Change Agents

Change Agents

Somewhat surprisingly, Mel and Norma Gabler, evangelical Christians who have gained national recognition for their efforts in textbook monitoring (including being featured on “60 Minutes”), credit feminists with the greatest success in changing texts over the past ten years. In 1975 alone, the National Organization for Women obtained 1,651 generic alterations in elementary spellers and math books for Texas, alterations such as changing “mother will bake a cake” to “father will bake a cake.”

However, the Gablers—and others within the conservative camp—are equally quick to point out that their own efforts represent the “silent” 75 percent or more of all Americans who, according to pollster George Gallup, hold to traditional moral values. “It is the publishers and educational bureaucrats who are out of line with the beliefs of the majority,” Mel Gabler says.

Statewide efforts directed toward getting publishers “back in line” understandably have had the most far-reaching impact on text makeup and selection. According to a 1980 survey on censorship practices sponsored by the Association of American Publishers (AAP), the American Library Association (ALA), and the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD), the statewide adoption of textbooks and other institutional materials in 22 of the 50 states is of great importance not only because it directly affects the range of educational materials used in the “adoption” states themselves, but also because it exerts a powerful influence on the materials that will be available in the 28 “open” states.

Heavily populated states such as Texas and Califormia have, as major purchasers of textbooks, the economic power to influence text development. School publishers will usually respond to such pressures out of economic necessity—though often reluctantly. Thus an edition prepared for Texas and California, the two largest adoption states, often becomes the sole edition available nationwide.

Partly because they wield their influence in Texas, the Gablers are regarded as two of the most powerful people in education today. Their book reviews have turned the annual Austin textbook hearing into “a litmus test of how liberal a textbook can be,” according to publisher Fred McDougal.

The extent of the Gablers’ influence (clearly identified as significant by the AAP-ALA-ASCD survey respondents) can be seen in a series of textbook guidelines adopted partially as a result of the work of their Educational Research Analysts group. The six most pertinent guidelines require textbooks to:

• “contain no material of a partisan or sectarian character”;

• present “factual information accurately and objectively without opinionated statements or biased editorial judgments by the authors”;

• “promote the free enterprise system, respect authority and individual rights, and not encourage civil disorder, social strife, or law breaking. Balanced and factual treatment of contrasting points of view in political and social movements is necessary. Violence must be restricted to the context of its cause and consequence”;

• “not include blatantly offensive language or illustrations”;

• clearly distinquish theories “from fact … in an objective educational manner” (This provision was substituted in April for a previous rule stating that “the presentation of the theory of evolution shall be done in a manner which is not detrimental to other theories of origin.” Texas attorney general Jim Maddox had declared the old rule an unconstitutional intrusion of religion into state matters.);

• “treat divergent groups fairly without stereotyping.” To counter radical feminism, books must include “traditional and contemporary roles of men, women, boys, and girls.”

Books that fail to meet any of these guidelines stand in danger of being rejected or, at the very least, sent back to the publisher for rewriting. Such a decision usually has national ramifications, with most sales representatives agreeing that books flunking Texas are generally much harder to sell anywhere else.

Wars Of Words

Negativism and violence in basic and supplementary readers stirred much of the clamor in West Virginia. A year later (1975) in Texas, Norma Gabler and fellow petitioner Fran Robinson held up in the textbook hearings two Scott, Foresman series for elementary children (Signposts and Milestones, 1975), marked with scores of red tabs indicating episodes of death, violence, suicide, and killing. To these and other objections, publishers typically responded that such incidents were in the Bible. Norma Gabler replied that this was a “sorry defense which tells something about the moral perception of educational change agents. The Bible stresses that these acts are wrong and tells what is right.”

The cry against violence and negativism continued in Texas until officials advised publishers that such books would be rejected in the future. When readers were again presented, the Gablers called them “the greatest change in textbooks since we began our work.”

Richard Carroll, president of Allyn & Bacon, concedes that the publishers got the message. “We now consider it an editorial mistake to have a violent episode in a reader,” he says.

