The Study of Advertising Analysis in Canada's Consumer Education: The Overlooked History of Media Literacy Education and Its Potential

<p> The study of advertising analysis has key significance for education to date as the world leans toward post-truth thinking.</p><p> It is well known that advertising analysis in Japanese schools was influenced by a teachers' resource book developed for media literacy education introduced into the English curriculum in the late 1980s in Ontario, Canada. However, Japanese studies on this topic overlook the fact that before media literacy education began in schools in Canada, a more basic advertising analysis was already a part of consumer education. As a result, an approach to advertising analysis focusing on understanding sophisticated techniques of consumer appeal came to be highly regarded, while the importance of the basic study of advertising analysis required by today's society remains unrecognized.</p><p> Based on the above recognition, this paper investigates the history of what the study of advertising analysis aimed to achieve in consumer and media literacy education in Canada. Specifically, it examines the development of advertising analysis in secondary school consumer education from the 1940s, the early years of consumer education in Canada, to the 1980s, using examples from Alberta and British Columbia. This is followed by an investigation into the positioning of advertising analysis in media literacy education in the teachers' resource book developed by Ontario's Ministry of Education in 1989.</p><p> The results of this investigation are as follows. First, the teaching guide of the 1940s in Alberta positioned advertising as one of the sources that provided product information in order for consumers to make rational decisions. As well, a textbook written by an Alberta educator in the 1960s focused on language techniques in advertisements and encouraged students to evaluate the objectivity of the product information. It is at this point that the fundamental approach to the study of advertising analysis in consumer education was established.</p><p> In the 1980s, however, a collection of educational materials on consumer education published by the Ministry of Education and Ministry of Consumer and Corporate Affairs in British Columbia included an item with a different approach. It reflected the interests of its creators, the advertising self-regulatory organization and a consumer goods company, and claimed that the “spirit” of the product represented in advertisements is a factor in a consumer's purchase decision.</p><p> The push to recognize this intangible factor in advertising was also seen in a teachers' resource book for media literacy education in Ontario. In this book, advertisements were basically regarded as texts, like literary works, that can be used to train students to understand techniques for interpretation of their meaning and value.</p><p> These developments seem to imply progress in the study of advertising analysis. However, focusing on the literary value of techniques and disregarding factual information in advertisements correspond to a recent trend of relativizing objective facts. The history presented here reveals the problem with our educational mindset, where we tend to see the changing nature of the study of advertising analysis as progress rather than an issue.</p>