Dear Mr. Harper

Printed 20 May 2006:

In support of the commercialization of schools, letter writer Jake Marks states that "it's commerce that generates this country's gross national product" (Commerce pays the bills, May 18).

This is an unjust simplification; human ingenuity and the dedication of workers are the fuels of commerce. Further, it is the role of our school system to develop these skills.

Advertising, by definition, is created to capture our attention. Multitask as we might, attention is a limited resource. While I applaud the idea of teaching our children about marketing, I don't think we need in-school commercialization to drive the point home.

There are already plenty of distractions we deal with growing up in the school system, lets not add advertising to the mix.

Written in reponse to:

In releasing a Canadian Teachers Federation survey that is supposedly not in favour of commercialization in Canadian public schools, Manitoba Teachers' Society president Brian Ardern has actually brought attention to what makes our society tick and why we have what we have in this resource-rich country of ours.

Bad or good (I'm not defending the execution of ads), advertising lubricates the wheels of commerce and it's commerce that generates all of this country's gross national product. And we all know that for every dollar earned, for every dollar paid out -- all of those dollars are taxed, and that money is used to pay for many things -- including school buildings, school supplies and teachers' salaries. Teachers should use the incidence of advertising and marketing in schools as a prime opportunity to teach children about how the free world works since these kids have to live and ultimately work in it. Ardern should take this opportunity to do something more meaningful and approach the Department of Education with an eye to creating a course on what advertising and marketing means to people and how kids can better understand it.

Jake Marks
(President of Jake Marks Advertising?)

The Manitoba Teacher's Society response:

We agree with letter-writer Jake Marks that children in our public schools should be much more informed about advertising. The sad fact is that despite our best efforts in coaching them on media literacy, some students are still unclear about how advertising works.

We want to assure Mr. Marks that we sincerely want our students to know how North American advertisers spend billions of dollars each year crafting messages that prey on their appetites and insecurities. Students must be aware of how marketers employ highly paid research teams, psychologists and other experts to study them, learn how they talk and communicate -- all to make sure advertising to children and teens has maximum impact.

We want to educate our students about the deep concern advertisers have for kids when they gather at yearly conferences to discuss how to get past the family gatekeepers (parents), how to pitch their brands at school dances, and how to get teen girls to measure themselves against impossible standards of beauty.

We want them to know how corporations talk about the "nag factor" and the fact that Canadian "tweens" (children between 8 and 14) influence $20 billion in family purchases. We want to tune them in to to marketers' conversations about "kidfluence", mindshare, headspace, owning eyeballs -- even "owning" kids as young as five and six years old.

Finally, we would be remiss if we failed to teach our students how marketers go so far as to research and calculate their allowances, plus the cash they receive from relatives -- even their birthday money -- to figure out on how much they can spend on video games, junk food, cellphones, make-up, movies and fashion. Mr. Marks is right -- many of our students need a much better grasp of the role of advertising. We can assure him that teachers are doing their best to make sure that happens.

Brian Ardern
The Manitoba Teachers' Society

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