In the state of California, where busybody politicians believe no one can function in their everyday lives without the guidance of busybody politicians, there is now a push for lighter textbooks. Apparently, textbook-laden backpacks are twisting students’ spinal alignments. Or some such.
It says something about the state of public education today that the biggest issue regarding the school textbooks is not their content, but their weight. Regardless, this is important to all of us, because states like California have a major say about what Metro students carry in their backpacks on the way to the bus stop. The vast majority of school textbooks are published by a handful of national publishers for nationwide distribution, and the textbooks themselves are chosen by statewide commissions for use in schools. Textbook manufacturers naturally cater to the wishes of their largest customers. Hence, whatever California wants, Tennessee (and everyone else) usually will get.
So if this effort succeeds, Nashville students may be getting smaller textbooks somewhere down the road. Based on my own survey of the textbooks in general use throughout Metro schools today, that might not be such a bad thing. Today’s textbooks are, put simply, full of, uh, a bunch of extraneous stuff.
We certainly had useless fodder in our textbooks during my own school experience. But these days, it seems, textbooks have doubled—if not quadrupled—the junk factor. In some of today’s textbooks, irrelevancy pervades almost every page.
Down the street from Becker’s Bakery on the corner of 10th and Coruthers sits what was once the Waverly-Belmont School. It’s now the official library and media center of Metro schools. There, teachers can take a look at the vast array of textbooks approved for use in Metro classrooms.
You can, too. At least, I think you can. No one stopped me, anyway, when I decided, in a fit of nostalgia, to check out a few school textbooks. With the anniversary of Sept. 11 still fresh and patriotism on my mind, I started with American history, which was (and remains) my favorite subject. When I was in school, American history always ended around 1945. This was because, invariably, we would spend literally months on the explorers during the fall semester, piddle with the Colonial Era for another month or two and, then, realizing we were running out of time, we would start speeding through the rest of American history around Valentine’s Day. This was the typical schedule:
August-October: Explorers
November: Puritans/Pilgrims (tie-in with Thanksgiving a must)
December: England starts becoming a pain in the butt
January-May: Revolutionary War to World War II
If the latest history textbooks are any indication, I fear this problem has only worsened. Not only do they continue to overemphasize the explorers, they devote pages upon pages to the so-called “First Americans.” The Aztecs, the Iroquois, the Incans, they’re all here—and not just in a few short paragraphs either. We’re talking entire chapters dedicated to these folks.
And they don’t even tell the whole story. The Aztecs, especially, tend to get a pass from history books, never mind that theirs was a merciless regime given to marauding neighboring lands and eating their neighbors for dinner. Houghton-Mifflin’s The American Pageant coyly notes that there was some “unrest among peoples from whom the Aztecs demanded tribute.” Uh-huh. There was, actually, so much “unrest” that many of these neighbors allied themselves with the Spaniards to conquer the hated Aztecs.
The Spanish conquests, just so you know, were bad, unlike the Aztec conquests, which, if you’re keeping score, were good, at least according to the fourth grade Harcourt Brace book Early United States. It asserts that the “Aztecs borrowed new ways of doing things from peoples of the conquered. In this way, the Aztec Empire became one of the greatest of the time.”
It was those damned Spaniards who came over and ruined everything. It has become almost passé to point this out anymore, I realize, but white Europeans, as a whole, fare about as well in today’s history textbooks as they do in the NBA. Their crime: coming over and ruining this pristine paradise where civilizations like the Aztecs, so supposedly developed and wonderful, hadn’t even invented the wheel for transportation use.
According to Prentice Hall’s Pathways to the Present, a high school-level history text, Europeans were “driven by burning curiosity, a desire for wealth and a duty to spread their religion.” They were also, apparently, a bunch of paternalistic supremacists, as evidenced by the quote about Christopher Columbus in publisher Globe Fearon’s United States History, a text used by lower-level high school students: “Like most Europeans of his time, [Columbus] thought he should defeat other groups of people and control them.” How do they know this? Was there a European Gallup Poll back then? Isn’t it possible that, in fact, the average European didn’t have an opinion about it at all? The European masses may very well have been apathetic about the whole thing, early exploration being, by economic necessity, a pursuit of the elite and moneyed classes.
Speaking of Columbus, he comes off as a bumbling dunce. Much is made of the fact that he didn’t actually discover an alternate route to Asia. Well, how the hell was he supposed to know? It’s not like there were satellites back then. In Pathways, his first encounter with the native “Tainos” comes off like a passage from the Ugly American (or, in this case, the Ugly Italian): “The Tainos greeted the newcomers with gifts. This astonished Columbus, who was not familiar with the Native American view of trade as an exchange of gifts....”