Whereas objections relating to explicit language and sexuality were most often cited as the issues prompting challenges at the local level, the AAP-ALA-ASCD survey referred to earlier reports that statewide challenges more frequently focused on ideological concerns. The issues most often cited were: secular humanism, Darwinism and evolution, scientific theories, criticism of U.S. history, values clarification, undermining of traditional family, atheistic and agnostic views, antitraditional/antiestablishment views, negative or pessimistic views, and moral relativism or situation ethics.

In each of these areas, conservatives admit they are bucking well-established trends and philosophies—yet not entirely without some noteworthy successes, as the following examples illustrate.

Biology: Adam or Ape? The creationist-evolutionist controversy unquestionably draws the sharpest lines of demarcation between the traditionalists and “progressives.” While evolution was slow in coming to textbooks after the Scopes trial in 1925, scientific creationism has been entirely avoided. Yet, according to Gerald Skoog, professor of education at Texas Tech, creationists exert “an influence that has been persuasive and, in some cases, dramatic” (Science News, Jan. 28, 1984).

To prove his point, Skoog points to the fact that Holt, Reinhart & Winston reduced the number of words relating to evolution in Modern Biology, the country’s best-selling biology textbook, from 18,211 in 1973 to 12,807 in 1981; and that the 20,346 words about evolution in a 1974 Silver Burdett book were reduced to 4,314 in the firm’s 1981 edition (Discover, Jan. 1984). Moreover, Laidlaw Brothers’ high school text, Experiences in Biology, does not contain the word “evolution” at all.

Skoog, who has researched the coverage of evolution in over 100 biology texts dating back to the turn of the century, says, however, that evolutionists may be in the process of making a dramatic classroom comeback.

“There appears to be a growing tendency for honesty on the part of publishers,” Skoog says, reflecting his own view of evolution. His initial readings of the 1985 editions of both Modern Biology and Experiences in Biology seem to indicate a substantial increase in the treatment of evolution, with the Laidlaw text devoting an entire chapter to it.

History: The Way We Were? Neal Frey, a former history teacher at Christian Heritage College, expresses the viewpoint of the majority of conservative protesters regarding most history textbooks. “The books,” he says, “still show American history as nothing more than a combination of existential and environmental determinism; and just ignore the Christian origin of our country. They also continue to speak more favorably of communism than our system.”

As an example of faulty methodology and bias, Frey points to Random House’s Freedom and Crisis (Second Edition, 1974, 1978). “This book focuses on a single event against a period in history. For instance, the entire Puritan era is examined in the light of the Salem witch trials with obvious religious bias.”

Protesters have had intermittent success in working “a proper perspective” into U.S. history. Enthusiasm for federalism (where a union of states recognizes the sovereignty of a central authority while retaining certain residual powers of government) has been curbed, as has the lavish praise given the concept of a world government.

Glowing accounts of Marxism have also been curbed. Example: The bald statement in Allyn and Bacon’s A Global History of Man (1970), “The Marxism [in China] turns the people toward a future of unlimited promise, an escalator to the stars,” was qualified by the preface, “Communist leaders say …” (p. 444).

“The imbalance is not as great in the texts we see today,” says Mel Gabler, “but it is still obvious.”

Human Behavior: Values Clarification. More a methodology than a course, values clarification became the sine qua non of progressive education in the 1970s. As formulated by Sidney B. Simon and others, VC embraced both situation ethics and cultural relativism. It posited no fixed values and gave full authority to the student in determining his or her own values system.

VC was soon instituted into everything from social studies to sex education, from early grades through high school. And objectors complained that the new methodology did away with moral absolutes and parental authority. Their protestations torpedoed or forced revisions in a number of books incorporating a VC approach to discussions of drug use and sexual practice. Some examples:

• Random House’s Life and Health (3rd edition, 1976, 1980) for ninth and tenth grades, was withdrawn from the Texas adoption process by the publisher in 1983 after the Gablers cited objectionable passages on sex and death that included: “Adolescent petting is an important opportunity to learn about sexual responses and to obtain sexual and emotional gratification without a serious commitment” (p. 161); “In many societies, premarital intercourse is expected and serves a useful role in the selection of a spouse. In such societies, there are seldom negative psychological consequences” (p. 161); and “The thought of death sometimes occurs in a sexual context … in that the event of orgasm, like the event of dying, involves a surrender to the involuntary and the unknown” (p. 486).

