Today coloring books are offered everywhere-- at the doctor's office, restaurants, even recently at the bank. They appear to be the "shut the kid up" toy of choice at all sorts of establishments.
We didn't run into this, but as I said our child is a teenager. When he was younger we typically brought along our own stuff like puzzles and books so if there were "shut up kid" options we didn't use them.
At a preschool my son was at around the age of 3, they used to do a lot of "art" projects, really carbon-copy crafts projects. They were along the lines of gluing eyes to egg cartons in the same places, painting things in exactly the same way, etc. They were pretty obviously designed to show the parents some output, not to encourage creativity or anything useful like motor development.
Yes, I agree that can be a huge problem. We toured schools like this but fortunately had also saw other preschool options that were much more appropriate. I really appreciated the art options at our son's preschool. It was definitely open ended access, process not product oriented. While we did plenty of messy stuff at home too, it was a treat to know that at school he spent happy time with paint, clay, without the home clean up.
