News and Features
Q&A: Joel Bakan
By Gary Stephen Ross published Sep 1, 2011
Joel Bakan on the many ways corporations target today's youth—and what parents can do about it
Your last book argued that corporations are like psychopaths. The new book, Childhood Under Siege, is about the corporate targeting of children. What’s the link? When I was on the lecture circuit for The Corporation, this issue came up over and over. I had two young kids at the time (they’re teenagers now), and it became very real to me how much power and influence corporations had over their lives—how they get sucked into brands, online worlds, Facebook; how commercialized their lives were, their desire for junk food and so on; their peers on psychotropic drugs; the slashes to public funding of their schools. It’s powerful to see your children subjected to forces over which you have little control. I agree with Nelson Mandela that the keenest revelation of a society is the treatment of its children. It became a way of developing a broader social critique.
Are you simply bemoaning generational change? My parents liked Frank Sinatra and their parents thought they were crazy. I liked the Who and the Beatles; now we have Lady Gaga. Each generation should challenge older generations culturally, intellectually, socially—that’s where progress comes from. What I’m talking about is a new phenomenon, a powerful cultural, social, and economic force that has its sights set on children as markets, one that’s far from having their best interests at heart.
Corporate branding in schools is an obvious example. People tend to stay with their first bank, their first credit card, so the earlier you reach them the better. There’s a new genre of ads where it’s kids who tell viewers how cool the car is—marketers have discovered kids are the most persuasive salespeople for their parents. Targeting kids is great for marketers; targeting them at school—where they are captive audiences and where, at least in their minds, the messages are sanctioned—is even better. The bigger issue is the trend towards turning schools into fully corporate enterprises, a trend well underway in the U.S. and, if we don’t resist it, likely to make its way here.
Why is it a bad thing? When corporations are running schools and providing curricula, their concern is not with educating children or creating democratic citizens with humanistic values. Corporatized education involves lots of standardized multiple-choice tests because they’re cheap to mark, and hence profitable, for the corporations that sell them. Big class sizes? They’re efficient. Providing the best education, however that’s defined, is very different from providing the most revenue for the education management organizations, testing companies, and curriculum manufacturers playing larger and larger roles in K-12 education in the United States.