• Another book in this genre failed to get a single vote from the Texas Textbook Commission. Charles A. Bennett’s Finding My Way (1979), for ninth graders, used the word “masturbation” 43 times in a two-and-a-half-page, mostly favorable discussion of the practice.

• Also in 1983, 25 health books were postponed for adoption until warnings about illegal drugs were balanced with cautions against legal substances. This came about after the Gablers noted that one book, Laidlaw’s Good Health for You (1983), devoted several pages to the ill effects of coffee, tea, and over-the-counter prescriptions, while only 19 lines were spent describing the harmful effects of marijuana.

Assessing The Gains—And Losses

In spite of these successes, conservatives are not fooling themselves into thinking they have stemmed the tide of humanist influence. One problem is that the conservative protest movement is, in fact, a nonmovement. There is no nationwide conspiracy on the part of religious fanatics to establish a kingdom of innocence in public schoolrooms, and individual efforts on the local level usually come to an abrupt end once the issue at hand is addressed.

“The number of parents involved is directly proportionate to the number of offensive, stupid or misleading things in the classroom,” says Onalee McGraw, an education consultant and currently a member, by Presidential appointment, of the National Council on Educational Research.

Trying to assist concerned parents in the process of influencing their local schoolboards are groups like the American Education Coalition. Founded in 1983, AEC provides parents with a series of topical ACTION kits geared to effecting conservative change. One recent kit offered individuals a “how to” approach to getting elected to the school board. Still another described the problems inherent in current sex education curricula.

Marcella Donavan, the director of the AEC, says the overall objective of such “helps” is to sensitize parents to the problems in education and to their role in doing something about them. “We’re here to help parents improve their schools,” Donavan says, “and to show them how their views can find their rightful place in the marketplace of ideas.”

As for the Gablers, their impact on that marketplace has been nothing short of phenomenal. Yet their “organization” is but a handful of committed individuals working long hours with a minimum of support. And at this time, there is no other couple or committee on the horizon ready to work alongside or even further their efforts.

The lack of any cohesive organization may be the least of conservative worries, however. Conservative protesters, for example, have most often been characterized as “censors” and book burners, while their liberal counterparts are perceived as freedom fighters. Moreover, mass media portrayals of textbook protests have furthered the myth that only the Right is critical of classroom texts. The public relations problems inherent in these multiple misconceptions are obvious, with many conservatives caricatured as outdated traditionalists living in a Victorian time warp. To this charge Mel Gabler simply responds that “the books were stripped of God and moral values before they ever came to us.”

A deeper problem still is the fact that mainstream America does not appear to grasp what the fight is all about. That ideologies are conflicting in the classroom is still foreign to most parents. According to Judith Krug, director of the American Library Association Office of Intellectual Freedom, the majority of Americans see today’s textbooks as apparently—and adequately—“fulfilling [educational] needs.”

So what of the future? Can opposed value systems be reconciled and satisfied in school texts?

Mel Gabler worries that a politically powerful National Education Association (NEA), backed by a supportive president and Congress, could establish a virtual dictatorship over curriculum in public schools. A worst-case scenario would be a standardized, federally financed curriculum, administered and written by progressive educators, and forced upon both public and private schools by federal and state educational bureaucracies.

A harbinger of such a curriculum, he says, could be the NEA’s recently introduced junior-high pilot program on nuclear disarmament and extremism in America. The Washington Post editorialized that the NEA offering is hardly objective (it says the U.S. is far ahead of the Soviets in nuclear arms) and amounts to “political indoctrination.”

Of greater concern to Gabler is the apathy and ignorance of Americans about the new textbooks and their power. He quotes D. C. Heath, a textbook publishing pioneer, as saying, in effect, “Let me write the textbooks of a nation and I care not whose songs it sings, or writes its law.”

JAMES HEFLEY AND HAROLD SMITH

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