School book clubs sell more than books
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- February
- 11
I wrote a check early this morning for $4 at the request of my 7-year-old daughter, who wanted to buy “Hotel for Dogs,” the book upon which the popular movie was based. Her second grade teacher sends home a pamplet every month from Scholastic Inc., the publisher of popular books for kids.
Of course there’s no obligation to buy anything. But try telling that to a 7-year-old, I’ve noticed lately that there’s a lot more than books in the listing that my school gives my child. Among the items Scholastic hawks to kids are posters, junky toys both separately and packed together with books, and electronic games.
Later in the day I read that a group called the “Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood”:http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/621/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=26599 has started a campaign to try to stop in-school book club sales from including things other than books.
A review by the group of Scholastic’s elementary and middle school book clubs found that one-third of the items for sale are either not books or are books packaged with other items such as jewelry and toys.
They are starting an online e-mail campaign to try to stop Scholastic from selling so much junk to kids. Sounds like a great idea.
This entry was posted
on Wednesday, February 11th, 2009 at 5:29 pm by Jane Lerner.
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I don’t have any issue with the sale of pencils, notepads and other items that directly relate to reading and writing, but I could definitely do without the “jewelry” (particularly since it’s really cheap and I wonder about its lead content), and those electronic games.
That said, I think the Scholastic program, overall, is a good one, since part of the proceeds are returned to the school and because it also allows parents to buy books to donate other books to the school’s library.