RALEIGH — “Secondary and college students, and indeed most of the rest of us, have only a feeble grasp of politics and a vague awareness of history, especially the political history of the United States and the world.”
That’s how Paul Gagnon, professor emeritus of history at the University of Massachusetts, describes a key educational deficiency in American public schools, a deficiency that he and others trace directly back to the “raw materials” being used in the classroom: textbooks.
According to a detailed report in Sunday’s Washington Times, education analysts from a variety of institutions and viewpoints agree that most of the textbooks used in U.S. classrooms are of such poor quality, riddled with errors and significant omissions, that they threaten the ability of schools to impart basic historical and cultural knowledge.
Writing for the American Federation of Teachers, Gagnon observed that only 11 percent of American eighth-graders had scored “proficient” on the latest National Assessment of Education Program history exam, down from 17 percent in 2001. An inability to recognize key historical figures, locate events such as the American Civil War in the correct half-century, and exhibit even a passing familiarity with the language and concepts contained in founding documents such as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are among the pieces of evidence that Gagnon and other historians have advanced in recent years for the proposition that flawed textbooks, written more to please political constituencies and racial-grievance groups rather than to satisfy educational needs, are facilitating ignorance and thus eroding the basis of our governmental institutions.
It is as if the building blocks of our civic education, which should be the firm foundation of our civil life, are cracked and ill-fitted.
Pulitzer-Prize winning historian David McCullough, known for his presidential biographies of Truman and Adams, pointed to another problem with the majority of history and social studies textbooks in public schools: they are “deadly dull.”
“It is as if they were designed to kill anyone’s interest in history,” he told The Washington Times. “A child made to read these books would ask, ‘What did I do wrong today that I am being so punished?'”
Unfortunately, the problem of flimsy textbooks is not confined to history and is not solely related to political bias. Multiple factors lead to the nationwide adoption of a few key texts, from a few publishers, without proper review or sufficient alternatives for states and schools. My John Locke Foundation colleagues have helped to expose the extent of the problem here in North Carolina over the past several years. A little more than a year ago, N.C. State University physics professor John Hubisz wrote a paper released by the JLF-affiliated North Carolina Education Alliance on the subject of the middle-school science textbooks used in North Carolina. He called them “inadequate” in both accuracy and coverage, warning that erroneous texts were a particularly serious problem in a subject such as physics where many teachers are themselves poorly qualified to impart the material.
Former Carolina Journal managing editor Andrew Cline, who recently reviewed one of the more outrageous history texts used at the college level, wrote a CJ cover story some years ago about North Carolina’s textbook-selection process. Because of its use of a centralized, top-down process of selecting textbooks for use in all public schools, Cline wrote, North Carolina is one of only a handful of states that through their collective purchasing power largely determine the range of textbooks produced for K-12 education. Both Cline and Hubisz argued for a more decentralized approach, a process allowing individual systems and schools to make their own decisions and to choose among alternatives.
It is a false economy for the state to practice bulk-buying of textbooks if the result isn’t worth buying, individually or in bulk.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.
