A school teacher In California puts Ads on exams to make money. I think it’s a great idea. In fact, they should find more places to Advertise to the students! Yes, I do work in the evil Advertising industry. No, I don’t think it will corrupt the minds of the next generation. Here’s why.
Look beyond the obvious and see the potential. The teacher, Tom Farber, only started doing this because of the major financial crisis that the school system faces. His semester budget doesn’t even fully cover the cost of printing out the tests and exams. Without additional funding, the amount of testing will have to be reduced, lowering the quality of the education.
Of course that’s no excuse. No excuse to bombard students with powerfully crafted persuasions that will shape their future goals and desires. Wait a minute, isn’t that what schools wanted to inspire in the first place? I don’t mean aspiring to party in a limo every night, but to have other goals that will contribute positively to society.
Advertising is a tool used by rich people to get even richer. It works because the rich people wouldn’t waste their time and money doing something that doesn’t work. So let’s take that powerful system and use it to positively influence the next generation. Create an optimal level of Advertisement saturation in the school, while fine-filtering the Ads that are allowed to be placed. Advertisers such as respectable publishers, University programme recruitment, music instrument vendors, nutritional foods producers etc.
Students spend most of their off-school time exposed to irresponsible advertising, so let’s even the playing field by exposing a counter-message. While they’re at it, update the school system and create social media based learning through Twitter. What do you think about this? Am I totally out of my mind?
(Apologies in advance – my tone seems rather negative, but no attack is meant on the author; only the idea being promoted.)
I’m not sure I believe that taking an overexposed audience and throwing more advertising at them is any sort of improvement.
1. There’s no reason to believe that reduced testing will lower the quality of education. Further, the financial problems in education are not going to be solved by letting advertisers take over yet another institution.
2. The goal of schools should be to educate, not to “craft persuasions that will shape their future goals and desires.” Kids are already distracted enough these days; our goal should not be to distract them more.
3. The idea that “we” can take this “powerful system and use it to positively influence the next generation” is well-meaning and laudable, but also very naive. “We” don’t control the system; the rich folks who don’t give a crap about anything but making money do.
The public school system has been in decline for decades. This would only exacerbate existing problems.
Thanks for posting this. It’s a discussion we NEED to have.
-vr
As a person that highly values learning and personal growth, I appreciate you taking the time to share and educate. Now then, let’s see what I can come up with.
I believe that communication has evolved and trying to fight against it would be unproductive at best. The brain systems of the recent generation has adapted to the mass consumption of information, perhaps easing the sensory overload effects of advertisements. So while I agree that over saturation of advertisement will confuse the message, that is why I suggested a carefully controlled saturation of ads in the schools.
1. Agreed, testing alone cannot be any benchmark for the quality of education. But I believe this is a good excuse to use Advertising to do some good. A weapon is neither good or bad. Responsible control will be the deciding factor.
2. I agree that schools should place education as their priority, but I believe that the education system is as outdated as a 2400 baud modem. Many web systems have extremely customized information delivery to users, so why shouldn’t schools do the same thing? Ads doesn’t have to be meaningless spam. Subtle high persuasion Ads can achieve what the teachers might verbally advocate already. If a student is into botanical studies, a well placed Ad in the school garden might provoke enough interest for a followup inquiry. Potentially dangerous though, yes.
3. Here’s a lighter side of the argument. If the schools can get all the young and empowered entrepreneurs on their side, external financial reliance might be controlled over time.
I believe in the good will of the human race. With the hyper accelerated learning processes through the internet, I do believe more and more people will be empowered to do the right thing.
A good response; I may have to temper my position somewhat.
I will agree that communication has certainly changed drastically in the last few decades. But I think your “adaptation” is not so much a function of “brain systems” as it is an unconscious effort by the mind to filter out the unimportant. Since the individual mind is the one deciding what is “important”, kids are more and more ignoring education altogether in favor of gadgets and entertainments.
The point is they’ve learned to filter, and learned what to filter. Will they even mentally digest your “good” ads?
While the idea of offering adverts for “good” things like “University programme recruitment, music instrument vendors, nutritional foods producers etc.” is again laudable, it is not realistic. Who gets to decide what constitutes “good” adverts? You allude to some form of “careful control,” but there is no indication of what entity will be doing the controlling, and frankly it doesn’t really matter what your answer would be. There is no human entity that is immune to human nature, and human nature has been the bane of good ideas throughout history.
I agree that the edu system is outdated. It needs a fundamental overhaul, and the idea that teachers ought be “persuading” students of much of anything is the first thing that needs to go. The only thing teachers should be persuading students of is the importance of being educated; of learning HOW to think rather than WHAT to think. Ads would simply clutter up the flow of the really important communication rather than be of any significant benefit.
I also believe in the good will of the human race, if we’re using “good will” in a purely appetitive sense. Even so, good will doesn’t necessarily make for good decisions or right actions.
And now I’ll zip it before I get in trouble
-vr
I thought about staying on my originally position for my reply, but after several sessions of rethinking, perhaps a shift in direction is in order. I don’t think a continuous argument limited to this narrow vision will be of much benefit.
After re-watching Ken Robinson’s famous speech on how schools kill creativity, I now see our conversation in a different light. Please bear with me as I take a leap in conjecture.
I’m arguing for persuasion for the sake of guided human growth, and you’re arguing for developing a strong sense of self development. While I believe that both has its merits and perfectly good intents, perhaps we can distill the idea further by promoting good “evolutionary creativity”. Inspire them to look at the big picture, at the growth of the entire human race as a whole.
I believe that we’ve been confining our methods for education based on our limited imaginations and adaptation skills. Instead of giving children preset tools for learning, give them the inspiration to create tools for themselves. With preset boundaries and designated areas of creativity, there will always be a unique strength in the unconditioned minds of children. Perhaps it is the greatest resource we have today, considering how valuable ideas are in this information age.
In regards to education, I believe that any social incentives we brand onto the minds of people, will never be as powerful as the feeling of inspiration and evolutionary creativity.
To look at it from a macro level of functionality, human beings for the most part have been disconnected. Perhaps for the first time in history, we can use technology to truly connect everyone and move as cells of a greater body. That’s how almost all living organisms work together, while we have become quite cancerous.
I cannot predict the exact solution, but perhaps if we promote new tool building and evolutionary creativity in children, someone more imaginative than me can think of a better way forward.
To touch on the original point – I didn’t have any real issues with the teacher selling ad space on tests to pay for being able to get copies of the test. Not his fault the administration sucks. I feel there’s better ways to implement tests than handing out multiples copies, like writing question on the board and having students copy them for example, I’m not one to agree that testing is the best way to measure learning.
on to the bigger details. Of course, knowing me as you do Herb, I’m sure you wouldn’t be surprised to hear I agree with the other commenter. how about in an act of protest, and to foster *real* learning and creativity, why not refuse to send your children to school at all? Rather than try to install a love of learning in them, why not recognize that they are indeed born with it, and then continue to try and expand on it?
Free an unfettered access to resources, light instruction on basic skills like reading, and then basically pointing a kid off in the direction his interest lead him. THAT works. Answering their “why?”s, offering up why’s in return – this can teach them to think critically as well.
Measurable results can be seen when a child explains what they know to an adult, or better still, instructs a younger child.
For wholesale change to the system, you have to start on an individual level. Working outside the system is one way to do so.
The world is really their oyster – not what is in the classroom contained in the walls, not what’s on the test. it’s outside, out there in the real world.
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