Advertising Is Educational!

A Minnesota high school is selling ad space, both aural and visual, as part of its theater production of "It's a Wonderful Life." The school's drama advisor claims that the process of selling out American students is "a lot of fun": "The kids are going to deliver all the ads and it will be a great piece for the advertisers to get their product out, too."

The school's principal seems only slightly less enthusiastic, stating that "in a perfect world, we probably wouldn't need to go ahead and sell advertisements." Probably?

The principal is also some kind of visionary prophet/profit, and you can practically hear the ringing of cash registers in the offices of advertising agencies across the country when she says, "I would certainly never want to have ads in the school hallways."

I don't know why not. The pimped-out teens of this country already wrap themselves in the holy cloth of Corporate America on a daily basis. And, really, aren't all those football games worth any price?

And as our once incomparable system of education is sold out to Coca-Cola and insurance companies, the total cost of the Iraq war to date is over $340 billion. I wonder how many high schools are teaching their students about that, or the further sacrifices that will need to be made by the educational system (and its students) to pay for it.