Scholastic, once again, finds a way to get to our school children

This week the New York Times ran an article about Admongo.gov, a media literacy campaign aimed at 4th through 6th graders (In a World of Ads, Teaching the Young How to Read Them, April 27th). After reading the article, and checking out the website, I was moved to write the following letter to the editor of the NY Times:

To the Editor,
As a parent and former classroom teacher, I am not impressed with the new media literacy program aimed at 4th – 6th graders (In a World of Ads, Teaching the Young How to Read Them, April 27th). I am all for children learning about advertising and becoming critical consumers, however, Scholastic isn’t the right company to be co-sponsoring such a curriculum. Scholastic has already taken advantage of the trust of parents and schools by marketing more and more “junk” to our children. Take a look at current Scholastic book clubs and book fairs, and you will see they are filled with media-linked books, lipsticks, jewelry and toy tie-ins that add to our consuming culture and seduce children away from good literature. Only under pressure from the Campaign for Commercial-Free Childhood did Scholastic take the highly-sexualized Bratz doll products out of their book clubs and book fairs. Now, Scholastic has managed another way to get to our children – under the dangerous ruse of being part of the solution.

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Meanwhile, there are other problems as well. For example, the fake advertisements are pretty tame. The curriculum does not dive into issues such as violence and over-sexualization, which are a huge part of marketing towards children. There are some useful tools, such as materials aimed at helping families deconstruct ads and have conversations at home, but whatever might be good, comes at the cost of giving Scholastic more space to advertise in our schools. I feel strongly that schools should be free of advertisements, so for me, the poster above – which will be popping up in schools all over – is actually just a big promotion for Scholastic – a for profit company.