No, it's bad. And while the problem is old the scale of it is new.

It's a false claim often made by marketing people that marketing is synonymous with persuasion and the propagation of ideas. That without marketing everything is doomed to obscurity and irrelevance. Well, that may be true for an increasing number of areas of life in the world that marketing has built but it isn't generally. You've heard of Quantum Mechanics, right? Do you think it says something valid about the world? Did anyone ever market it to you?

Marketing is a fundamentally shallow form of communication. It's the forcing of awareness of something onto people without their choosing to be aware of it. The payload is necessarily low in information content, the interaction is brief and the message is dressed up to be maximally attention-grabbing. These things have negative results, and those negative results become worse the more pervasive marketing gets. The fact that people have always done it doesn't make it good, or make it desirable to allow an unlimited amount of it into our society.

It's worse in modern times for a couple of reasons. One is that our society consumes more information than ever before, and we've made a Faustian bargain with marketing to fund the generation of that information. Another is that marketing drags everything down to its level - the presence of these shallow, maximally distracting signals forces others to do the same in order to be heard. The transformation of politics into marketing (marketed as "inevitable" or "the way it's always been" by marketers) is a case in point. It's cancerous, and I'm glad people are finally waking up to it.

None of us were born with knowledge of quantum mechanics. Some outside force placed that information into your head by sitting you down in a classroom, and incentivizing you enough to remain there under the vague threat of future poverty. Very few things get the privilege of becoming part of a school curriculum. And the way those ideas get there, looks a lot like marketing.

I don't think anything I can say will change your mind. Often, a belief that things were better in the past is more of a personality trait or an emotional disposition motivated by external events rather than something rational.

If you're so inclined though, I highly recommend using the Library of Congress website or Newspapers.com to read what mass communication was like 50-200 years ago.

You'll be amazed at how little has changed:

https://pessimists.co/telephone-archive/

https://pessimists.co/radio-archive/

Again with the equating marketing to communication, propagation of ideas and persuasion. What goes on in a classroom is not marketing, by any useful definition...

Yet.

Any time you have limited attention, and more than one idea vying for that attention, the end result is marketing.

Any argument you make that students should spend an hour learning about quantum mechanics instead of something else on the market of ideas (eg. finance, literature, history, etc.) is by definition an act of positioning.

The curriculum of today is the result of marketing in the past. You just don't see it that way because you weren't around when those decisions were being made.

No, you're defining marketing in a way so broad as to render the term meaningless, as a way of avoiding answering the actual criticisms. An extreme example of this kind of argument would be "murder is doing stuff, here is an example of people doing stuff and it's fine, so murder is fine". This is fallacious (and, if done deliberately, dishonest) so I won't engage in that line of debate further.

Conversely, I would say you’re defining marketing so narrowly that you’re actually just talking about advertising.

But I agree, it sounds like we’re just arguing semantics at this point and have reached the logical end point of all internet debate