Trials of a textbook writer

National Review, Feb 24, 1989 by Raymond English

IN THE WAKE of the shock of Sputnik I there was a surge of enthusiasm for better, more demanding education. It was an exciting moment.

I was a college teacher of political science who had publicly expressed concern at the political ignorance of college freshmen. Because of my outspokenness, I found myself drafted by a private educational-research organization to develop a series of socialstudies textbooks.

For 15 years I worked on this project. But the post-Sputnik enthusiasm for intellectual rigor turned out to be a brief April-day glory. By the mid Sixties, anti-intellectual influences were once more in control. I found myself under constant pressure to sacrifice scholarly standards in order to inculcate some political or social doctrine.

In one of our books on world history we examined the causes of the Reformation, our account being approved by a Catholic bishop and the superintendent of Lutheran schools in a big city. But objections came ftom a Baptist minister, who insisted that mentioning the doctrine of purgatory was equivalent to telling the children to believe it. (Query: How do you teach about Luther's objection to indulgences without mentioning purgatory?)

He also objected to references to "The Church" in chapters on medieval Europe. "But, Pastor," I pleaded, "you and I would not be Christians today, were it not for the Church in the Middle Ages."

"Ha!" he said, with flashing eyes, "I would!"

Then there were the passionate antisocialists, with whom my sympathies largely lay, but who wanted me to suppress the fact that ours is and has been a mixed economy, and to denounce "farm supports." On the other side was the old education establishment that wanted to continue to analyze industrialization and economic development in the terms that Karl Marx employed after steeping himself in parliamentary reports on conditions in British factories and mines in the 1840s-an analysis long since discarded by most economic historians.

The 1960s and '70s brought a legion of new interferences. A history book was boycotted in California (in effect it was vetoed) by two groups. Organized Filipinos wanted a total rewriting of the account of the annexation of the Philippines, which we analyzed in terms of the intense imperialistic rivalries of the great powers at that time. It was the time of the partition of Africa, of the division of China into spheres of influence, of the takeover by European powers of Burma, Indochina, and the Spice Islands. Japan joined the imperial scramble and took Korea and Formosa (Taiwan).

Yet the Filipino pressure group wanted the story of the Philippines told in Leninist terms: the capitalist "sugar interests" of the United States compelled President McKinley to annex the islands in spite of a flourishing independence movement led by Emilio Aguinaldo. I would have been willing to mention this, although I'm opposed to loading the average youngster with unnecessary names and complications. However, that would not have satisfied the critics, who refused to recognize that a failure by the United States to take responsibility would have led to a race for Manila between the German Empire and Great Britain.

The other veto came from Zionists who opposed reference to the fact that the population of Palestine before 1947 was predominantly Arab. It is difficult to explain persisting tensions in the Middle East if such fairly relevant statistics are suppressed.

One of the more fatuous vetoes came from a state whose committee on ethnic and sex discrimination took strong exception to our account of the beginnings of effective feminism in the 1860s and '70s. We had pointed out that certain economic and technological advances opened the way of emancipation to large numbers of women. Ready-made clothes and commercially canned foods freed them from major. domestic chores; public schools took over education and much babysitting; education and jobs opened up for more and more young women. All this seemed too obvious to argue about; yet the committee rebuked me for attributing the emancipation of women to technology rather than to "character and self-assertion." I could only ask which of us was impugning the character and self-assertion of women. It was the committee that assumed that women had been lacking in those qualities from the Garden of Eden until the late nineteenth century.

Other dismal memories come to mind from those years. The Japanese-American critic, for example, who objected to our accurate statement that there were proportionally more JapaneseAmericans in executive and professional positions than any other group could boast. "Delete this!" said our critic. "It reinforces the myth of success!"

There was also the running battle with moral relativists, typified by a squabble over the caption for a photograph of vandalism in a second-grade textbook. Our caption said something to the effect that everyone had to pay for this stupid behavior. "Delete 'stupid'; it implies a value judgment." To which the only response is: "Yes! It is a value judgment, and second-graders can appreciate it."