The enemy without!

Advertising as a competing form of education

When TV first appeared, it was a great educational tool (and I am old enough to remember televisions being used in classrooms).  Advertising perverted this great promise.  Programming became oriented towards attracting advertising, became more entertainment than education, it became what would keep people watching, largely through familiarity.

It is the exact same narrative with the internet. Initially, great promise for collaboration and collective learning and social media platforms opened us up to enormous possibilities. Then monetisation through advertising led to programming (algorithms) to keep us glued to our screens. To increase ‘stickiness’ this new form of entertainment accessed and reinforced even baser instincts, no longer simple familiarity but envy, fear of missing out, the need to be liked. A trend that is particularly damaging to teenagers who are prone to addictive behaviour (see Teen Brain by David Gillespie).

Jessica Brilli - Retro TV

The common thread is advertising which I have contrasted to education (TV) and collaborative learning (internet) but advertising itself is in the business of education.  It is teaching us about products and about lifestyles, about value and about the nature of relationships and what is normal, what is healthy, what not. It is astonishing, the number of things that advertising teaches. At a deep level, it is teaching us about who we are, about our very identity.

One thing is certain, this is not being done with our best interests at heart but rather to expand the sale of products and services, many of which, in the cold light of day, we do not need, and our planet cannot indefinitely sustain.

To resist these pressures our children must develop their autonomy, their ability to freely choose their responses from internal motivations, able to resist these external pressures to conform to an unsustainable way of being.

Building this capacity in our young people is an important element of 21st century schooling.

And this happens through relationships.

John Corrigan is an expert in helping individuals to bring their whole of mind to their daily life and increase their effectiveness and the effectiveness of those around them. This expertise scales from the individual to the team to the organisation. At the core of this work is the practice of encounter.  Earlier blogs can be found here.

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