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1. Make schools ad-free zones, where young people can pursue learning free of commercial influences and pressures. To accomplish this:
- Schools and school districts should adopt and enforce guidelines restricting the use of business-sponsored materials. As a model, they should look to the 1989 guidelines developed by the International Organization of Consumers Unions, which call for all business-sponsored education materials to be:
- Accurate: Be consistent with established facts appropriately referenced, and current.
Objective: Present all relevant points of view, and clearly state the sponsor's bias.
Complete: Not mislead by omission.
Non-discriminatory: Avoid ethnic, age, race and sex stereotypes.
Non-commercial: Not contain any of the sponsor's brand names, trademarks, related trade names, or corporate identification in the text or illustrations; avoid implied or explicit sales messages.
Evaluative: Encourage cognitive evaluation of the subject taught.
- All companies that provide educational materials for schools should comply with these guidelines, or with the similar guidelines developed by the Society of Consumer Affairs Professionals in Business.
- National and local education groups, including PTAs, Boards of Education, and professional teaching associations, should support guidelines for business-sponsored materials. They should help their members comply by covering the issue in their publications and at their conferences, and by addressing the larger political problem of the underfunding of our schools.
- Teachers should support the adoption of business-material guidelines in their schools and use such guidelines to screen all teaching materials before using them in the classroom.
2. Promotions that target kids must meet higher standards than those aimed at adults. They should not exploit the inexperience and vulnerabilities of kids; and they should clearly identify themselves as advertising.
- Publishers of children's magazines and broadcasters of TV programming for children share some responsibility for the fairness of advertising they bring to their young audiences. They should not accept advertorials or celebrity-endorsements.
- The Federal Trade Commission should recognize that kids' clubs, whose purpose is to sell products, may mislead children, even if the commercial nature of the clubs is obvious to adults. The FTC should require kids' clubs to provide a substantial non-merchandising service or activity for kids. Clubs intending to sell members' names in mailing lists should disclose that fact and give kids the opportunity to keep their names off the list.
- Congress should enact legislation that would bar tobacco and liquor companies from paying to place their products in movies. This disguised advertising of hazardous and potentially addictive products should not be tolerated by a society that values the health of its children.
3. Educate children about the nature of commercial messages directed at them and build their ability to resist sales pressures. Schools and parents need to balance some of the promotional influences on kids' development as consumers and citizens.
- Schools and teachers should teach kids to analyze ads, demythologize products, and clarify the alternatives one faces in the marketplace. Such consumer education fits naturally into a number of conventional subject areas. It should begin in the elementary grades.
- Parents should contribute to their children's education by regularly discussing purchasing and money-management decisions with their children, and by critically analyzing advertising with them.
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