If a public education system’s pedagogy is heavily influenced by big business, what types of citizens are produced?

Students looking for a good quality education are paying the price of their greedy or poor public school districts. As public school funding are becoming scarcer, more and more schools are getting partnerships with corporations.  Our classrooms, which used to be a safe haven, are now polluted with advertisements, clouding the minds of innocent naïve students with consumerist’s thoughts. Gary Ruskin and Juliet Schor’s article Brainwashing Consumers and Children: The Dangerous Spread of Commercialized Culture,“ By 2000, 94 percent of high schools allowed the sale of soda, and 72 percent allowed sale of chocolate candy. Energy, candy, personal care products, even automobile manufacturers have entered the classroom with "sponsored educational materials" that is, ads in the guise of free "curricula"”. Fast food corporations infected public schools and the rise of child obesity infected society. Corporate America is already guiding our judgments outside of schools; we should not have it distracting our students with its negative consumerist ideologies. Corporations and the education should not be partners because they have contradictory ideals. The education system is used to eliminate ignorance where as corporations are fed by ignorance.

Corporations are taking advantage of the current economic problems facing our public school system to gain more consumers and our greedy government is to blame. As our fiscal crisis worsens our government is brainwashing children to fix the recession. America has earned a title for being home of the biggest corporations worldwide. This may be beneficial for our economy, but it is creating a new generation of materialists, consumers, diabetics, and obese people. “Children are inundated with advertising for high calorie junk food and fast food, and, predictably, 15 percent of U.S. children aged 6 to 19 are now overweight” (Ruskin and Schor). The mental and physical health of our students is at risk. our education system really needs to start making reforms to their partnerships or they have to cancel their partnerships completely.

Corporate sponsorships can ultimately undermine critical thinking skills. When students in Arroyo High School see Burger King, Subway, and Snapple on their campus they do not think of the damage it can do to their mental and physical state. Their only thought is “that burger and cookie that Samantha is eating looks really good. I’ll go buy one too”. Alex Molnar, lead author of the report and a research professor at the University of Colorado Boulder states, "The goal of it is to become more integrated into the pattern of everyday school life, so it's hard to tell where the advertising begins and ends. … These businesses are there for the kids? No, they're not. They're there for themselves; they're there to make money”. It is evident that their main goal is to provide society with naïve consumerists. Corporations entering school can care less about what damaging advertisements they put up on campuses. They simply want to make money and create a new generation with this same ideology.