Born to Buy, by Juliet B. Schor

BusinessWeek magazine has a short review of Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture by Juliet B. Schor -- and if I see this book in my favourite used bookstore (cause I just don't buy anything new -- I think of it as me being environmentally friendly), I will buy it. The book compares the American public school system with the mall, where most lunchrooms double as fast-food joints, television sets in classrooms beam advertising for video-games, movies, more fast-food, and the school curriculum has been infiltrated by 'free' materials from Corporations that teach lies. Despoil their stomachs, despoil their brains and despoil society's future by indoctrinating our children with the Corporate dope.

Schor, a sociologist at Boston College, interviewed marketers, worked with 5th-6th graders and uses academic research to prove her case, that our children are being commercialized -- and corporations are actively targeting them at a younger and younger age. She sites businesses that pay parents and schools to have access to their children; the hiring of cool kids to push goods to their peers in schoolyard playgrounds and host parties where the products are used. Corporate sponsored curriculum include those of Exxon, that teach kids that fossil fuels pose few dangers and that alternative energy is costly and unattainable; and the American Coal Foundation, which teaches that the earth could benefit from more carbon dioxide.

You have to wonder about the people who make such advances at our children -- how depraved? how predatory? how abusive? Shouldn't they be going to jail?

For related reading, see:

Sloan Work and Family Research Network Vol. 4(2) pg. 6 [PDF], as well as the newsletter's website.

New American Dream website

How Marketers Reach Young Consumers [PDF]

The Influence of Commercialism on the Food Purchasing Behavior of Children and Teenage Youth [PDF]

Psychologists Challenge Ethics of Marketing to Children

Marketing Food to Children [PDF]