1. Josef Goebbels had nothing on the JA program--it was larded up with the most incredibly biased, anti-union, anti-worker, anti-environmentalist material I've ever seen presented as "objective" outside of National Review and Reason magazines.

2. It was remarkably effective--all over America, during school time, children were getting the gospel according to JA with no countervailing messages offered.  

I was appalled, and I am sure that the reason I didn't get an invitation to resume the following year is because I started trying to wake the kids up to the consumption messages and to suggest that "making more money" was not the only road to wealth and happiness (I started promoting low consumption, low media ideas, talking about how students get trapped with consumer credit and trained to be unconscious consumers of things like cell phones, etc.).

I've often mulled this experience over and wondered if we couldn't/shouldn't start a program for science and social studies classes called "Environmental Achievement" -- instead of selling crap tchotkes to "run a business," we could offer students options of doing things like

  --mapping their local watersheds and inventorying threats to the health

  -- tracing all the waste that goes "away" from their school and finding out how it is dealt with

  -- mapping public health statistics against socio-economic factors and locations of pollutant emitters in their communities

  etc. etc.

JA seems like an effective model, with some real bad content.  Wonder if the model could be used to deliver a curriculum with pro-social, pro-environment content.  Playing it absolutely straight would be fine--there's no need to tilt the message because an objective study of environmental issues will find plenty to interest students without the need for biasing it to alarm them.


The 5% Project

These idealists could do it.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin