That book was assigned in my daughter’s class about 7 years ago. My wife was reading it aloud and became so agitated at its collectivist “message” that she called me in to hear it. We contacted the school and told the (classic, Earth-mother hippie) teacher exactly what we thought of that kind of radical indoctrination posing as “education”. We made it clear that if we saw any more of that socialist claptrap, we’d pull our daughter out of school instantly and educate her ourselves. Apparently, several other parents were similarly distressed, and the lesson plans quietly reverted to more suitable texts.
Lesson to be learned, just because your kids is in school does not mean you have a free pass to ignore their educational material.
BTW, when I was in 3rd grade "social studies" class, the text book we were assigned described the difference between socialism, communism, and capitalism; the description of communism was *fairly* honest (ie, the writers admitted it was a Bad Thing), but socialism was described in the most glowing terms imaginable, and the description of capitalism could have been straight out of an 1890s Marxist tract...There was no admission whatsoever that "the worker's" condition had changed since the days of Charles Dickens. The text really tried to push socialism-and the teacher not only pointed that out, she got the whole class to agree that "Socialism is the best system".
This was Anno Domini 1973.
Yeah, that sort of indoctrination has been going on for some decades now...Thankfully some parents fight back when they learn of it.