The history textbooks Metro uses regard the introduction of slavery to the New World as the A-No. 1 sin of the Europeans. No one can argue with that, but it’s interesting to learn that some forms of slavery aren’t as bad as others, particularly the slavery practiced in Africa—according to these texts, anyway. After some time of conveniently overlooking the previous existence of African slavery, history textbooks now grudgingly admit that slavery was practiced in Africa well before the Europeans stuck their noses in. Evidently, though, African slavery was somehow “better” than the American version, even though much of the following paragraph from Pathways could have been written by an antebellum slavery apologist:
“[African] slaves became adopted members of the kinship group that enslaved them. Frequently they married into a lineage, even into the high ranks of society. Slaves could also move up in society and out of their slave role. Children of slaves were not presumed to be born into slavery. Finally, enslaved people carried out a variety of roles, not limited to tough physical labor. While most women and many men labored in the fields, some men became soldiers or administrators.”
That sure sounds great. The European (or “bad”) form of slavery, on the other hand, was brutal: “[Europeans] regarded slaves as mere property and treated them no better than farm animals. Slavery was a lifetime sentence—often a death sentence—from which there was no escape.”
European slavery: bad. African slavery: not so bad. European conquests: bad. Aztec conquests: good. There’s a definite trend here, which is to turn our history texts into politicized drivel, to create a world where the achievements of white males, no matter what their individual merits may be, are diminished in favor of those of others by virtue of nothing more than their sex or skin color. To be color blind, we must, it seems, be color-conscious, which is a little like destroying the village to save it.
Consider United States History, which devotes a mere 93 words to Benjamin Franklin. The book mentions in passing the following achievements for Franklin: street lights, fire department, library, Poor Richard’s Almanac, ambassador to France and a role in writing the U.S. Constitution.
Students who are subjected to the misery of reading United States History will not learn that Franklin also had a major role in passing the Declaration of Independence, that he invented bifocals, the lightning rod and the “Franklin stove,” and that he was a key negotiator in many Revolution-era treaties.
They will learn, however, the accomplishments of one Anna Green Winslow, a “young girl in 1772.” Unlike Franklin, little Anna merits an entire page in the book—198 words! Presented in diary form, her accomplishments were as follows: going to school, going to church, sewing, knitting and reading. After reading about Anna, students are asked a ridiculously vague “challenge” question: “What kind of person was Anna?” Answer: Obviously a much more important person than Benjamin Franklin, one of the greatest Americans who ever lived.
As though politically correct nonsense run amuck isn’t enough, there’s much more to discover about Metro textbooks—namely, the disturbing issue of factual inaccuracy.
For example, Pathways asserts that the dictum, “millions for defense, not one cent for tribute,” grew out of the so-called “XYZ Affair”—a 1798 Adams administration diplomacy initiative with France gone awry. (Almost any diplomacy initiative with France goes awry, but I digress).
That’s true as far as it goes, but from a historical perspective, the phrase really took wing a few years later during the Jefferson administration, in response to what were essentially terrorist operations by the Arab “Barbary States” of North Africa. The Barbary States demanded “protection” money from European powers to preserve access through shipping lanes in the Mediterranean Sea.
European nations played along, but the United States eventually refused to do so. The XYZ Affair was only marginally related to this, but students wouldn’t know that from reading Pathways, which, as far as I could tell, devotes nary a word to the Barbary States crisis.
As a side note, the war against the Barbary States is the American military action in history (“...to the shores of Tripoli...”) most closely related to the current war on terrorism. This might be an interesting point for teachers to make in the classroom today, but not if they’re using Pathways.
The book also has an incomplete and therefore misleading definition of “free enterprise system,” which it says is “an economic system in which companies compete for profits.” Well, that’s true to a point, but it ignores the fact that, to get those profits, these companies have to offer goods and services that consumers actually want for a price they will actually pay. The way the definition reads, consumers have no role in the system at all—it’s just a bunch of businessmen sitting around fighting over money.
According to United States History, a “conservative” is “a person who wants the government to do less for its citizens.” Like the free enterprise system definition in Pathways, this is also misleading, assuming, as it does, that any government activity is—per se—a positive thing. The implication is that conservatives must be selfish people—after all, how can anyone be against doing things for people? In fact, conservatives simply tend to have a skepticism about the idea that government action is always the answer to real or perceived problems.
This skewed view of conservatism continues in United States History’s assessment of the Reagan presidency, noting that “many Americans shared [Reagan’s] strong belief that the government should not help poor people.” Actually, Reagan’s view was that government programs sometimes did more harm than good for the poor (a view that was eventually vindicated by welfare reformer Bill Clinton in 1996), but students wouldn’t know that from the book.
