A New Battlefront Opens in the Textbook Wars

By Anneli Rufus, AlterNet. Posted September 28, 2006.

We trust school textbooks to be packed with facts, to be dispassionate overviews of everything that is and that has ever happened. We assume that middle-school and high-school students today know the same stuff we knew at their age: that with certain embellishments, certain improvements and updates, each new generation chiseling its initials into desktops inherits a basic knowledge set, taken for granted, the nuts and bolts and navigators that we studied, back then.

But that was then. Now we live in strange times when everyone nurses his or her own truth. The very concept of objectivity has been deconstructed on kindergarten nap carpets. Thus the question of what deserves to be taught -- and what gets forgotten -- is a political matter. At its core throbs a $4.5-billion-a-year textbook industry in which four megapublishing houses produce nearly all the books used at American public schools. And the process by which it is decided what kids will learn is a big messy mosh. Its winners and losers include pressure groups, religious zealots, lobbyists, school boards, the megapublishers -- Houghton Mifflin, Harcourt, Pearson and McGraw-Hill and their many imprints -- and, oh yeah, the kids.

Just as the left and right accuse each other of controlling U.S. media, both also accuse each other of controlling academia.

Sen. Sheila Kuehl -- better known to boomers as the actress who played Zelda in "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis," circa 1960 -- authored a bill this year requiring California textbooks to "accurately portray in an age-appropriate manner the cultural, racial, gender and sexual orientation diversity of our society." The state senate approved the bill 22-15 on May 11. LGBT activists celebrated because, in academia, what California does matters. Along with also-populous Florida and Texas, it's an "adoption state," which means that books selected by California's school boards are fast-tracked to being adopted nationwide. Kuehl was optimistic, telling ABC News that she envisioned future textbooks describing James Baldwin not merely as "an African American writer" but as "an African American gay writer." (Baldwin himself preferred being called simply "an American writer" to "a black writer.")

SB 1437's critics included Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who vowed to veto the bill if and when it reached his desk. Hoping to dodge that veto, on Aug. 7 the state legislature approved an amended -- some say gutted -- version of the bill, which mandates only that textbooks not reflect adversely on people based on sexual orientation.

On Sept. 6, Schwarzenegger vetoed it.

It comes down to the same old skirmish: Should individuals get column inches because of what they did -- or because of who they are in terms of involuntary identity-definers such as gender and class? Who goes in? Who stays out? Says who? Not everyone can fit. The books are already overstuffed: Houghton Mifflin's 747-page A More Perfect Union, a typical middle-school social studies volume, weighs four pounds.

The sins of yesterday's history textbooks were largely of omission: the achievements of women, non-Westerners, preliterate societies and people of color remained sadly unsung. A fix-that urgency infuses today's books. The frontier-settlement section of America: Pathways to the Present starts with a brief introduction, and then: "The majority of settlers who traveled to the west were white. There were, however, thousands of African Americans who moved westward." Next we learn about "A Frontier for Women": "Many women regretted their family's [sic] decision to go west." The pendulum swings wide, atoning. Houghton Mifflin's To See a World includes details on Renaissance writer Christine de Pizan and patron-of-the-arts Isabella D'Este, but omits mention of their near-contemporary, Galileo. Fair? Or arbitrary?

A main reason for making textbooks so diverse is the idea that kids need role models in whom they can recognize themselves, and academia has been dead-white-men territory for far too long. My husband's teachers at Berkeley public schools in the late '60s and early '70s were academic revolutionaries. You kids have already learned white people's history, they announced at the start of each school year. But the kids hadn't already learned white people's history. As it happened, they never did.

Because the financially strapped Berkeley School District was stocked solely with old, unapologetically eurocentric books -- which the kids seldom saw -- many teachers typed and mimeographed their own classroom materials to distribute instead. My husband saved a stack of these. "Africa: The Father and Motherland," reads one yellowed page featuring a map. Other pages comprise a crash course in Swahili. (Mimi ni mwanafunzi means "I am a student.") The teachers handing out these materials, and the students memorizing them, were nearly all white: the spawn of professors, grad students and beatniks. It was the wave of the future. Since 1976, California's curriculum has been legally required to be inclusive and characterize specified groups in upbeat, inspirational ways. According to official state guidelines, an equal number of males and females must be depicted performing equally strenuous physical and mental tasks, solving problems and displaying a span of emotions. To be adopted in California, textbooks are forbidden by law to "reflect adversely," as the official wording puts it, on pretty much anyone.

Anneli Rufus is the author of several books, including "Party of One: The Loners' Manifesto."

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