Alex Molnar is one of the nation’s leading experts on corporate involvement in public education. When we allow corporations to provide school equipment and lesson plans, he warns, we are also exposing children to advertisements and, ultimately, indoctrinating them in the corporate worldview. In effect, we are selling our children to corporations in exchange for a few educational tools of questionable value.
As the head of the Center for the Analysis of Commercialism in Education, Molnar is a harsh critic of the corporate presence in the classroom. “At a time when poor children have been killed for their shoes,” he writes, “they are forced to watch advertising messages for high-priced sneakers. . . . At a time when too many children abuse alcohol, they are taught history by a brewery. At a time when many children are literally made sick by the air they breathe, they are told that some of our nation’s biggest polluters are their friends. And at a time when young people hunger for real connections and genuine friendships, they are fed illusions by people for whom they are little more than units of consumption.”