United States History’s presentation of the Iran-Contra scandal is somewhat off too. It notes that “many Americans were angered by the news. They still felt that Iran was an enemy because of the hostage crisis. They also felt that the Contras were cruel and corrupt.”
The bit about Iran is reasonable, but the part about the Nicaraguan Contras is laughable. Far from thinking that the Contras were “cruel and corrupt,” the majority of Americans didn’t have a clue about the Contras—what they were, where they were or whether they were cruel or corrupt or what. In reality, most Americans were more or less just annoyed about having to hear about it day after day. Sort of like another event involving another president a decade later.
Speaking of which, Pathways spells Ken Starr’s name with one “r” on first mention. How hard can it be to correctly spell the name of a guy who was in the newspapers every day just four years ago?
And please, oh please, could we get some interesting writing? Here’s an actual passage from Pathways: “In a very basic way water transformed the young economy of the United States.” That’s sure to get teenagers’ intellectual juices flowing.
Or how about this strange little bit from United States History, which, while admittedly written for lower-level high school students, still seems too hackneyed for a school textbook: “The shah [of Iran] asked to come to the United States for cancer treatment. The United States said, 'Yes.’ ”
At least kids will be used to this sort of prosaic mediocrity by the time they get to American history in the middle and high school grades. Their elementary level social studies books are full of it (in more ways than one).
Second-graders get the privilege of reading Harcourt Brace’s Making a Difference, an irksome little tome whose title betrays the banality inside. Under the guise of “setting the scene with literature,” for instance, the book includes what is ostensibly a “poem” by someone named “Alma Flor Ada,” who has a Web site (www.almaada.com) students can check out if they have nothing else going on in their lives. The poem is a multicultural little ditty called “Pride:”
Proud of my family
Proud of my language
Proud of my culture
Proud of my race
Proud to be who I am.
That’s it. That’s the entire poem. Now, clearly, second-grade textbooks should be written on a second-grade level, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they should include things that may as well have been written by second-graders.
In another section of the book, students get to read about the “Prairie Peace Park” in Lincoln, Neb. This is a children’s “peace” theme park that has mazes, sculptures and something called the “World Peace Mural.” It sounds like a peck of fun.
The park’s director is quoted as saying, “Give children the right view of the world, and they will give us peace.” How very touching...and also utterly void of significance. The piece then suggests that second-graders construct giant “peace murals” for their schools.
This ride on the peace train continues in sixth grade with Harcourt-Brace’s The World. In a two-page spread entitled “Make Peace, Not War,” the book quotes Genghis Khan, of all people, as a proponent of peace: “Genghis Kahn, though known far and wide as a mighty warrior, once said that much trouble could be avoided if peaceful agreements could be reached.” Genghis Kahn, of course, reached peaceful agreements by pillaging cities and murdering thousands of people across Asia and Europe.
While we’re at it, if you ever wonder why some kids don’t seem to have a clue about even the simplest concepts in life and the world, consider these “definitions” from Making a Difference:
Vote: A choice that gets counted
Custom: A way of doing something
Artifact: An object that is made and used by people
Of course, perhaps social studies books need to be this simple-minded, given that elementary-level reading textbooks often seem to be aimed more at keeping the fires of “diversity” and “multiculturalism” alive than they are at developing reading and comprehension skills.
Scott Foresman’s elementary reading book, Take Me There, for instance, begins with a story of a hearing-impaired child. Later, there’s a story by an Asian American woman about a “Fire Dragon.” And in a story about a cat caught in a fire, the author uses the term “firemen”—and seems to mean it literally—but the illustrator makes sure to include a female fireman (firefighter? female fireman? firetrix?) in the foreground.
Take Me There also features a song by Raffi, that irritating sensitive New Age guy who sings irritating sensitive New Age guy songs. This is enough to destroy any child’s love of reading, and I declare that any dip in Metro reading scores is directly attributable to forcing our kids to read the lyrics to Raffi songs. Prove me wrong.
Did you know that “The Gingerbread Man” is a multicultural story? Neither did I. But it turns out the story takes place in what must be the only rural farm community in the world as ethnically diverse as Haight-Ashbury. The accompanying illustrations to the story (in Smith-Foresman’s Favorite Things Old and New!) show—in comical South Park-like construction paper cutouts—a white man, a white woman, an African American, a Hispanic-looking girl and an Asian American child watching the anthropomorphic cookie get gobbled by a (probably endangered) red fox.
