Giving Kids the Business

By Alex Molnar

When Michael Milken, the junk bond king, was let out of prison, he said that he wanted to be involved in education because he considered it one of the biggest moneymakers for American business. He isn't alone. Christopher Whittle, the irrepressible father of Channel One, is now hard at work trying to lure potential investors to the Edison Project with the claim that one market point in the education market is worth $2.8 billion to any business savvy enough to figure out how to capture it.

The attempt to mine childhood for commercial advantage is nothing new, either in American schools or American society. As early as 1929, concern about the influence of corporations on school curriculum was sufficiently strong for the National Education Association to empanel a "Committee on Propaganda in the Schools."

In 1959, Saatchi & Saatchi, the New York advertising agency, created the first television ad aimed exclusively at children. The only problem was that there was nowhere on television to show it. Not willing to let their creation, the Trix rabbit, go homeless, Saatchi & Saatchi invented Saturday-morning children's television so their ad would have programming to interrupt. Thirty years later, when Channel One was brought to life with millions of high-voltage advertising dollars, the "vast wasteland" of American commercial...