The recent tussle over the Civil War, the Confederacy, and the meaning of that tragic era, as noted by Virally Suppressed @ The Daily Kos, reminds me of a greater, ongoing conundrum in American education. First, a couple of definitions:
- Information will be defined as logical assertions divorced from their true or false value;
- True and false values are determined by the best understanding of reality. (Note that given the connections of government to public schools, and the ban on the favoring of one religion over another in the US Constitution, it would be disingenuous to claim that any given religious text has priority in the understanding of reality. Science has, as its primary mission, the study of reality; given its many successes, and in accordance with American meritocracy, it is accorded the priority for understanding reality.)
These let us admit that textbooks are full of information without implicitly endorsing the individual components of that information as being true or false.
So the conundrum is simply this: who gets to fill these textbooks with information? How can we certain that the textbooks contain true information? American primary education is typically controlled by local school boards, which are responsible for the selection of the textbooks to be used in the classes. They may also be responsible for meeting standards set by the State and, in some cases, standards set by the court system following lawsuits by various agencies and individuals.
At this juncture, it’s useful to remind the reader that the system of creating textbooks is hardly cost-free, neither in terms of intellectual effort, or creation of the tangible product; creation must be followed by a cross-check, and in cases where information is not, or cannot be, rigorously presented and analyzed, opinions will inevitably intrude into the process. The fact of cost skews any “market” that may exist, as does the question of how true any given textbook might be, possible discount deals offered by publishers, and other rigors of the marketplace.
Thus, these textbooks are actually supplied by a limited number of publishers. Decades ago, I recall reading reports concerning the attempted capture of textbook publishers in Texas, the leader by virtue of the size of the state market, by anti-evolutionary theory forces, and the conflict apparently continues, as a 2003 report from the National Center for Science Education indicates. Entitled “Evolution: Still Deep in the Heart of Textbooks,” it notes,
As the adoption process for biology textbooks began in early 2003, the ranks of those vocally opposed to evolution education swelled. For decades, Mel and Norma Gabler’s Educational Research Analysts — “a conservative Christian organization that reviews public school textbooks submitted for adoption in Texas” which places “scientific flaws in arguments for evolution” at the top of its list of concerns (http://members.aol.com/TxtbkRevws/about.htm) — has urged the Texas Board of Education to minimize evolution and even to include creationism in the textbooks adopted for use in the state (see, for example, RNCSE 1999 Jan/Feb; 19 [1]: 10). In 2003, the Gablers were joined by a host of homegrown creationists as well as by the Discovery Institute, the institutional home of “intelligent design”, in seeking to undermine the treatment of evolution in the biology textbooks under consideration.
While evolutionary theory faces no serious disputes within the scientific community, it clearly has its opponents external to the community, and they are not shy in attempting to capture the publishing step of education. Problems of this sort are not limited to inconvenient science, either. In the somewhat less rigorous area of history, an article from The Washington Post, entitled “Americans believe false things about the Civil War because even our textbooks bow to the apologists,” covers the problem of the Civil War:
So thoroughly did this mythology take hold that our textbooks still stand history on its head and say secession was for, rather than against, states’ rights. Publishers mystify secession because they don’t want to offend Southern school districts and thereby lose sales. Consider this passage from “The American Journey,” probably the largest textbook ever foisted on middle school students and perhaps the best-selling U.S. history textbook:
The South Secedes
Lincoln and the Republicans had promised not to disturb slavery where it already existed. Nevertheless, many people in the South mistrusted the party, fearing that the Republican government would not protect Southern rights and liberties. On December 20, 1860, the South’s long-standing threat to leave the Union became a reality when South Carolina held a special convention and voted to secede.
The section reads as if slavery was not the reason for secession. Instead, the rationale is completely vague: White Southerners feared for their “rights and liberties.” On the next page, the authors are more precise: White Southerners claimed that since “the national government” had been derelict ” — by refusing to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act and by denying the Southern states equal rights in the territories — the states were justified in leaving the Union.”
The article points out the seceding states each declared their motivation for leaving the Union was to preserve slavery, but the history books obscure this fact with, instead, concerns about state rights.
Given the costs of producing textbooks, and the limited offerings necessarily available, how do we ensure true, full facts are contained in these books?
Some might advocate a governmental approach, i.e., all facts in this textbook are government-approved. This almost makes sense for primary schools, as nearly all information in such schools should be of a basic nature, and not controversial – which is not to say they are all, in actuality, true, but they are generally accepted as true. The nature of the human condition requires all knowledge to be contingent, and we should be aware of this.
However, by assigning to a political institution this decision, the entire question of what belongs in textbooks, and what are true facts, becomes an exercise in politics. For even the most casual observer of the American political process at the State and Federal levels, we know that will result in the committees in charge becoming coveted positions, subject to the most violent of political passions and conflicts. If the questions is assigned to a bureaucracy, then either decisions will happen at the speed of a glacier, or just a few individuals will become responsible, and the possibility they will be untrained in the specialties in question, or maintain positions outside the mainstream with regard to those subjects, will be substantially non-zero.
Texas uses a State Board of Education, as explained by the New York Review of Books:
… and the peculiarities of its system of government, in which the State Board of Education is selected in elections that are practically devoid of voters, and wealthy donors can chip in unlimited amounts of money to help their favorites win.
The vulnerability of this system to manipulation by individuals holding opinions at wide variance with the current perceptions of reality should be obvious. As Texas and Texas publishers have undue influence over the industry of educational materials, they are certainly the most important of all States in their manner of selecting textbooks. The article goes on to cover the many eccentricities involved in this most important of processes.
Do I cover all important issues here? No. Open Source textbooks may be the answer – or they may become part of the problem. Here is a link to a Utah project, which is interesting but dismaying in that it compares test score results of kids using open source vs kids using traditional textbooks; I should prefer an analysis of the content of the books and how relevant scholars evaluate the books.
To my engineering mind, there does not appear to be that useful solution which we can implement and forget, just continual battle with those who so violently disagree with established knowledge models that they will do anything to interject their views into the mainstream. I hope someone smarter than I comes along with a better solution.
(h/t Hunter @ The Daily Kos)
