Case Study: Texas Textbook Adoption...
With the reality of the Texas State Board of Education's revisions to historical curriculum in public school textbooks coming to fruition, it's important to understand how and why textbooks are chosen, both by citizenry and publishers alike. This reason is two-fold: First, it is hoped that by illuminating a long misunderstood and abused process the process might become subject to sufficient criticism to force a discussion on it; second, by helping to foster open, democratic discussions about something that has gone on undisturbed, we can begin to uncover what can be done about it, both now and in the future.
Knowledge as Anglo Cultural Concept...
As has been detailed in articles Messin with Texas: A Now Dangerously Silent Textbook Controversy, Arizona, HB2281 and the Myth of a Public Education system, California's Gay History Bill Seeks to Balance the Books and Betty Ford and the Ongoing Struggle for Gender Equality in School, public education in the United States has never been neutral. Rather, its present cultural and ideological bias comes originally from men such as Columbia Professor David S Muzzey, of Pre-Revolutionary Anglo heritage. He was one of a handful of Anglo-Saxon historians who tasked themselves with writing a national narrative that, according to historians such as Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob, was much more culturally and ideologically diverse at its inception than any such historians decided to include in their accounts.
According to Historian Frances Fitzgerald, Muzzey believed that an American was someone like him; 'Not a mass of people but individuals of English descent, with traditions of independent landed wealth and a genteel culture.' Muzzey believed the burden of Americans such as himself was to "assimilate and mold into citizenship 'them'." He also felt that failure to assimilate 'them' risked "an undigested and indigestible element in our body politic, and a constant menace to our free institutions."