Parody of an Ad

So, we're on the way out of a staff meeting convo about classroom management. We have largely decided that success often becomes about entertainment, since you can't actually force inner change on students, and it's hard to intrinsically motivate students to learn things that they aren't interested in or won't move them towards their goals. A colleague says, "It is basically just about building a better mouse trap." Or, in other words, if we can trick them into thinking we're giving them something useful, then we can get them. He was being sarcastic, but it was a phrase I hadn't heard before... I guess it is somewhat common in business circles as "If you can build a better mouse trap, they will beat a path to your door." It turns out the original quote is from Ralph Waldo Emerson: "If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap, than his neighbor, though he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door." The big question: What if you don't actually need a mouse trap? What if the mouse doesn't actually need cheese? So, much of marketing and ads isn't about promoting things that meet needs, but about creating needs alongside products to fill them.

I chose to apply this idea to education, but in the ways education gets manipulated by the government as a sort of business idea. We are looking for a certain product, so we offer certain rewards. The poster that I manipulated is from the American Competitiveness Initiative. Check out the link below for the Information from the Department of Education and the whole report. The Initiative was introduced in the President's 2006 State of the Union address. (Where else would we get the word "competitiveness.")
http://www.ed.gov/about/inits/ed/competitiveness/index.html

This is the cover of the 17 page initiative that offers college money to students if they take extra math and science classes. The report is full of the same old research about how we are getting beat by other countries with smart kids... About how China is producing half of the future scientists of the world (or something like that) This is all well and good. I am all about kids getting free money for school, but the sentiment from the original poster smacks of the old space race promotions... except denying that the real reason we are pushing "competitiveness" is for the purposes of defensive (and more honestly) offensive military technologies. If we were to just spend less on these technologies, how much more fundage would be available to put right into education, instead of having to let it trickle down... What if kids could then take not only higher mathematics, and sciences, but vocational classes? What if we could provide a wider variety of intrinsically motivating choices in all academic areas?

...they'd beat a path to our door.