The Politics of the Textbook

Michael Apple, Michael Apple, Linda Christian-Smith, Michael Apple, Linda Christian-Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136636530
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The Politics of the Texbook analyzes the factors that shape production, distribution and reception of school texts through original essays which emphasize the double-edged quality of textbooks. Textbooks are viewed as systems of moral regulation in the struggle of powerful groups to build political and cultural accord. They are also regarded as the site of popular resistance around discloding the interest underlying schoolknowledge and incorporating alternative traditions.

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The Politics of the Textbook

Michael W. Apple and Linda K. Christian-Smith

Whose Knowledge Is of Most Worth?

Reality doesn't stalk around with a label. What something is, what it does, one's evaluation of it, all this is not naturally preordained. It is socially constructed. This is the case even when we talk about the institutions that organize a good deal of our lives. Take schools, for example. For some groups of people, schooling is seen as a vast engine of democracy—opening horizons, ensuring mobility, and so on. For others, the reality of schooling is strikingly different. It is seen as a form of social control or, perhaps, as the embodiment of cultural dangers, institutions whose curricula and teaching practices threaten the moral universe of the students who attend them.

While not all of us may agree with this diagnosis of what schools do, this latter position contains a very important insight. It recognizes that behind Spencer's famous question about "What knowledge is of most worth?" there lies another even more contentious question, "Whose knowledge is of most worth?"

During the past two decades, a good deal of progress has been made on answering the question of whose knowledge becomes socially legitimate in schools.¹ While much still remains to be understood, we are now much closer to having an adequate understanding of the relationship between school knowledge and the larger society than before. Yet little attention has actually been paid to that one artifact that plays such a major role in defining whose culture is taught—the textbook. Of course, there have been literally thousands of studies of textbooks over the years.² But until relatively recently, by and large, most of these remained unconcerned with the politics of culture. All too many researchers could still be characterized by the phrase coined years ago by C. Wright Mills, "abstract empiricists." These "hunters and gatherers of social numbers" remain unconnected to the relations of inequality that surround them.³

This is a distinct problem since texts are not simply "delivery systems" of "facts." They are at once the results of political, economic, and cultural activities, battles, and compromises. They are conceived, designed, and authored by real people with real interests. They are published within the political and economic constraints of markets, resources, and power.⁴ And what texts mean and how they are used are fought over by communities with distinctly different commitments and by teachers and students as well.

As one of us has argued in a series of volumes, it is naive to think of the school curriculum as neutral knowledge.⁵ Rather, what counts as legitimate knowledge is the result of complex power relations and struggles among identifiable class, race, gender/sex, and religious groups. Thus, education and power are terms of an indissoluble couplet. It is at times of social upheaval that this relationship between education and power becomes most visible. Such a relationship was and continues to be made manifest in the struggles by women, people of color, and others to have their history and knowledge included in the curriculum. Driven by an economic crisis and a crisis in ideology and authority relations, it has become even more visible in the past decade or so in the resurgent conservative attacks on schooling. "Authoritarian populism" is in the air, and the New Right has been more than a little successful in bringing its own power to bear on the goals, content, and process of schooling.⁶

The movement to the right has not stopped outside the schoolroom door. Current plans for the centralization of authority over teaching and curriculum, often cleverly disguised as "democratic" reforms, are hardly off the drawing board before new management proposals or privatization initiatives are introduced, In the United States, evidence for such offensives abounds with the introduction of mandatory competency testing for students and teachers, the calls for a return to a (romanticized) common curriculum, the reduction of educational goals to those primarily of business and industry, the proposals for voucher or "choice" plans, the pressure to legislate morality and values from the right, and the introduction of state-mandated content on "free enterprise" and the like. Similar tendencies are more than a little evident in Britain and in some cases are even more advanced.

All of this has brought about countervailing movements in the schools. The slower but still interesting growth of more democratically run schools—the growth of practices and policies that give community groups and teachers considerably more authority in text selection and curriculum determination, in teaching strategy, in the use of funds, in administration, and in developing more flexible and less authoritarian evaluation schemes—is providing some cause for optimism in the midst of the conservative restoration.⁷

Even with these positive signs, however, it is clear that the New Right has been able to rearticulate traditional political and cultural themes. In so doing, it has often effectively mobilized a mass base of adherents. Among its most powerful causes and effects has been the growing feeling of disaffection about public schooling among conservative groups. Large numbers of parents and other people no longer trust either the institutions or the teachers and administrators in them to make "correct" decisions about what should be taught and how to teach it. The rapid growth of evangelical schooling, of censorship, and of textbook controversies, and the emerging tendency of many parents to teach their children at home rather than send them to state-supported schools are clear indications of this loss of legitimacy.⁸

The ideology that stands behind this is often very complex. It combines a commitment to both the "traditional family" and clear gender roles with the commitment to "traditional values" and literal religiosity. Often packed into this is also a defense of capitalist economics, patriotism, the "Western tradition," anti-communism, and a deep mistrust of the "welfare state."⁹ When this ideology is applied to schooling, the result can be as simple as dissatisfaction with an occasional book or assignment. On the other hand, the result can be a major conflict that threatens to go well beyond the boundaries of our usual debates about schooling.

Few places in the United States are more well-known in this latter context than Kanawha County, West Virginia. In the mid-1970s it became the scene of one of the most explosive controversies over what schools should teach, who should decide, and what beliefs should guide our educational programs. What began as a protest by a small group of conservative parents, religious leaders, and business people over the content and design of the textbooks approved for use in local schools soon spread to include school boycotts, violence, and a wrenching split within the community that in many ways has yet to heal.

