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| "Students for Sale: How Corporations Are Buying Their Way into America's Classrooms." Steven Manning. Location: This article can be found in two locations. The first is a link to the CERU site at Arizona State University. This link will take you to the CERU site where you can download the article: http://www.epicpolicy.org/publication/students-for-sale-how-corporations-are-buying-their-way-americas-classroomsThe second is a direct PDF download of the article: http://www.epicpolicy.org/files/CERU-9909-97-OWI.pdfPre-reading Questions1) How do you think students might be "for sale" in the article? It is unlikely that the author means this literally; try to think of ways that students might be offered up "for sale" before you begin reading. What are the emotional implications of this phrasing? 2) Did you experience any corporate influence over your high school education, even if it was just the presence of vending machines on your campus? What was the impact? How different is it in college? 3) Were you exposed to junk food or fast food on your high school campus? Should fast food outlets and vending machines full of junk foods be banned or permitted on campuses? Journal Topics1) If you had or have children, how do you feel about their being exposed to sugary beverages and snacks at their schools, where you cannot monitor them? 2) If you got into the habit of consuming too much junk food or fast food in high school because it was so easy to get, how do you feel about that now? What would you like to go back and change, if you could? Questions for Critical Thought1) In a letter discovered by a Colorado newspaper, an official who oversees a contract between the Coca Cola Company and a local school district "instructed principals to allow students virtually unlimited access to Coke machines and to move the machines to where they would be 'accessible to the students all day.'" Furthermore, the district is required to sell 70,000 cases of Coke products every year. Drinking a lot of soda is indisputably unhealthy and can have long-term, even life-time negative impacts (the sugar content leads to obesity, the calories are empty of nutritional value, and the phosphates reduce calcium in the bones). Does this entail a conflict of interest between the district and the students? 2) The article ends with the following rhetorical question: "Are opponents of schoolhouse commercialism fighting a losing battle?" What do you think? Can schools stop the encroaching commercialism of the modern age? Should they try to? Suggestions for Personal Research1) Do some on-campus research and fact finding to see if your school has any exclusive contracts with corporations. The best places to look are food service, vending machine contracts, and athletics, but there may be others, as well. Multicultural Issues1) If you are from a different country, did corporations make their way into the classrooms there? If they did, did this have any of the commercial benefits that this article claims go to schools in the United States? Were there any problems? Vocabulary Termsdemographics convergence extracurricular revenue quotas furtive dissent evangelical scuttled anti-commercialism |