I was recently talking with the general manager of the Manarat schools, Dr. Mohammad Al-Qahtani. He informed me that an advertising company had made an offer to pay half a million riyals in order to put advertisements on the walls in our school in Riyadh. I was deeply disturbed by this seemingly generous offer and requested that it be rejected and not to accept any similar offers in the future in any of our schools.

Coincidentally, I had just finished reading a book called “Branded” by Allisa Quart. The author describes in her book the attempt by companies to indoctrinate children and adolescents to consume their products.

It seems companies have come to the conclusion that children and adolescents are at an age where they are particularly susceptible to media blandishments and are malleable enough to form consumption habits that will remain with them for the rest of their lives. Let me quote a statistic mentioned in the book: “Thirty-one percent of US teens spent $155 billion in discretionary income in 2000 alone, buying clothing, CDs, and makeup.” As you can see, this is serious business.

Companies prey on schools’ constant need for funding (especially state schools) to enter into commercial agreements with them that allow company advertising within the schools, turning them into the marketers’ dream, a “captive market”. An example is Coca Cola, which forged a 10-year, $11-million deal with Colorado Springs, Colorado school district in 1997, while Dallas’s Grapevine high school made a 10-year $4 million deal with Dr. Pepper.

Not only do these companies advertise in the schools, they also change school books to suit their needs — such as “If you have five bottles of Pepsi Cola and you subtract two, how many bottles of Pepsi Cola do you have left?” Or “Jack put on his Nike running shoes just before he ran down the hill with Jill, who also had her Nikes on.”

I kid you not.

Schools in the US are under such pressure to fill sales quotas for the companies that they now allow students to drink soft drinks in class. A boy was punished in one school for wearing a Pepsi Cola T-shirt while the school had an agreement with Coca Cola.

Children are in danger of becoming brand groupies and measuring themselves and others by the brands they consume.

This has already happened in the US, we must ensure that it does not happen here.