On to math, which is no longer just about numbers. It is also about dehydrated vittles, at least in Harcourt Brace’s fourth grade-level Math Advantage, which begins its chapter on “multiplication facts” with the following:
“Native Americans planned ahead for winter by drying meat and fish. Meat was cut into strips and dried in the sun and wind or over a fire. Fish was salted and hung to dry.”
It used to be that word problems in math books had to do with things like estimating when a train from Philadelphia would meet a train from Denver. Now, a “problem-solving activity” is to “find out what the Native Americans in your area ate and what they might have preserved for winter.” Something tells me they don’t test this on the TCAP math section.
Farther down this complete waste of a perfectly good textbook page, we finally get to some kind of math-related endeavor. Students are to draw two drying racks for Native American food and then put the food items into equal rows (illustrating the general concept of multiplication). This item features a picture of a white boy and (surprise!) an African American boy smiling with delight as they do this unbelievably lame activity.
Later on in the same book, fictional students “Bruce and Gina” take a poll of their classmates to determine their favorite holiday. (The theme is “understanding collected data.”) The choices are: President’s Day, Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, Thanksgiving and Labor Day.
Fourth of July and Thanksgiving? OK. But there is no child anywhere who would consider any of the others their “favorite” holiday. Kids, as we all know, love Christmas and Hanukkah (gifts), Easter (candy) and Halloween (even more candy).
But, of course, we can’t mention these holidays. Heaven forbid we should ever acknowledge the existence of Christmas, particularly, in a textbook. The PC police would squawk. Same goes for Easter. And Halloween would bring out the zealots on the other side of the fence. So all those are out. Which means we end up with a feature that probably looks to the average fourth-grader like it was written by someone without a clue about what it’s like to be an average fourth-grader.
This is ironic, because today’s textbooks are forever trying to “connect” to kids. Some of them have more product placements than an Austin Powers movie. The sixth-grade edition of Math Advantage, for instance, has a picture of a kid surrounded by Frito-Lay products. Oddly enough, he’s not eating any of them. He’s just sitting there surrounded by 30 giant bags of chips: the king of Cheetos Mountain.
The same book also features little sidebars called “Teen Times” that, I suppose, are meant to “bring math to life” for adolescents. One of these involves—of all things—crop circles:
“Some people believe that crop circles are made by alien spacecraft. Actually, most have been done by college students with a good knowledge of algebra and geometry.” The message, then, seems to be that students should learn math so they can perpetuate elaborate hoaxes on gullible farm families. Sounds good to me.
The prize for the Most Gratuitous Diversity Moment in any textbook has to go to Advanced Algebra: Tools for a Changing World, which has an entire page of word problems dealing with bowling. The featured illustration: a black girl in a wheelchair bowling with a special ramp device. African American, check; female, check; disabled, check. Relevance to any word problem on the page? None.
The winner of the most PC math book overall, though, is the middle school-level Mathematics Explorations and Applications from Prentice Hall. The entire book seems to be written to earn the approval of Gloria Steinem.
Word problems in the book seem uncommonly focused on using girl’s names. The book also features “careers” boxes throughout in which virtually every person featured is a woman. “Women of color” get some play too, often in ham-handed fashion, as in the illustration accompanying a graph charting CD and record sales from 1976 to 1992. Next to this graph is a giant picture of Chattanooga’s own Bessie Smith. That’s OK, except that Smith died in 1937 and thus has no real application to this graph at all. No other singers are featured.
On one page toward the end of the book, Dr. Grace Yang of the University of Maryland appears to wag her finger at any girl who dares to dislike math. “If young women don’t continue taking math courses in high school,” Yang sermonizes, “by the time they enter college their choice of field will be very much restricted.” That’s certainly going to light a fire under any obstinate high school girl.
The philosophy behind this book is pretty clearly to correct the “problem” that boys tend to do better at math than girls. For argument’s sake, what about the other “problem”—that boys tend to lag behind girls in reading? Is anyone ready to tackle that one? Or is that just not as important?
Metro’s science books, meanwhile, are pretty straightforward. This is partly because of the nature of the subject itself. Science is science; its principles are immune to overblown social and multicultural considerations. When the temperature gets above 212 degrees, water boils, and it doesn’t matter whether a Hispanic man, an African American woman or a white hermaphrodite turns on the stove. The water still boils.
This is refreshing. Really, the only complaint I have about the science textbooks is that they can get a little preachy. The fourth-grade edition of Silver Burdett’s Discovery Works makes a big deal about how the United States uses 47 times as much petroleum as India. “Suppose all people used as much fossil fuel as do people in the United States,” the book lectures. “Imagine how quickly fossil fuels would disappear.”
