooms are supposed to be the room where pupils get to learn about a lot of things that will help them in shaping up their future in a proper way. But extensive marketing strategy of corporate has transformed the classroom into mere war zone of different companies where each company is putting their best effort in attracting children towards their product. Conclusion: All the above mentioned examples of how companies are using schools for increasing their customer base show how the character of classrooms has changed in recent times. This extensive commercialisation is only corrupting the schools’ atmosphere. It has been found that most of the curriculum materials supplied by the corporate are extensively ridded with bias, distortion and superficial fare. Consumer Union has conducted a study on these commercials, and found that most of the free gifts provided by the companies to students are extremely tilted the company’s own products. Channel one also conducted an independent study, and this study itself has revealed the fact that its twelve minute news program makes little contribution in enhancing student’s knowledge, it play little role in making students aware of current public affairs. It has been found that mere 20 percent of the whole news program covers current political, economic, and cultural affairs, and remaining 80 percent of time is devoted to advertising, sports, and natural disasters. This kind of commercialisation hugely undermines the purpose that the schools are supposed to serve. Advertising and education have completely two different objectives. Advertising aims at encouraging people in wanting something and fulfilling that desire at any accost, while education persuades people to “reflect on their desires, to restrain or to elevate them”. The principal purpose of schools is to make responsible citizens. Therefore, conscious steps have to be taken to responsibly serve the fundamental purpose of schools. Those commercials have to be banned that do not provide any good knowledge to students, and which are not helpful in enhancing pupils’ thinking capability and do not contribute in the process of making them responsible citizens who are aware of all what are happening around them and capable of critically analyze all these incidents. So the ads of burger or chocolate or Pepsi or coke or sauce etc. ought to be removed from public elementary schools, public junior high schools, and public high schools, and if Channel One does restructured its program, then it also ought to be banned. Reference Sandel, Michael J. Commercials in Classrooms. In Public Philosophy: Essays on Morality in Politics. London: Triliteral. 2006. Read More