Brainwashing Children
Consuming Kids: The Commercialization of Childhood
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Here’s a great documentary describing how children are studied, dissected and manipulated by corporate entities using all kinds of underhanded methods. |
Uploaded by futureproducernet
Consuming Kids throws desperately needed light on the practices of a relentless multi-billion dollar marketing machine that now sells kids and their parents everything from junk food and violent video games to bogus educational products and the family car.
Drawing on the insights of health care professionals, children's advocates, and industry insiders, the film focuses on the explosive growth of child marketing in the wake of deregulation, showing how youth marketers have used the latest advances in psychology, anthropology, and neuroscience to transform American children into one of the most powerful and profitable consumer demographics in the world.
Consuming Kids pushes back against the wholesale commercialization of childhood, raising urgent questions about the ethics of children's marketing and its impact on the health and well-being of kids.
"The Mouse That Roared": How Disney Instills Greed and Consumerism - Starting at Three Months
From: Truthout – by: Martha Sorren, Truthout | Book Review
Learn more about Disney's creeping cultural hegemony - read "The Mouse That Roared"," Truthout's Progressive Pick of the Week, reviewed in this article.
In American culture, Disney has become synonymous with childhood. Present-day grandparents grew up watching the animated films, wearing Mickey Mouse pajamas and begging to go to Disneyland. But while it all seems innocent, few people have considered the hold that the Disney Corporation has not only on their own lives, but on the world as a whole.
Henry Giroux and Grace Pollock explore this relationship between consumer and industry in their book "The Mouse that Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence." [Full disclosure: Henry Giroux is a member of Truthout's Board of Directors.]
How Disney Magic and the Corporate Media Shape Youth Identity in the Digital Age
From: Truthout by: Henry A. Giroux and Grace Pollock, Truthout | Op-Ed
While the "empire of consumption" has been around for a long time[1], American society in the last 30 years has undergone a sea change in the daily lives of children - one marked by a major transition from a culture of innocence and social protection, however imperfect, to a culture of commodification.
Youth are now assaulted by a never-ending proliferation of marketing strategies that colonize their consciousness and daily lives. Under the tutelage of Disney and other megacorporations, children have become an audience captive not only to traditional forms of media such as film, television and print, but even more so to the new digital media made readily accessible through mobile phones, PDAs, laptop computers and the Internet.
America's problem with sex education
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No barrier to knowledge: teaching contraception in school. |
From: The Guardian – by Daniel Denvir
Given the comic failure of abstinence-only – 95% of Americans have premarital sex – isn't it time the US got over its hangup?
Though most American youth continue to learn about sex most everywhere but in school, there is some good news: according to a recent report from the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS), the Obama administration and Congress in 2010 eliminated two thirds of federal funding for abstinence-only-until-marriage education, and, in a historic shift, allocated close to $190m for comprehensive sex education.
