"Parents and citizens groups regularly call for changes in textbooks reflecting particular political or religious views, and many times, they succeed. One hundred years after the Scopes Monkey Trial, opposing sides are still waging the evolution-creation fight. ([Harvard science professor and evolution expert Stephen Jay] Gould, who often testified on behalf of teaching evolution, wondered why his son’s high school biology textbook invited students to “investigate other theories” when he never saw similar invitations to, for instance, check out levitation as an alternative to the theory of gravity.) In November 2004, CBS News reported a group of parents were suing a school district in Georgia which had added stickers that said "Evolution is a theory, not a fact,” to biology textbooks at the earlier insistence of other parents. The same story noted that the State Board of Education in Texas exerted pressure on publishers to change the wording in their health textbooks to specify that marriage was a lifelong union between a man and woman, an issue of debate in many parts of the country."
Seriously?! Homophobia aside, even if you are simply defining it in a legal sense, marriage is hardly "lifelong." And Mr. Gould's point is spot on: I see no one proposing that we theorize other reasons for Earth's orbit around the sun or Old Faithful's promptness.
But I was particularly pleased to read this paragraph:
"[Textbook editor and writer Tamim] Ansary would like to see states get rid of the textbook adoption process altogether, and let teachers pull together their own classroom resources instead relying on a single text. He envisions teachers supplementing a mini-encyclopedia reference core with related fiction and nonfiction books, board games, software and hands-on materials like maps or models that would make the subject come alive (similar to the way many homeschoolers design their own curricula without textbooks). Ansary believes that letting schools pick and choose the elements of from different, smaller publishers would encourage competition by smaller companies and increase diversity, instead of stifling it."Uhh... yeah! Why are students (and their teachers) in schools expected to all learn from these same, terrible textbooks? Why is pulling information from varied and interesting resources such a revolutionary idea?
And why -- WHY -- do people think that home educators should aspire to using the same resources as the schools? That seems to be a great concern among the detractors I've spoken with: where will I get my textbooks? Or tests? Oh, don't get me started on that one.
My kids have learned history through dress-up, games, stories, and role-playing. I doubt they could tell you what year Caligula was assassinated (though they can Google it, if you really need to know), but they can tell you all about his insanity, as well as what life was like for the average Roman citizen during his tyranny. They've also seen how a simple salt mixture mummifies flesh, how paint becomes part of a wall in the fresco process, and why trebuchets fling farther than catapaults, which fling farther than onagers.
Anyone can look up information these days, and even a young child can look up false information. It takes hands-on learning and interest-based reading to get to the meat of the matter, to really understand the reasons for scientific principles or historical events, and to be able to glean from this knowledge how to move us all forward.
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