THE DUMBING OF AMERICA

...Manifest harm is done to students in other areas of learning in which textbooks have been subjected to tampering...

...The basic credo of the textbook publishing industry has been sounded by Bob Jones, Western regional representative of Holt, Rinehart & Winston: "When you're publishing a book, if there's something that is controversial, it's better to take it out...

...The effect, says Ronnie Hastings, director of science education at Waxa-hachie High School in Texas, is that his state's public school students are "woefully unprepared" for college science courses...

...There is no evidence that any textbook publisher has refused to abide by this brazenly un-American statute...

...Not a single individual publisher offered support...

...administrators more suited to work as department store floorwalkers...

...In higher education, college departments—not a state textbook commission—usually choose the texts...

...Once the "difficult" books are allowed to disappear altogether, the students may become less tolerant of any books...

...Parker has tracked down illustrations of the publishers' devotion to the intellectual well-being of children, such as this one: "Publishers deleted Shirley Jackson's classic short story, The Lottery,' from the national editions of four literature anthologies because, in 1978, the Texas State Textbook Committee refused to purchase books that included the story...

...That desolate fact lends special substance to a comment made last spring by William Morris, who edited the first edition of The American Heritage Dictionary...

...Indeed, the Lone Star market is so significant that textbooks in other states have a Texas brand on them, though that fact is usually not known to students, teachers, and parents in those other states...

...But they will never say so publicly, let alone accept the invitations of People for the American Way to testify before state textbook commissions...

...They'll skip the word or sometimes the entire paragraph...

...Publishers are desperate to get on the list of approved books because the Texas market is so huge...

...The publishers of America's textbooks, who are often also the publishers of the trade books you and I read, have barely been mentioned in connection with what one weary teacher calls "the dumbing of America...

...You want dummies, they'll make you dummies...

...Privately, many deplore the appalling quality of certain bowdlerized texts put out by the publishing houses that retain them...

...Too many oversimplified textbooks in high school have turned their heads softer...

...G. & C. Merriam Co...

...If the students' potential was, indeed, maimed in high school, the attitude of many professors, including those who select texts, is that the damage is irreversible...

...refused to make any deletions in its Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, thereby forgoing all that Texas gold...

...During an "Evening of Forbidden Books" sponsored by PEN and the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Morris warned: "Beware of a new dimension of censorship: censorship inside the publisher's office, hidden censorship that only the authors, editors, and the ultimate control, the sales department, know about...

...Too much television all these years has turned the students' heads soft...

...Extensive use is made of graphics...

...Remarkably, one group that shares complicity for this mounting tide of mediocrity in the schools has gotten off alNat Hentoff writes every month about music and occasionally about First Amendment issues...

...Those who choose the texts and those who publish them place the blame on today's undergraduates, who don't read well and don't want to read much—and who certainly don't want to read books that make their heads ache...

...Furthermore," a senior official of one large textbook operation told me, "we also have to prepare more and more material to help the teacher work with these already oversimplified books...

...Thus, a publisher who wants to play it safe will follow the example of Laidlaw Publishing, a division of Doubleday: "Laidlaw Publishing doesn't even mention the word 'evolution' in its new nationally distributed biology texts," ABC reporter Ron Miller pointed out last summer...

...The Dumbing of America BY NAT HENTOFF Among all the rising indictments of American public education—in books, reports, stump speeches by the President and Presidential candidates, television specials—one phrase has become embedded in the national consciousness like an aching tooth...

...A professor at UCLA mourns, "Students today are a lot less tolerant of difficult books than they were when I started teaching...

...See Lenin having some schnapps at the Finland Station...

...Furthermore, too many youngsters in college now have no business being there...

...Many of the same spineless publishers produce textbooks for the college market as well...

...Whatever the order, they'll fill it...

...Education writers on the staffs of newspapers (few radio and television stations have an education reporter) rarely cover the big dealers in textbooks...

...The publishers can't say they don't know about the law (which, among many other things, might forbid mention of the slave quarters on the George Washington and Thomas Jefferson plantations...

...it's too expensive to print other editions which put back in what was left out for Texas...

...The text is selling about 75,000 copies a year at Harvard and Yale as well as at many community colleges...

...Clearly, Texas can't be blamed for the deterioration of learning at this level...

...And just as in the lower grades, these merchandisers of learning are eager to please the powers that control the marketplace...

...They add their names and prestige to the books printed for secondary school use...

...Some of them are almost on automatic pilot...

...Publishers tailor their textbooks to what they believe will be accepted in Texas, and if they turn out to be right, those are the texts they will sell elsewhere in the country...

...Every effort is made to avoid complex arguments that students either cannot or will not follow...

...Then there is the large Follett Publishing Company, whose Texas representative, William Wood, has said, "It would be very difficult to write off the Texas market...

...But not from publishers...

...Frederick Crews, an English professor at the University of California, is the author of a composition text, The Random House Handbook...

...For instance, the word "evolution"—let alone the teaching of the theory of that name—is in some disrepute in Texas...

...There is also what might be called collusion in letting students sink to their lowest level...

...There has been a real 'dumbing down' of the texts...

...Merriam's president, W.A...

...As he examined the simplifying of college texts in a number of fields, Trombley concluded that books for freshmen and sophomores have generally "declined in difficulty to a level that might have been considered suitable for tenth graders not many years ago...

