If the Occupy movement ever decides to create an actual list of demands (although, why should they?), then I'd like to propose they put this on the list:
Required courses in public school curricula beginning at the lowest grades and continuing with increasing sophistication throughout high school on the subject of critical viewing of commercial advertising. The courses should include a list of all the "tricks of the trade," the advertising world uses. A chapter in the course should include political speech-making, as that, too, is advertising, or as college courses call it, persuasive speaking. (For my one college speech course assignment to create a persuasive speech, I denounced persuasive speech as brainwashing and propaganda. I expected a failing grade, but the instructor was impressed, perhaps because no one had probably ever turned the table on the very thing he assigned before, and I received the only A in the class. Once in a while, it works in your favor to say what you see.)
Arming citizens with this information would make a good beginning of preventing future foreclosure and debt crises. Of course, if there were such a curriculum, it would be co-opted in short order in some way by commercial interests, since the purpose of a public education in this country is not to turn out informed citizens, but to turn out workers who support the corporate sponsored government without thinking. But, I am assuming that part of the Occupy demands, were they to be enumerated, would be to give teeth to federal agencies, including the Department of Education, which Rick Perry, for one, wants to abolish, instead of appointing the person most likely to destroy the agency to its head, which has been the trend since George W.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
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