Coca-Cola's Global Lessons: From Education for Corporate Globalization to Education for Global Justice

Teacher Education Quarterly, Winter 2004 by Saltman, Kenneth J

Recently, critics of school commercialism and the U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Richard Carmona have taken note of just how fat public school students in this country are becoming. While the critics of school commercialism suggest that childhood obesity must be understood in relation to the deluge of junk food marketing infiltrating public schools, the Surgeon General's concern is somewhat different. After addressing the largest-ever conference on childhood obesity in San Diego - attended by doctors, educators, and parents, Carmona was quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle as stating, "Our preparedness as a nation depends on our health as individuals" (Severson, 2003, p. 1). He noted that he had spent some of his first months in office working with military leaders concerned about the obesity and lack of fitness among America's youth. "The military needs healthy recruits," he said (Severson, 2003, p. 1). The newspaper article noted that Carmona was careful not to assail the junk food industry for its part in threatening national security by flabbifying the nation's chubby little defenders.

Many critics do censure marketers of junk food for their part in inundating every private and public space with health-harming products and slick advertisements. I want to focus here on one such company to illustrate how the dangerous influences of corporate ideology on schooling effect much more than public health-they also work to shape the ways that public institutions of education serve the private sectors' desire to control the future of work, consumption, culture, and politics. To turn back this corporate assault on the public, I propose that teacher education programs and progressive educators around the country can play a significant role in challenging these lethal corporate pedagogies with more critical, participatory, and democratic ones.

In 1998, Coca-Cola came under criticism from activists, and subsequently in the press, for their efforts to secure exclusive vending contracts with public schools across the nation. The attention began when a student at Greenbrier High School in Evans, Georgia was suspended for wearing a Pepsi t-shirt on "Coke in Education Day" which was part of a larger promotional "Team up with Coca-Cola Contest." The event involved lectures by Coke executives, science classes that focused on the chemistry of Coke, economics classes about the marketing of the product, and Coke rallies; culminating with an aerial photograph of students dressed in red and white spelling out the word Coke with their bodies. It was during this event that student Mike Cameron took off his shirt to reveal a Pepsi shirt underneath, only to be suspended from school for his apparently subversive act (Saltman, 2000).

Though initially most of the press coverage of the event appeared in the business section of newspapers as an episode in the "Cola Wars", an increasing number of writers and speakers assailed Coca-Cola and other companies for working to turn school kids into a captive audience for advertisers, and for making public schools just another place to sell soft drinks, clothing, and junk food by turning hallways, book covers, scoreboards, and school buses into billboards. A number of progressive organizations, such as the Center for Commercialism in Schools and the Commercialism in Education Research Unit, have criticized the ways that large corporations such as Coke have promised under-funded public schools the possibility of cash or resources like sporting equipment in exchange for exclusive rights to sell Coke to kids. It's worth pointing out that often the reward for participating in these collaborative efforts is minuscule. For example, Greenbrier was given $500 for winning the district-wide competition that pitted schools against each other to create the grandest promotion of Coke. Greenbriar was then granted the opportunity to compete against other schools for $10,000.

The issue I want to address here isn't simply whether or not Coke is paying enough in money and resources to turn schools into advertisements by infiltrating the curriculum and making buildings into billboards. The critical issue at hand is the way that Coca-Cola and other massive multinational corporations are undermining public institutions, and the public sector more generally, by transforming schools into investment opportunities for the wealthiest citizens at the expense of everyone else. In what follows, I first explore some of Coca-Cola's educational projects. I then discuss how these efforts are related to corporate globalization. And finally, I elaborate on some critical democratic pedagogies that can contest this corporate assault on youth - pedagogies that teach for global justice rather than corporate globalization.

Coca-Cola's Global Lessons

Coca-Cola is undermining the public sphere by threatening public health, aggressively pursuing youth in schools as potential new customers, and by encouraging students to understand themselves principally as consumers rather than citizens. Coca-Cola is also undermining the public sector around the world as the company has come under criticism for initiatives such as privatizing water supplies in Chiapas, Mexico (Barlow, 2003 ; Zinn, 2002)-using support from schools there to do so; undermining workers' rights in Central and South America by threatening union organizers with death (Bacon, 2002; Podur, 2003), using sweatshop child labor to make Coca-Cola soccer balls in Pakistan (Global March against Child Labor, 2002), and failing to provide adequate healthcare benefits to workers with AIDS in South Africa (Lobe, 2002). Coca-Cola participates in undermining democracy by shifting power from people to corporations in four basic ways: (1) by working to privatize public goods and services, (2) by propagating ideologies favorable to corporate management of the planet, (3) by promoting the kinds of education that fail to link the production of knowledge to the wielding of power, and 4) by embracing curricula that actively erase the material and symbolic struggles waged by different individuals and groups over work, consumption, and culture. An example of Coke's anti-public, pro-privatization agenda in education is its involvement in the First Book national literacy campaign (www.firstbook.org). As part of this campaign, Coca-Cola has joined up with "The Gift of Reading Promotion" in which representatives of the company travel around to public libraries and schools with a gigantic 12 foot book with the stated intent of getting youth interested in reading. There is a distinctly corporate logic to Coke's assumption that what would motivate students to read would be a larger-than-life book. Coke's consumer logic of "bigger is better" was parodied by the newspaper The Onion (1996) in an article titled, "Coca-Cola Introduces New 30 Liter Size: Bottle Will be Unwieldy, Inconvenient." The article begins: