by Matt Muns
What do George Floyd, Thanksgiving, and the Civil War all have in common? The publicly traded Scholastic Corporation has made a conscious decision to weave them into a twisted account of American History (their label) portraying our country as systemically racist, fundamentally flawed, and essentially evil. Articles written in their weekly Scholastic News Review are mandatory classroom reading and discussion for our children—6 million in total from first through sixth grade across the country, according to Scholastic.
During back-to-school week in August, these 6 million mostly elementary-age students were welcomed back with an article titled “Demanding Justice,” with the subheading: “Protests spread across the United States after a Black man is killed by police.”
The opening article paragraphs are misleading and disturbing:
Hundreds of thousands of Americans are demanding an end to the long history of racism and police brutality against Black people in the U.S. He (George Floyd) died after being pinned to the ground by a white police officer. The officer had pressed his knee into Floyd’s neck for more than 8 minutes. Floyd repeatedly said he couldn’t breathe.
This skewed portrayal of the event was pushed onto my 9-year-old, fourth-grade daughter. George Floyd was arrested for a purported crime. In June, the county medical examiners found the cause of death was cardiopulmonary arrest, which potentially had to do with the combination of fentanyl, methamphetamine, and cannabinoids discovered in his blood, according to the toxicology report.
This public information existed long before Scholastic decided to push out a false narrative that would lead most children to infer that George Floyd had died from the police officer kneeling on his neck.
This theme of portraying the United States as systemically racist was visited again in a Scholastic News Review article in November titled, “We’re Still Here.” Thanksgiving week, instead of learning about the history of the early Pilgrims, their struggle to survive in a harsh new environment, and the early support given to them by the Wampanoag tribe that led to the “First Thanksgiving” celebration, our children were given another misleading narrative labeled American History.
The opening paragraphs detail how the Europeans brought diseases that caused the death of many of the Wampanoag and that the Pilgrims then built their settlement where the deceased Wampanoag once lived. The article takes a dark turn under the main section labeled “Broken Promises.”
Without explaining to our children that more than 50 years had elapsed since the first Thanksgiving, the article states that Europeans then took over the Wampanoag’s land, killed many of their people, and enslaved the remaining ones. This again would lead a young child like my daughter to believe that after celebrating a good harvest the Pilgrims then turned on their benefactors, killing and enslaving them.
The start of 2021 found Scholastic ensuring they, too, were a part of erasing history instead of teaching it. The Scholastic News Review on January 5 had a picture of a J.E.B. Stuart statue being removed with the word box at the bottom of the picture called “Words to Know” with the word racism and its definition.
While the article doesn’t mention or address relevant historical details leading up to the American Civil War, it is heavy on the kidnapping and enslaving of people from Africa, which it infers the United States government actively participated in. In reality, the United States banned the importation of slaves in 1808 (one year after the U.K. did it in 1807) and U.S. citizens had never participated in the capturing and shipping of humans from Africa. This key fact goes unmentioned.
With each of these Scholastic News Reviews comes a teaching guide. One of them titled, “Strategies for Teaching about Racism and Unrest” came from and was linked to blacklivesmatteratschool.com. This is further proof that the Scholastic curriculum being force-fed to our elementary-age children has a clear objective to indoctrinate them that the United States is a systemically racist and fundamentally flawed country and thus should be radically changed.
Scholastic’s goal is simply stated in black and white by their 2nd generation Chairman and CEO, Richard Robinson, in a message posted on the company’s website:
To help them, WE must know who they are. Each day WE try to reach to the very heart of what each child will uniquely respond to—what will CHANGE the way THEY think about themselves and the world.
Scholastic seeks to connect emotively with our children and change the way they think about the United States and the ideals, principles, and freedoms it was founded upon. We must say to our school districts and our state representatives that we want Scholastic out of our educational system and out of the classrooms trying to indoctrinate our children.
These are our children, not Scholastics’, not the school districts’, not the teachers’. We pay for Scholastic with our tax dollars and it is time to say no more.
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Matt Muns is the managing partner of Advanced Global Resources, a technology consulting group headquartered in Dallas. This is his second professional services firm to co-found and lead over the past 13 years, with personnel and clients spanning five continents. He and his teams have successfully implemented technology for the Fortune 500, large multinational companies, and the U.S. government. He is a member of the Texas State Bar and lives in Southlake with his wife and three children.
