This Educational Message Is Brought to You by . . .

Now, that was a close shave (Gillette).

In the nick of time (Swatch) as a new school year begins, Gov. Gray Davis has signed (Bic) a bill eliminating the use of product names (Disney) in school textbooks (McGraw-Hill). No more math questions like, “If Joe wants a $108 pair of Nikes and earns $6 an hour at Taco Bell, how many hours will he have to work to buy the shoes?”

By Saturday, Davis should have on his desk a second bill, also by Assemblyman Kerry Mazzoni (D-San Rafael), to lay all manner of restrictions on soda contracts like those making Coke the exclusive soft drink of H.L. Mencken Middle School, on the use of “free” computers whose screens bear ineradicable advertising, and on “educational programs” whose 12-minute daily newscasts contain two minutes of ads and whose definition of “news” extends to anchors’ banter and stories about rock stars.

At the same time that the nation has been kicking Joe Camel out the back door for corrupting kids, it has been opening wide the schoolhouse front doors to the purveyors of candy, soft drinks, fast food and snack food, often granting them exclusive run of the place and advertising bragging rights.

Business is hungry for schoolkids because they have money to spend--more than $70 billion a year--and they tell their parents how to spend billions more.

Schools are hungry for business because their budgets are often as red as a first-grader’s Crayola.

Deals made by schools nationwide have slapped ads on the buses students ride, the school lunch menus they read, on hallway posters and textbook covers. An alleged exercise in “scientific thinking” from one company asked students to compare the thickness of the sponsor’s spaghetti sauce to a rival brand’s.

A Garden Grove elementary school’s students assembled for a cereal maker’s rally last year to collect certain box tops for money for the school. A Chula Vista school district cut a $4.45-million, 10-year exclusive Pepsi deal. (San Diego is about to go for a $23.5-million, 10-year deal making Pepsi the official and exclusive city soft drink.) I don’t know whether it’s a testament to the ethics or to the chaos at the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second largest, that it hasn’t yet cashed in big on the cola wars or other free lunch deals.

People who track these things report that Pepsi rules at Oxnard High School and in Alameda and Folsom schools, but Coke owns the turf in schools in Thousand Oaks and Antelope Valley and Channel Islands High School in Oxnard.

The Mazzoni measure would also ban a bit of language that advertisers have put into some school contracts--the “anti-disparagement clause,” a kind of gag order barring school officials from speaking ill of the sponsor’s product. A Georgia teenager who wore a Pepsi shirt on his school’s Coke Day was suspended for a day.

So check out your kid’s next class picture. Who’s that in the front row there? Why, it’s the Trix Rabbit and Ronald McDonald!

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Advertisers write the nation’s dialogue. Ad jingles morph into punch lines and headlines: “Be all that you can be . . . You’ve come a long way, baby . . . You may already be a winner . . . Have it your way.”

“Adcreep” has leached into our lives, manufacturers’ names and logos embossed, embroidered and printed all over our garments. You aren’t what you wear; what you wear is you.

The mantra invoked for such deals is the same used for everything from locker searches to the lottery: “It’s for our kids.”

Nearly nine in 10 of “our kids” recognize Joe Camel and Mickey Mouse; if that many know Abraham Lincoln, it may be just as the guy on the $5 bill.

Perhaps the next legislative session will require that a percentage of money from “exclusive contracts” go to pay for a class to teach “our kids” the modern self-defense technique of understanding the immense power of advertising, rather than just being swept away by it.

What is it exactly that are we educating “our kids” to become, anyway--citizens, or consumers?

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Our farm was way out on Smoketown Road, but there was another farm, up on Route 62, whose barn bore a huge painted sign, “Chew Mail Pouch Tobacco.” After passing that ad dozens of times, I failed to see it any more; it became part of the landscape, but it had already done its work, for I remember it better than anything else about the place, including the names of the people living there.

The ad culture is like that, deep and potent. The morning will come when we wake up to an enchanting sunrise bearing the logo “A Kodak moment”--and we, unsurprised, will yawn and go back to sleep.

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Patt Morrison’s column appears Fridays. Her e-mail address is [email protected].