There were a number of important contributing factors that heightened tensions in West Virginia. Schools in rural areas had been recently consolidated. Class relations and relations between the country and the city were becoming increasingly tense. The lack of participation by rural parents (or many parents at all, for that matter) in text selection or in educational decision making in general had also led to increasing alienation. Furthermore, the cultural history of the region, with its fierce independence, fundamentalist religious traditions, and history of economic depression, helped create the conditions for serous unrest. Finally, Kanawha County became a cause célèbre for national right-wing groups who offered moral, legal, and organizational support to the conservative activists there.¹⁰

It is important to realize, then, that the controversies over "official knowledge" that usually center around what is included and excluded in textbooks really signify more profound political, economic, and cultural relations and histories. Conflicts over texts are often proxies for wider questions of power relations. They involve what people hold most dear. And, as in the case of Kawawha County, they can quickly escalate into conflicts over these deeper issues.

Yet textbooks are surely important in and of themselves. They signify—through their content and form—particular constructions of reality, particular ways of selecting and organizing that vast universe of possible knowledge. They embody what Raymond Williams called the selective tradition—someone's selection, someone's vision of legitimate knowledge and culture, one that in the process of enfranchising one group's cultural capital disenfranchises another's.¹¹

Texts are really messages to and about the future. As part of a curriculum, they participate in no less than the organized knowledge system of society. They participate in creating what a society has recognized as legitimate and truthful. They help set the canons of truthfulness and, as such, also help re-create a major reference point for what knowledge, culture, belief, and morality really are.¹²

Yet such a statement—even with its recognition that texts participate in constructing ideologies and ontologies—is misleading in many important ways. For it is not a "society" that has created such texts, but specific groups of people. "We" haven't built such curriculum artifacts, if "we" means simply that there is universal agreement among all of us and this is what gets to be official knowledge. In fact, the very use of the pronoun "we" simplifies matters all too much.

As Fred Inglis so cogently argues, the pronoun "we"

smooths over the deep corrugations and ruptures caused precisely by struggle over how that authoritative and editorial "we" is going to be used. The [text], it is not melodramatic to declare, really is the battleground for an intellectual civil war, and the battle for cultural authority is a wayward, intermittingly fierce, always protracted and fervent one.¹³

Let us give one example. In the 1930s conservative groups in the United States mounted a campaign against one of the more progressive textbook series in use in schools, Man and His Changing World by Harold Rugg and his colleagues. This textbook became the subject of a concerted attack by the National Association of Manufacturers, the American Legion, the Advertising Federation of American, and other "neutral" groups. They charged that Rugg's books were socialist, anti-American, anti-business, and so forth. The conservative campaign was more than a little successful in forcing school districts to withdraw Rugg's series from classrooms and libraries. So successful were they that sales fell from nearly 300,000 copies in 1938 to only approximately 20,000 in 1944.¹⁴

We, of course, may have reservations about such texts today, not least of which would be the sexist title. But one thing that the Rugg case makes clear is that the politics of the textbook is not by any means something new. Current issues surrounding texts—their ideology, their very status as central definers of what we should teach, even their very effectiveness and their design—echo the past moments of these concerns that have had such a long history in so many countries.

Few aspects of schooling currently have been subject to more intense scrutiny and criticism than the textbook. Perhaps one of the most graphic descriptions is provided by A. Graham Down of the Council for Basic Education:

Textbooks, for better or worse, dominate what students learn. They set the curriculum, and often the facts learned, in most subjects. For many students, textbooks are their first and sometimes only early exposure to books and to reading. The public regards textbooks as authoritative, accurate, and necessary. And teachers rely on them to organize lessons and structure subject matter. But the current system of textbook adoption has filled our schools with Trojan horses—glossily covered blocks of paper whose words emerge to deaden the minds of our nation's youth, and make them enemies of learning.¹⁵

This statement is made just as powerfully by Harriet Tyson-Bernstein, the author of a recent study of what she has called "America's textbook fiasco":

Imagine a public policy system that is perfectly designed to produce textbooks that confuse, mislead, and profoundly bore students, while at the same time making all of the adults involved in the process look good, not only in their own eyes, but in the eyes of others. Although there are some good textbooks on the market, publishers and editors are virtually compelled by public policies and practices to create textbooks that confuse students with non sequiturs, that mislead them with misinformation, and that profoundly bore them with pointlessly arid writing.¹⁶

Regulation or Liberation and the Text

In order to understand these criticisms and to understand both some of the reasons why texts look the way they do and why they contain the perspectives of some groups and not those of others, we also ne...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. The Politics of the Textbook
• 2. The Culture and Commerce of the Textbook
• 3. Texts and High Tech: Computers, Gender, and Book Publishing
• 4. With a Little Help from Some Friends: Publishers, Protesters, and Texas Textbook Decisions
• 5. Race, Class, Gender, and Disability in Current Textbooks
• 6. Reclaiming the Voice of Resistance: The Fiction of Mildred Taylor
• 7. Critical Lessons from Our Past: Curricula of Socialist Sunday Schools in the United States
• 8. The Secular Word: Catholic Reconstructions of Dick and Jane
• 9. Readers, Texts, and Contexts: Adolescent Romance Fiction in Schools
• 10. Textual Authority, Culture, and the Politics of Literacy
• 11. Textbooks: The International Dimension
• 12. Building Democracy: Content and Ideology in Grenadian Educational Texts, 1979–1983
• Contributors