That’s fine as far as it goes, but students also should be asked to “imagine” what would happen to our nation’s economy if we suddenly cut our fossil fuel use to Indian levels, especially given the material differences between the two countries.
For one thing, our national economy would grind to an immediate halt. For another, the U.S. gross domestic product is about four times as much as that of India, while its population is less than a third the size of India. This suggests that, on one economic level at least, the United States operates much more efficiently—producing more wealth with fewer people—than India. In the modern-day economy, that requires the use of fossil fuels.
Does this mean we shouldn’t conserve fossil fuels where we can? Of course not. But Discovery Works suggests Americans are just sitting around dumping barrels of sweet crude oil down their storm drains while deriving no economic benefits therefrom. In other words, there are two sides to the story, but not in Discovery Works.
The book also avoids religious references at all costs. The fifth-grade edition includes a two-page presentation on “one of the oldest living things” on the planet: a 4,600-year-old California bristlecone pine tree named “Methuselah.” Nowhere on these two pages do the authors explain why the tree has such an unusual name. (Hint: He is the oldest person mentioned in the Bible.) That’s something many students might reasonably wonder. It would be nice if Discovery Works would explain it to them.
Science books are now also forums for telling our young’uns about the evils of drugs. If Discovery Works’ “Straight Talk on Drugs” is any indication, they’ve got a ways to go:
“Why do people ever start taking drugs? Often people try drugs to escape from problems. For example, people may use drugs when they are under pressure at work, home or school. Some people try drugs to feel grown-up or to fit in with a group. But there’s never a good reason to take illegal drugs.”
Actually, if I’m a kid reading this, I’ve just read at least five or six decent reasons to take drugs. This “straight talk” is going to work wonders.
Speaking of “straight talk,” let’s not forget those mainstays of high school: health textbooks. The most prominent health book on Metro bookshelves has the vomit-inducing title of Totally Awesome Health. The publishers of this book actually have reserved the trademark of “Totally Awesome,” apparently believing that Earth will someday enter a tear in the space-time continuum and return permanently to 1985, when, I believe, teenagers last used this phrase.
Believing that the title speaks for itself, I won’t elaborate on Totally Awesome Health, except to share some of the book’s reasons that teenagers should abstain from certain activities.
Totally awesome reason not to smoke: “I do not want to paralyze my cilia and prevent them from keeping harmful substances out of my lungs.”
Totally awesome reason not to drink: “I want my secondary sex characteristics to develop in a normal way.”
Something tells me the folks at R.J. Reynolds or Anheuser-Busch don’t have much to worry about. Buy stock now.
After considering all of this, it’s worth offering some suggestions for improving school textbooks: First, everything in a school textbook should be accurate. Textbook publishers only publish a few at a time, and these are usually just updates of previous editions. Futhermore, if the first few pages of textbooks are any indication, it looks like half of the national education community is involved in writing, editing or reviewing them. So it’s not too much to ask to get it right. In addition, members of state textbook commissions have a duty to read the textbooks under consideration. Something tells me they don’t. Perhaps they should be asked to sign affidavits that they have done so, kind of like what they do with Emmy Award voters. Couldn’t hurt.
Second, how about fewer pictures and more text? It may be the MTV generation we’re writing for, but they’re called textbooks for a reason. Besides, most pictures are nothing more than means to fill “diversity” quotients. Give it a rest. Kids aren’t stupid. They know people are different. Which brings us to....
“Ethnic cheerleading” should end. That’s not my phrase, by the way. It comes from noted historian Arthur Schlesinger, who says that the once-admirable efforts to make up for oversights in the coverage of women and minorities in the past have now reached critical mass. In what I suppose passes for a postmodern twist in a school textbook, Pathways actually criticizes itself in its last chapter, making mention of Schlesinger’s view that the focus in textbooks now seems to be on making people feel good about themselves rather than learning about the past. He has a point.
Textbooks also should no longer be written by committee. Or at least they should stop reading like they are.
And first things first. Math books should be about math instead of what Native Americans once ate. Science books should be about science instead of press releases for every special interest group in America. History books should be about history: the good, the bad and the ugly—on all sides. The Aztecs were vicious. American slavery was an abomination. Genghis Kahn is not going to win a postmortem Nobel Peace Prize. Teach kids the basics and, trust me, they’ll be able to figure out the world on their own without getting whacked every day with propaganda sticks.
Perhaps then our students will learn what they actually need to know, and if it means lighter textbooks in the process because enough of the irrelevant has been dropped, all the better. Maybe even California’ll get on board.
