Madder Men

In light of my last post and your comments on it, an article in today's New York Times Arts section seemed particularly timely.

The article,"Scholastic accused of Misusing Book Clubs" by Motoko Rich, discusses a watchdog group's opposition to the presence of advertising links and non-book items in the Scholastic Book Club flyers that go out to thousands of school children every month. I know several of us here at AJ's Clubhouse have expressed our concern about this before. The watchdog group is called Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood. You can see more of what they do at their website, linked above.

The argument that Scholastic offers is that some of these items help bring reluctant readers to books by luring them with posters, toys and games. The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood objects globally to anything that is not a book being marketed in schools and that the add-ons only teach children acquisitiveness, without actually teaching them to value books (I have heavily paraphrased here and take all credit for any oversimplification). I think my own opinion on the matter lies somewhere in the middle, although closer to the CCFC's side. I have already discussed in this space my discomfort with brand name advertising in schools. I don't, however, put the selling of a book with a poster in the same category as the selling of a video game. Scholastic has both types of things. I don't think video games belong in school flyers. But I have no problem with posters -- as long as the poster has something to do with the book. AJ loves it when his books come with posters. He has a number of them up in his room. But I would be surprised if he would choose a book simply because it had a poster. The poster would only encourage an interest that was already there. I don't even have a problem with some of the non-book items Scholastic sells -- science experiment kits, for example. If they get a kid to engage in some scientific inquiry at home, that's great. The Mad-Libs they've started selling are good too. Although not designed as educational tools but for silly fun, they encourage reading and writing and they taught my kid the parts of speech. My objection to most of the non-book items is the quality control -- the few science kit type products we've ordered from Scholastic have been cheaply made and hard to use. If they are going to sell such things, they should make sure they are good quality and worthwhile educational products. Not video games. Not advertising. Not junk.

Of course, what Scholastic wants to market outside of schools is its own business. Inside the school, where they have a captive audience that has to be there -- they have not chosen it -- marketing non-educational, branded, or plain inappropriate products is reprehensible. And Scholastic has been doing plenty of all three.

Mad Men

AJ is a huge fan of the website Funbrain. He loves the math games especially. He plays them in school when they have their computer lab day. I like the games too, but I'm a little squeamish about all the advertising. On the one hand, I'm sure the advertising is the only reason sites like this exist. And anything that gets a kid playing math for the sheer fun of it is doing something right. On the other hand, AJ is being bombarded with ads for Y0g0s and McDon@ld's. AJ and I talk a lot about advertising and what it does and how it works and why you should interrogate it, so I'm not really worried that he's being brainwashed. His friends are much more persuasive advocates for those particular products anyhow.

So my questions for you are, is advertising ever appropriate in educational materials? I am thinking not just of websites, but also things like the preschool math books based on Cheeri0s and M/Ms, school fundraisers with local fast food franchises (ours does D0min0s, Wendis and McDs every month with prizes for the class with the biggest haul) If so, how much is too much? What should we be doing about it?