...the state's textbook budget was $64 million in 1983...

...So the kids in the classrooms get damaged goods...

...Still, the willingness of a firm as respected as Houghton Mifflin to yield to official censorship—something to which it would not submit in its trade nonfiction books and novels—is a disturbing indication of how little respect adults in publishing, like most adults, have for kids...

...What's the rationale...

...As you might imagine, the level of biology instruction in Texas public schools is more than inadequate after all the watering down of "acceptable" biology textbooks in recent years...

...It comes from the National Commission on Excellence in Education, which has declared that much of what is going on in classrooms around the nation is responsible for "a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and as a people...

...Instead of using two-syllable words and a lot of pictures, Crews, in his words, aimed "a little high...

...The attitude of both professors and textbook editors is fatalistic...

...The absence of those offensive words in Texas classrooms is not a significant loss to the children who, if pressed, might admit they have picked them up elsewhere, though without knowledge of the words' etymologies...

...Self-respect seems to be no problem for those professors, experts in their fields, who earn considerable side income as consultants to textbook publishers...

...insufficient funds for education from state legislatures, from Congress, from a President who believes all that's really needed to bring up everybody's spirits is prayer, particularly in the schoolhouse...

...Students are dumber these days: That, at least, is current conventional wisdom among teachers and publishers...

...most without reprimand...

...As Damaris Ames, communications director for Houghton Mifflin, puts it, "Publishers simply reflect the attitudes and demands of the society...

...And you'd see it in Follett books in classrooms in other states...

...In most cases, the reading level of introductory textbooks has been reduced," writes William Trombley...

...In an interview with Paul Mussen, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and coauthor of a widely used introductory text in child development, Trombley noted that Mussen was troubled because his publisher kept after him to "simplify" the book...

...They say they are only producing what college teachers want and insist on...

...I'm concerned," said Mussen, "about the deterioration of standards...

...Because textbook publishers fear controversy more than they fear the loss of their souls, it is not surprising that they have declined comment during the past four years while the following Oregon law has been under challenge from the American Civil Liberties Union...

...Since the law's enactment, the State Board of Education has distributed, every two years, a circular to major textbook publishers around the country quoting the statute and making clear that publishers must agree to adhere to it in any contract with the state of Oregon...

...When subjected to pressure by state textbook commissions and other bodies in the business of "purifying" what children learn, such highly respectable publishers as Harper & Row, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, Macmillan, and Houghton Mifflin compromise the intellectual integrity of their products rather than lose a sale...

...Any day now, a publisher attuned to the market is going to put out a line of history and biology texts with pop-up illustrations...

...But not much use, it would appear, is made of teaching...

...The Texas State Textbook Committee chooses five titles in each subject area, and the 1,200 individual school districts can select one of the five, but no other...

...A persistent exception is William Trombley of the Los Angeles Times...

...Consider what happens in Texas, one of seventeen states where education agencies adopt textbooks for the entire state...

...If that's the case for Texas high school students—betrayed by their own State Textbook Committee—what of the students in other states where those biology textbooks, watered down for Texas, have also been purchased...

...This may well be more insidious and dangerous than the work of all the professional censors put together...

...Concern about being cashiered by the textbook publishers keeps them silent...

...If we couldn't sell a book without Cre-ationism in it, I imagine you'd see it there...

...No textbook shall be used in the schools which speaks slightingly of the founders of the republic or of those who preserved the union or which belittles or undervalues their work...

...But The Random House Handbook is out there, moving right along, and the fact that it has been adopted "at all levels," says Crews, "is a very encouraging sign to me...

...Llewellyn, told the Commissioner of Education, "Our responsibility as lexicographers is not fulfilled by pretending such language does not exist...

...Says Stevie Remington, executive director of the Oregon ACLU, who has led the fight to have the law declared unconstitutional, "We received help from teachers...

...If you have any self-respect...

...salary scales too low to attract smart new teachers or hold smart older ones...

...twenty years ago, they would have been pumping gas or working for the telephone company after receiving a high school diploma...

...With exceptions, of course, college teachers seem to have a diminished sense of responsibility to their students...

...Other composition texts that aim in the opposite direction sell from 200,000 to 400,000 copies a year...

...In 1981, hoping to make [its already bowdlerized high school edition of] The American Heritage Dictionary acceptable for Texas classrooms, Houghton Mifflin offered to drop 'offensive words' from its latest edition...

...About the only persistent exposer of those who publish diluted—and therefore distorted—educational materials is Barbara Parker, the passionate and knowledgeable director of the National Schools and Libraries Project of People for the American Way, the First Amendment support group Norman Lear founded a few years ago...

...Everyone is saying you have to write in baby talk, but that doesn't seem to be the casp...

...That doesn't seem to trouble the textbook people...

...Relatively few teachers and textbook writers insist on bucking the trend...

...Indeed, according to a student at the University of South Alabama, "If a dean had not been overruled, the computer science department here would have switched to a coloring book as its textbook for a sophomore-level programming class...

...There is also no record that any publishers' organization—including the Association of American Publishers, which professes to oppose censorship—has delivered a word of protest...

...Not all textbook and reference publishers have round heels, however...

...The blame for this dismal situation has been widely dispersed—the incompetence of teachers, especially young teachers entering the profession...

...But is any of this the fault of textbook publishers...

...An editor at Prentice-Hall sighs, "Today's student won't use the dictionary...