John Bird's Opinion

20/07/2010

Big Issue founder on Disney sponsored language...

Dear Walt Disney,

I read in The Financial Times that you are opening more language schools in China. Over the next few years you want to go from a few to hundreds. The Disney cartoon characters will be helping people learn English, and presumably enter into a kind of unconscious dependency on these characters. Or to put that more kindly, a happy association between Chinese children and your Mickeys, Donalds and Goofys.

I am sure if your thinking follows a logical line, and there is a marketplace in it, you could end up running your own Mickey and Minnie Universities. The usual fears come to mind.

You know, that some Hollywood business can come to so influence children that you will, as the Jesuits used to say, have them for life. That the fun will have behind it the ideas and values of a large multi-national corporation.

The US government may be losing an international charm offensive, but Mickey may get to places that even Obama cannot reach. At least with your plans we can see that your objective is little more than the need to appease the appetites of your investors.

I am sure millions of Chinese children may well acquire English with a jolliness to it. People often forget that profits have to be based on giving people what they want, although not necessarily what they need.

Jamie Oliver, along with others, has shown that if you get them young enough you can feed the children of homo sapiens with the most excruciating dross. They take to it like ducks to water, so long as the social programming that is attached to every act – whether eating or schooling – is thorough enough.

We who are not Walt Disney shareholders worry, Walt, that you might be building more than a profit. You may be growing your markets for years to come through a pleasant form of brainwashing.

But Walt, hey! Let’s cut you a bit of slack here. What you are doing has been done by states, principalities, empires, churches and political movements for millennia. So you might as well join the club.

Personally, I would like you to turn your attention to our prison service. Goofy and Mickey could do us all a big favour if they could bring some of that Disney stardust to incarceration.

And work your magic so that people actually learned something in prison. Not just the means to be more criminal on release, which alas is our current experience.

And then there is the health service. Could you not “giggle” people into healthy habits so that they don’t eat the stuff that Jamie warns us about? And thereby ruin their health and our health service?

A “Goofy” response to our social maladies could well be food for thought. For the signs are we are breeding dumb solutions by the score.
Our educators and social engineers would be well advised to take a leaf out of the Disney business plan – and make learning more joyful and profitable to society. Else we lose out, and with it our children.