I was reading Fast Food Nation last night, and one of the things discussed in the book is the increase of corporate promotion in schools. Coca-Cola’s big payoff to schools in Colorado in exchange for advertising space has been well publicized. There are also plenty of schools with fast food outlets in them, and these days it’s common for corporations to provide slanted education materials to educators and even sponsor textbooks in exchange for product placements in them. Anyway, the reason schools have been selling out in the worst possible way to corporate interests is because their revenues are down due to lack of tax dollars. The biggest entities pushing for lower taxes are corporations. It strikes me as amazingly perverse that corporations fight for lower taxes, thus putting schools in a pinch, and then take the money they save and use it to push their product and/or propaganda onto students. I can’t imagine that any sane person would choose to have corporate dollars go to pay for education through marketing and promotion rather than through taxation, but that’s really what we’re looking at these days.