2. The Battle Over Textbook Content-Why You Should Become Involved

There is a hard-fought, no-quarter-given, cultural war over what to include in our children's social science, health, math, English and other textbooks. Great controversy swirls around whether a textbook book should promote:

citizenship; a traditional sense of family; patriotism; an understanding of the free enterprise system; positive aspects of the U.S. and its heritage; national unity; an understanding of the "melting pot"; traditional moral values; traditional education, e.g., phonetics, writing, spelling, and traditional math; the work ethic; individual responsibility; a credible understanding, appreciation, and tolerance for our diversity, and other matters.

Or whether a book should promote:

a loose definition of a family; situational ethics; diversity of sexual orientation and access to contraceptives; non-traditional education such as outcome-based education, the new math, social promotion, and elimination of grades; a dominant role for the federal government in dictating curricula, imposing bureaucratic notions of political correctness, and redistribution of state assets; that we are no longer the American people and have become the American peoples, a mosaic of separate ethnic groups, each cherishing and preserving its apartness; that the role of the historian is to produce "feel good history"; encouraging use of higher order skills (analysis, judgment) without providing lower order skills (knowledge) in order to "sign up the student"/indoctrinate to a desired conclusion; antipathy to western values; failing to teach that democracy and the individual freedoms we enjoy today are the product of western society; the original national history standards which were unanimously rejected by the U.S. Senate.

These are but a few of the textbook content controversies which divide us.

Textbooks are a product of the free enterprise system, and a reading of some of the current textbooks gives an interesting insight into what the publishers believe Texans want or will accept.

If you believe that textbook content is important to the education of your children then you should be aware of these battles over textbooks, and, you will not want to watch from the sidelines, and will lend your support to those books which are worthy and object to those books you believe are unsuitable. This is too important a task to leave to others. A historian friend of mine writes "never, ever forget the wisdom of Edmund Burke: ... 'all it takes for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing'."

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