Scholastic Pulls 'Path to 9/11' Media Guide

September 8th, 2006 1:28 AM

This is getting entirely out of hand. What a crock. This is disgusting.

New York, NY (September 7, 2006) -- Scholastic, the global children’s publishing, education and media company, today announced that it is removing from its website the materials originally created for classroom use in conjunction with the ABC Television Network docudrama, “The Path to 9/ll,” scheduled to air on the ABC Television Network on September 10 and 11, 2006. A new classroom discussion guide for high school students is being created and will focus more specifically on media literacy, critical thinking, and historical background.

“After a thorough review of the original guide that we offered online to about 25,000 high school teachers, we determined that the materials did not meet our high standards for dealing with controversial issues,” said Dick Robinson, Chairman, President and CEO of Scholastic. “At the same time, we believe that developing critical thinking and media literacy skills is crucial for students in today’s society in order to participate fully in our democracy and that a program such as ‘The Path to 9/11’ provides a very ‘teachable moment’ for developing these skills at the high school level. We encourage teachers not to shy away from the controversy surrounding the program, but rather to engage their students in meaningful, in-depth discussion.”

Here's the pdf for section 5 in html below. That'll give you a feel for what they were like in pdf. And here is a file of the original main page of the guide. H/t BizzyBlog. (The guide was attacked by the liberal Media Matters site.)

Bootleg unedited copies of the movie are said to be starting to make the rounds in Europe.

When I saw through email that Scholastic had pulled the original Path to 9/11 study guides in pdf off line, I recalled that Google often caches pdfs in HTML. Sure enough, they were there. I saved them as separate web pages and loaded them up below.

Might be interesting to contrast and compare. I wonder, will the Dems or Scholastic go after my right to broadcast, too?

Student Resource Sheet 1

Student Resource Sheet 2

Classroom Discussion And Debate 1

Classroom Discussion And Debate 2

Beyond The Classroom Discussion And Debate