Coal Companies Pay Scholastic To Teach Kids About The Wonders Of Coal

Using the captive audience of children in school for some predatory marketing - that's Scholastic for you!

Three advocacy groups have started a letter-writing campaign asking Scholastic Inc. to stop distributing the fourth-grade curriculum materials that the American Coal Foundation paid the company to develop.

The three groups — Rethinking Schools, the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood and Friends of the Earth — say that Scholastic’s “United States of Energy” package gives children a one-sided view of coal, failing to mention its negative effects on the environment and human health.

Kyle Good, Scholastic’s vice president for corporate communications, was traveling for much of Wednesday and said she could not comment until she had all the "United States of Energy” materials in hand.

Others at the company said Ms. Good was the only one who could discuss the matter. The company would not comment on how much it was paid for its partnership with the coal foundation.

Scholastic’s InSchool Marketing division, which produced the coal curriculum in partnership with the coal foundation, often works with groups like the American Society of Hematology, the Federal Trade Commission and the Census Bureau to create curriculum materials.

The division’s programs are “designed to promote client objectives and meet the needs of target teachers, students, and parents” and “make a difference by influencing attitudes and behaviors,” according to the company Web site.

“Promoting ‘client objectives’ to a captive student audience isn’t education,” Susan Linn, director of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, said in a statement. “It’s predatory marketing. By selling its privileged access to children to the coal industry, Scholastic is commercializing classrooms and undermining education.”

I'm not sure how this differs from the Gates Foundation promoting online learning and the wonders of technology via all the education reform tentacles they spew forth without noting any of the negatives to all this living and learning in "virtual worlds" (i.e., nobody seem to live and evolve in the "real" world anymore.)

But it is emblematic of the toxic corporate/consumerist environment we live in where every moment of our lives we are now subject to marketing - it is always about promoting "the client's objectives."

As for Scholastic, I'm surprised they didn't have Harry Potter added to the coal curriculum too so that they could cross promote the wonders of coal AND the wonders of the Harry Potter world!

Kinda the way the Disney-owned Good Morning America cross promotes Disney product as "news."