On advertising and teaching...

I am a little uncomfortable with the idea of linking advertising with teaching. If we are being overly reductive, both teaching and advertising are about motivating people. True. However, I believe you have to be rather cynical about human nature in order for advertising to be successful. When practiced at its best, advertising plays upon the basest of human instincts, often subliminally, to motivate people to do things or acquire things they often don't need. Contrasting this to teaching, where we overtly (attempt to) motivate people to engage new information and construct knowledge and experience from it. To be sure, there are teachers who are cynical about their pedagogy, their students, and the impact of their work, but we can agree that these are not effective teachers.