Technology and Tyranny

The Texas board of education has apparently adopted standards that encourage students to question the basis of the separation of church and state and the negative impact of the United Nations on American sovereignty. I'm all for "questioning." I don't even care of the questions come from the right rather than the left (though it might be nice if they came from both directions). In this particular context, though, I wonder what "questioning" means and if it isn't here more a synonym for "encouraging." I am concerned about what seems to be the underlying political ideology behind the textbook changes. But I am also concerned about liberal responses which suggest that informing students that the words "separation of church and state" do not appear in the constitution is committing some sort of crime. The words are, in fact, not in the constitution and it's really just fine to point that out. What the textbook requirements apparently don't require is for students to learn where the "separation" phrase comes from, the context in which it was originally used, how those sources relate to the writing of the constitution, and how our understanding of the role of both church and government may have changed in the last 230 years.

The reporting on the Texas board decision all mentions that essentially the rest of the nation is forced to adopt whatever standards Texas adopts because Texas orders so many textbooks and publishers are loathe to publish multiple editions of a single textbook. All I can say is "Huh?"

First of all, I thought we lived in a market driven system. Texas appears to have 1.6 million high school students (http://www.localschooldirectory.com/state-schools/TX) . The country as a whole has over 14 million high school students (http://www.betterhighschools.org/pubs/documents/USFactSheetandReferences_FINAL_080406.pdf). It seems to me, with those numbers, a publisher could make pretty good money serving the country even if they never sold a single textbook in Texas. In fact, a decent salesperson could use deliberately avoiding the Texas standard as a selling point.

Second, how hard is it today to publish a number of copies of a slightly altered edition of a textbook? In a world with a publish-on-demand model in which printing a very small number of copies can still be profitable, how can the entire country be held hostage by the Texas Board of Education?

Finally, the School Library Journal article suggests a possible response to the Texas decision is to create and apply a national standard. This worries me. Partly because it might suffer from a political influence similar to the one the Texas Board suffers from. When conservatives come into power, suddenly our "facts" will become more conservative. But national sets of standards also tend to become very large ships which are hard to change direction. If our understanding of history suddenly changes because of some new discovery, will our national standards be malleable enough to handle the change?

What we need are smart, tough local boards who truly have the best interests of students at heart, and are willing to make demands that publishers use the technology at their to disposal to create appropriate textbooks for non-Texas students rather than simply whining that "Texas has our hands tied."