Hey, I posted this in the UK forum but it's an international issue so I'm putting it here as well for more people to read. This is something that's making me so very angry right now! I thought I'd share it with you and see what you all think of it. A while ago, poster frames were put up around my school (in the loos and the common room etc). They stayed empty for a few weeks, but then posters started to pop up. Some of them are educational, encouraging kids to exercise and eat fruit and veg, but some of them are adverts for films and albums (there is a Lindsay Lohan one and a Mean Girls one...do they have a thing for her?). I have a real problem with the fact that my school is taking funding from an advertising company and force-feeding young people with potentially harmful images, in spaces that could be far better used. I don't think that schools are the place for sexy posters advertising things that are completely irrelevant to education. I've already had a bollocking for the mysterious disappearance of said Lindsay Lohan poster, but I intend to follow this one through to the end. The annoying thing is, although quite a few people feel the same way as me, the majority of the sixth form is completely apathetic about it and don't care about the ethical issues of it at all. As far as they're concerned, if it's not obviously hurting them they 'can't be arsed' to change anything, and most of the lads are deliriously happy at the sight of a scantily clad girl on the wall. I just wanted to know what you lot think, to see if I'm on my own __________________
The same thing is happening in my school. Now, the healthy eating poster in the dining hall, fair enough, it's a good thing to encourage people to eat healthily. But what gets my goat is the posters for FILMS that have started springing up all over the walls like brightly coloured mushrooms after a rain of £5 notes. Surely school is supposed to be an environment where young people go to get educated, not just another tool for the big companies to push consumer culture onto children's oh-so-mouldable minds? Well. Huh, what am I saying, the "education" sytem has always just been a machine to teach us children to conform, fill our brains up with dates of wars and algebra, even our time at outside of school is crowded with homework so most of us don't have the time or inclination to learn things that would be useful, to philosophize, to realise that if we don't stop playing their game the government will fuck us from now until the day we die. In my time being home educated I started to think about all this, and when I went back into the system I took with me a healthy dose of realism and the knowledge that schools are just trying to make us conform to the system. But I'm getting off subject. I object the the school system as a whole, and think that advertising in schools is *especially* wrong. The fact that it raises money for sports equipment and new computers is good, but do we really need them? Is the entire school system merely about money, not about educating and embroadening our minds at all? How long is it before we have to start paying to go to certain classes? If we young people, the students, don't do something now, by the time our children are going to school it'll be even worse. We're the ones who school was invented FOR. We are the children. Somewhere along the line we forgot school is supposed to be all for us. While if it really is for us is debateable, we need to play every card we have and if that means using The Man's tool against him, then so be it. We need to do something. But, in all honesty, I don't know what we CAN do. Any ideas?
I think the fruit and vegtable posters are good because they tell you to eat healthy and get excercise but are they advertising for a specific fruit company? If it's for a company then I think that is wrong. As far a the movie posters go I don't like that idea. We have posters in my school but its ones teachers have baught themselves because it ahs to do wth their subject matter. We have yet to get paid advertising in my school but I wouldn't be susprised it if started happening in the next few years. They are already thining abut puttng ads on busses.
With certain unfunded mandates in the US it's hard for some schools to even buy the basic supplies. The public school system has been in the eyeball of big buisiness for quite some time and they are making progress towards establishing themselves more and more. This is the plan from our gov anyway. As a natural extension of the gov entity it only follows that public schools are a ripe ground for exploitation. Quite frankly it pisses me off to no end because not only are students subjected to constant corporate mandates at home, walking down the street etc..., but now in school. I posted a thread about whats happenning in higher education as well. The invasion continues there on the level of research funding etc... whereby companies are claiming the rights/patents to the results of university labs. It's sick. Let's get this straight, a student pays some crazily exorbitant tuition to go to work for some company to help them produce an exploitable product. This doesn't jive with me. http://hipforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=82415
Schools are short on cash, and I'd rather then find the money through advertising movies then raising taxes.
It's a valid viewpoint, but I'd rather them raise the taxes than aid in further warping our children's minds.
I didn't read any of the posts in this thread except for the first one, but it seems to me that if it brings more money to the school system it's a good thing. Obviously they shouldn't advertise things like cigarettes or alcohol, but if I understood you correctly the advertisements weren't for anything "bad." Every dollar that the school earns because they hang some movie poster up, is another dollar that they can spend on a teacher's salary, or textbooks, or a school lunch for someone who can't afford one.
That's rather strange. There's also been a movement lately to prohibit students from wearing clothes with the insignia of things like sports teams, gangs, rock stars, etc, because it might create a bad influence on young people. Looks like it's ok for businesses to advertise that stuff at school as long as the kids don't use it at school. As a sidenote, you can now earn money by having your car painted over fully with advertisements. It hasn't become widespread yet, but it will be in the coming years. Who knows. Maybe one day the principal of the school will pull into the school parking lot with ads all over his or her car. .
i know what i would do to these posters but i mean i'm just a punk who doerns't always think things through, but i would graffiti it. maybe that's becuase in our school system you have to fucking fight to get anything done, this is obviously the low and easy way out, but sometoimes it can be really enjoyable.
I didn't have to graffiti it, the boys in the year below did that. I'm not prepared to do something like that because I want to stay just inside the line of the law. The poster has gone missing, but it hasn't been torn or damaged by me, and it's not been stolen because it's only hidden a few metres from where it was originally. (Muhahaha)
