5 Reasons Scholastic Can’t Be Trusted with Your Kids
Scholastic, the beacon of literary adventures for kids of the 1980s and 1990s, is no longer the children’s company to trust with the hearts and minds of the next generation. The colorful shelves we once shopped in our school libraries, promoting classics like Clifford the Big Red Dog and Charlotte’s Web, now display sexually explicit content aimed at your eight-year–old. Buckle Up. Welcome to the Scholastic Book Fair of 2023.
Read more below!08/28/2023
By: BRAVE Books Staff
Why Can You Not Trust Scholastic?
1. Scholastic books expose children to sexually explicit content
Say goodbye to talking spiders and big red dogs, and say hello to Scholastic’s new “culturally relevant characters.” In Welcome to St. Hell: My Trans Teen Misadventure, Lois Hancox transitions to Lewis Hancox in the graphic novel geared for fourteen-year-olds.
The book follows the author’s real-life experiences through comic-book style images that depict aspects of puberty (menstruation, pubic hair, breasts) and transitioning (testosterone injections, binding, packers). The book contains language such as f***, p*****, b**** and includes a sex scene that includes unhooking a bra, lying in bed together, and implied sexual masturbation under sheets. Again, welcome to your local Scholastic Book Fair in 2023.
2. Scholastic books push LGBTQIA+ content
According to Scholastic, reading your kid a picture book with drag queen undertones is a perfectly suitable bedtime story for your three-year-old. Llama Glamarama by Simon Green is a picture book aimed at pre-k to kindergarteners about Larry, who “loves to dress up in bright costumes and DANCE! He has to hide this from the others for fear that they won't approve of his raucous ways.” Simon Green also writes Scholastic-published YA novels, like Gay Club! and Noah Can’t Even, a book with a banana on its cover as an innuendo that cues its gay-romance inside.
The Heartstopper graphic novels by Alice Oseman is a four-book series centered around a gay romance for grades 7-10. The graphic novels are littered with same-sex kiss scenes, f*** curse words, and quotes like “so I came out bisexual to my mom” and “bisexual feels right.” The tagline for this series is, “Boy meets boy. Boys become friends. Boys fall in love. A bestselling LGBTQ+ graphic novel about life, love, and everything that happens in between.”
The middle-grade novel, Melissa by Alex Gino, is about a transgender boy who comes out as a girl geared toward grades 3-7. The book received the “Scholastic Gold Award'' for its “innovative” story and is littered with quotes like: “This was called transitioning. You could even start before you were eighteen with pills called androgen blockers that stopped the boy hormones already inside you from turning your body into a man’s.” Pg 47, Melissa.
3. Scholastic books promote authors who are trans-influencers
Now, let’s introduce you to a handful of the authors Scholastic deems trustworthy to influence your children. Meet Alex Gino, the author of Rick and the aforementioned book, Melissa, two pro-LGBTQ+ books that are sexually explicit and are recommended for grades 3-7. Alex Gino identifies as gender queer and uses the singular they pronoun. In his author bio, he calls himself an award-winning author of queer and progressive middle-grade fiction who goes by the “honorific Mx. Gino.”
Meet Jason June, author of Mermicorn Island: Too Many Dolphins!, a book with two gay dads for grades 2-5. Jason June’s bio states, “Jason June is a writer who has always dreamed of being a mermaid. He regularly swims in the lake that he lives on and tells stories to the turtles on the beach. If he could have any kind of Sparkle, it would be Shape Shifting Sparkle. When he finally gets that mermaid tail, he hopes it’s covered in pink scales.”
4. Scholastic is ultimately led by executives who promote a woke agenda
The top executives behind Scholastic have a vested interest in efforts to promote transgender and woke ideology for youth. The CEO and President of Scholastic is also president of a foundation that fights for social justice to make children’s publishing houses pro-transgender. The foundation, Thomson Reuter Foundation Inc. heads an initiative called Openly that says, “So far, 2023 has seen a wealth of successful titles by and about gay people, but few asexual, bisexual, and pansexual books. Where are the messy, complex stories covering the realities of queer life that are not about coming out, being deviant, killing yourself, or being killed? …And where are all the bad gays? Gay men are not all the innocuous and sexless ‘best friends’ the media loves for them to be.”
Former Scholastic CEO Dick Robinson said, “We believe Scholastic can make the greatest impact by continuing to promote the work of LGBTQIA+ creators in our publishing, including the support and amplification of transgender and non-binary voices. This year, eight of the ten most challenged books on the American Library Association's Most Challenged Books List were there because of LGBTQIA+ content, and we are proud that two of them were published by Scholastic: Raina Telgemeier's Drama and Alex Gino's George, the #1 most challenged book of last year.”
5. Scholastic wants to keep most parents in the dark
Scholastic hides sexual content behind book covers that seem like normal, innocent books. In the case of series, they nestle LGBTQIA+ motifs in series like Jason June’s Mermicorn series. A parent wrote in an Amazon review, “We bought the first two books in [Jason June’s] series, and my daughter loved them, so I wanted to buy her the third when it came out. Two pages in it talk about the little girl dolphin swimming over to her two dads. That is not ok for a children's book, there is no reason my 7 year old should be asking me if it's possible for two boy dolphins to have a family. What purpose does it serve to create homosexual dolphins other than to try to make that seem ok and normal/natural? I don't see how having this helps the story at all, why do they need to push a political agenda on children.”
NBC news reported that another parent asked administrators at the Spring Branch Independent School District in Houston to pull this graphic novel [Drama by Raina Telgemeier, published by Scholastic], which features gay and bisexual characters, because she claimed it might lead young students “to question their sexual orientation when they don't even comprehend what that means.”
In addition to questioning sexual orientation, Scholastic books include conent that introduces keeping secrets from parents as in Alex Gino’s Melissa: “George had been reading websites about transitioning since Scott had taught her how to clear the web browser history on Mom’s computer.” Pg 61, Melissa.
With Scholastic, one thing remains clear–Scholastic doesn’t care about your children. Scholastic cares about promoting an ideology that will leave your kids confused and questioning the truth. At BRAVE Books, we believe a children’s book publisher should offer engaging and age-appropriate without all the junk. That's why we are excited to announce BRAVE Book Fairs, which offers pre-screened books to ensure that children aren’t exposed to adult content (masked as a harmless children’s book). Ultimately, we want to promote a love for reading while protecting the innocence of childhood.
But, if you want to fight back against this woke company, email us at bookfair@brave.us to host a brave book fair at your own school! It's clear that parents and children need an alternative to scholastic. That's where BRAVE Books comes in. BRAVE Books publishes wholesome children's books that are part of a buildable series called the Freedom Island Book Club. Get a new book delivered to your doorstep each month on a different traditional value such as the sanctity of life, the Second Amendment, and the importance of honesty. Plus, join the club today get your first month for FREE!
You can also sign up for the Freedom Island Book Club to receive a new book every month full of more ways to teach children other important traits like leadership, love, and overcoming fear.
