Under communism, we were told, children behind the Berlin Wall or in the shadows of the Great Wall trudged forlornly to school in drab shades of gray, green, and brown. We were told these children were allowed no individuality or freedom of expression; they were ground into a mindless monotony. To underscore the bituminous haze through which we saw those children, Richard Nixon said, ''What are our schools if not for indoctrination against communism?''

Today, capitalism is the opposite.

A reminder of this was in The Boston Globe sports section last Thursday. Red Sox outfielder Darren Lewis was photographed with a group of children. Lewis was pointing to a new ballfield at the Roxbury Boys and Girls Club.

Far more striking was that nearly every one of the children in the picture wore exactly the same T-shirt. The T-shirt was for the allergy drug Claritin, an official sponsor of Major League Baseball.

The caption under the photo said Lewis offered a ''helping hand'' to the youths. As the children's chests blared ''Claritin (loratadine),'' ''Claritin (loratadine),'' ''Claritin (loratadine),'' ''Claritin (loratadine),'' it was clear that it was the children who were the helping hands - as unwitting billboards for the pharmaceutical industry.

We seem to have trouble investing in public schools so these kids can think for themselves, but we have no problem producing a proletariat that possesses neither capital nor the means of production but offers mobile spaces of 12 inches by 16 inches to drum ''Claritin (loratadine)'' into the heads of anyone they meet.

Claritin is a particularly ironic case: It finds the time to play urban savior at the very time it is under attack for gouging the kids' parents and elders. This week on the presidential campaign trail, Vice President Al Gore singled out Claritin, made by Schering-Plough, for using its patents to pile up profits. Pharmaceuticals are the most profitable companies in the world, and Schering-Plough, with Claritin as its flagship drug, had a profit of $2.1 billion in 1999 on sales of $9.2 billion. The 23 percent return on revenues was four times higher than the average return, for example, for airlines.

According to a Wall Street Journal feature last month, drug companies spend more money on salespeople than on scientists. Schering-Plough, instead of working with Congress to make drugs more affordable, now spends more on advertising Claritin than Coca-Cola spends on Coke or Anheuser-Busch spends to push Budweiser and its Super Bowl lizards.

Instead of seeking compromise with politicians on Capitol Hill who note that 20 pills of Claritin cost $44 in the United States while they cost $8.75 in a more universal-health-care Europe, Schering-Plough has reportedly tripled its lobbying budget to $6.6 million. It has hired former US representative Bob Livingston to lobby for patent extensions and the license to further gouge.

But this is far greater than just singling out Claritin. This is about the use of our children as billboards, period. Coca-Cola may lag behind Claritin in overall advertising, but Coke is leading the race to turn public schools into one giant billboard. Soda companies, one of the biggest contributors to our national epidemic of child obesity, are throwing cash at struggling school systems to gain exclusive vending machine rights, to plaster their name along the hallways, on scoreboards, on school buses,and on rooftops.

Once we let Channel One into schools a decade ago, with its 12-minute home room show, which contained two minutes of fast-food commercials, the floodgates were open. For all the pious things we say about how precious our children are and how priceless is their childhood, we have allowed capitalism to put a price on their heads and on their chests.

Not one of these companies cares whether standardized test scores rise, but I bet you would see the greatest rise in scores in the history of the Western world if you took out a few of the questions on Charlemagne and asked things like:

''Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods are associated with: (a) humanitarian causes; (b) politics; (c) choking in big matches; (d) swoosh.''

Why, after a few more Claritin sports clinics, kids might even be able to spell loratadine. Communism has faded into feeble caricatures, but there are still children being indoctrinated. They are told they are individuals, but capitalism is doing its best to convince them otherwise. What are our schools if not to turn children into mindless, monotonous billboards?

Derrick Z. Jackson is a Globe columnist.

© Copyright 2000 Globe Newspaper Company

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