SubscribeOnce in a great while, the corruption that pervades the schoolbook business is displayed so vividly that it draws the attention of the national media. That is what happened in 1991, when the Texas State Board of Education staged an adoption of American-history books.I think LaClair is bringing attention to rather urgent, though largely unnoticed, issue.
For more than four decades, the couple influenced what children read, not just in Texas but around the country.
The reason was Texas’ power to be a national template; the state board chooses textbooks for the entire state, and of the 20 or so states that choose books statewide, only California is bigger than Texas. It is difficult and costly for publishers to put out multiple editions, so a book rejected by Texas might not be printed at all.
There is no fucking way I'm raising my kid in US. Don't know exactly how I'm going to go about this yet, but if she has to be home schooled or sent to Ukraine of France, or some other country in order to avoid being exposed to this sort of bullshit, so be it.
"In trying to avoid anything that might be offensive to either the left or the right, we were reduced to producing totally bland, middle-of-the-road pabulum," says one Macmillan/McGraw-Hill editor who, unsurprisingly, was not eager to be identified. ...Stille recommends Joy Hakim's series A History of US:
Many of the changes urged by this or that pressure group can be justified and defended, but the overall result is what has been aptly called a "conspiracy of good intentions"; the need to please or not offend every possible constituency has paralyzed textbook writers. Each paragraph is a carefully negotiated compromise, making it virtually impossible for a textbook to have a distinctive voice, not to mention humor, moral outrage, or evocative prose.
"It is a process that is destined to produce a dumbed-down product," says Byron Hollinshead, the head of American Historical Publications, and formerly president of American Heritage and Oxford University Press. "The Harvard Education Letter," he told me, "once compared textbooks to pet food. Pet food is not really concocted for pets, it's meant to appeal to pet owners. Textbooks are not written for children, they are written for textbook committees who flip through them to make sure they have the right ethnic balance and the proper buzz words."
... The books, written by Joy Hakim, an independent writer and grandmother from Virginia, are a refreshing exception in the otherwise bleak textbook scene. A former schoolteacher and journalist, Hakim was appalled by the dullness of the textbooks she saw and decided she could do a better job herself. As she began writing her first book, she tested it on children at a local Virginia elementary school and she paid them to comment on her manuscript, marking passages that were interesting, dull, or unclear.
Even though she was only circulating computer printouts, other classes that were using regular textbooks began asking to use her book. While virtually all the other textbooks are written by committees in as neutral a tone as possible, and do little more than present a series of events, dates, and people, Hakim tried to make story-telling central to her work. Her books have a distinctive personal voice and are enjoyable to read. They have been praised by, among many others, cultural conservatives such as Lynne Cheney, back-to-basics educators such as Diane Ravitch, liberal teachers in inner-city schools, and prominent professional historians. ("I was impressed by the accuracy and the depth of her research," said James McPherson, a professor of American history at Princeton University.) And while Hakim's books contain more of the traditional subjects of American history than others, they also include more about women and minorities. In this respect, McPherson told me, "I thought her book did a good job of inclusiveness without being obtrusive."
It is not politics, however, that sets A History of US apart, it is its prose. Hakim believes in the value of narrative history for children. She was impressed by a study showing that children retained far more of what they read when the texts were written by professional writers rather than education specialists. Three pairs of writers—composition instructors, linguists, and Time-Life journalists—were all asked to rewrite the same passages from a widely used history textbook. The texts by the education specialists produced no improvement in students' comprehension, while students retained 40 percent more from the passages written by the two professional journalists.
Commissioner Lucille E. Davy (NJ)Propaganda, or a textbook author that didn't go to law school?
Current Office: Commissioner of Education
...
Professional Experience:
Education Policy Adviser, New Jersey Democratic Committee, 2000-2001
You know, every time the church/state separation in schools thing comes up on Metafilter, I'm absolutely flabbergasted at what American teachers who have a firmly religious mindset are able to get away with in the course of teaching classes that have absolutely nothing to do with religion.Social and Legal pressures are completely different in my mind, and I'm wondering if I've maybe chosen the wrong wording. The Civil Rights Act of 1875 is an example of how I see legal pressure being applied without the social pressure to back it up.
It's such an odd state of affairs to read about if you were educated at a state school in the UK.
All maintained schools must provide daily collective worship for all registered pupils (apart from those who have been withdrawn from this by their parents). This is may be provided within daily assembly but the distinction should be made clear.Source: Government TeacherNet website
The head teacher is responsible for arranging the daily collective worship after consulting with the governing body. Daily collective worship must be wholly or mainly of a broadly Christian character. The precise nature will depend on the family background, ages and abilities of the pupils. It is acceptable for schools to split the collective worship sessions over the school year to be 51% Christian and 49% other faiths or interests.
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