On March 10, 2011, the Toronto District School Board voted down a business deal with Onestop Media Group to place screens in the hallways that would display, amongst other content, advertisements for products geared to the student demographic.

However, this vote was the result of a long, hard three-hour debate, in which arguments ranged from, “They are exposed to ads all day anyway,” to “what will happen when the kids start demanding the products: is that worth the revenue?”

One month later, on April 6th, the subject was once more raised in a different context: to consider shifting the decision-making from Board to Local levels. This would mean each school would decide whether or not to have the screens and their commercial content. In essence, deciding on this meant that the Board was offloading to the schools, thus diminishing the importance of the issue. In June 2011, the Board will vote to reject or adopt the motion regarding the decision shift.

AML fundamentally opposes initiatives like Onestop simply because they directly contradict the message of educational environments and they represent a profoundly uninformed understanding of how media works.

Whether a business is advertising milk or music videos, it is still focused on persuading a target market to consume its product. Advertising in school hallways allows a commercial interest (health-related or otherwise) to flog its product to a captive student audience. It is a goldmine for any business wishing to advertise to an audience that cannot turn off the ads. If TDSB wishes to be seen by its parents and learners as a progressive institution, with meaningful learning as its first priority, advertising on large screens will send the opposite message: it will imply that the Board cares more about selling its learners as a convenient and captive market in return for money. It will imply that the Board approves of and is willing to trade its students’ attention for cash. Furthermore, it will imply that watching advertising uncritically, without media literacy, is good enough. Saying that students are constantly exposed to screens and ads is a false argument. They can, for the most part, turn off ads, mute them, and generally modify them to their wishes on their personal devices screens. Ads on a large screen in a school hallway cannot be muted, and cannot be blocked by their target market. Advertisers know this, and they know the power of effective advertising: this is why they are interested in this venue. They know that advertising persuades most effectively without the conscious awareness of its market, deliberately repeated in the most banal of environments. AML is not against advertising, or the media, but their uncritical and seamless integration with a learning environment deliberately undermines the essential principles of learning, most particularly of media literacy. AML is concerned about the ethics behind this decision. Learners deserve better than an educational environment in which commerce and learning are blended in the interest of money.

The Board mission statement indicates that it wants “to enable all students … to acquire …values they need to become responsible members of a democratic society.” When these student learn in their classrooms about the commercial purposes of media (specifically, advertisements that employ certain strategies), and then walk into the hall to be confronted with said media, they are also learning that their institution and the people who run it are not to be trusted. Because fundamentally it means that those in power over them speak out of both sides of their mouth: they are saying that “advertising is a powerful persuasive tool for profit and here’s how it works..” AND “because we know advertising works, we are now going to use this tool to persuade you to buy these products, on behalf of this corporation, so they will give us money.” There is surely no gesture more ridiculous in the context of the lofty mission statement (which also refers to respectful learning environments). It directly contradicts the most fundamental precepts of learning.

The fact that the Board voted it down indicates that as a whole, the community, and the administration who ostensibly acts on behalf of parents and learners, ALREADY believe that it is not a good idea. Period. Nevertheless, it would make sense at this point for the Board to move forward and decide on a more developed policy. (Essentially, the TDSB Advertising in schools policy P.006 (http://www.tdsb.on.ca/ppf/uploads/files/live/93/161.pdf) is abstract and outdated. It deals with the presence and use of logos, and does not touch on the larger issue of screen-based ‘logos’ and commercial messages.) Discuss the issue without the context of One Stop, and establish the boundaries once and for all. Filtering the issue down to the local level is ignoring the vote, and is fundamentally undemocratic.

One wonders what the future will hold: as the boundaries between the classroom and the world at large dissolve for the benefit of the learners, challenges like this begin to surface. In fact, these challenges may be necessary as catalysts for essential dialogue about the nature of learning and teaching, and how commercial interests can intersect appropriately with that learning in a public institution.