education to come?

A quick quote from a novel I read recently. Hayley McDonald’s, school kid in the future, has just finished performing a presentation on why she loves America. This is in a time when corporations have become so powerful that they are more important than government, so important that our surname depends not on our family, but on who we work for:

The teacher jotted something in his folder. McDonald’s-sponsored schools were cheap like that: at Pepsi school everybody had notebook computers. Also their uniforms were much better. It was hard to be cool with the Golden Arches on your back.
-Jennifer Government - Max Barry

The novel is a very enjoyable read. I also found parts of it (such as the exert above) more than a little disturbing. Disturbing in that I can see them happening. There is a huge disclaimer that the start of the book attempting, I assume, to ward off law suites from Mattel, McDonalds, Pepsi, the NRA and especially Nike. It points out that the novel is a work of complete fiction – that none of the events would ever happen.

The thing is I can see some of it happening. The big corporations already influence government – is it such a wild jump to imagine them usurping it? The sponsored schools thing – well that scares me stiff. So you can imagine my horror when I picked up a copy of this year’s school magazine and looked at the back. There, in bright writing, is a list of companies who have ‘helped out’ the school in the past year. It was a long list. A similar list has been put on the brand new minibus that those companies ‘helped’ us buy.

I’m inclined to give the benefit of the doubt and consider such help community involvement rather than out and out sponsorship but how long will it be before we cross the line that we’ve been kicking recently? How long before I’m teaching maths using Tesco price lists?