The Answer To Political-Ideological Pressure on Textbook Publishers Is To Bypass Them
Ah, the perennial struggle for control of the integrity of Science vs Texas State Textbook Committee is underway again. You can read about that here if you've missedthe earlier rounds that have been pretty much in rerun for decades.
While there might not be a single solution to the problem of right-wing pressure to distort reality in textbooks, effecting the entire country, one is as easy as can be and it would cost little to nothing.
All of the educators and members of university and college faculties who periodically bemoan this have it in their power to create excellent, modern, hyper-text linked, interactive, etc. alternatives to textbooks that could be made available universally a for free online. They could be made so good, so up to date, so well supported that school districts and teachers would want to use them as an alternative to buying expensive, ideologically slanted, soon antiquated paper textbooks. They could then use their textbook budgets to provide tablets or notebook computers to their students who would then never be able to claim they left their textbook at school. Those could be produced by groups of specialists in their fields for free, what Wikipedia should have been but isn't due to its absurd "open editing" that is guaranteed to be as ideologically slanted as anything the most rabidly right-wing party in the struggle for Texas textbook purchasing would love.
So, instead of listening to the tedious whining on the blogs and in the lefty magazines, it's time for these people to put up and put the same kind of effort into a real solution to the problem that they'll put into whining about it. Make it excellent, easy to use, well supported and updated, BRILLIANTLY EDITED and FREE and you can't lose.
While there might not be a single solution to the problem of right-wing pressure to distort reality in textbooks, effecting the entire country, one is as easy as can be and it would cost little to nothing.
All of the educators and members of university and college faculties who periodically bemoan this have it in their power to create excellent, modern, hyper-text linked, interactive, etc. alternatives to textbooks that could be made available universally a for free online. They could be made so good, so up to date, so well supported that school districts and teachers would want to use them as an alternative to buying expensive, ideologically slanted, soon antiquated paper textbooks. They could then use their textbook budgets to provide tablets or notebook computers to their students who would then never be able to claim they left their textbook at school. Those could be produced by groups of specialists in their fields for free, what Wikipedia should have been but isn't due to its absurd "open editing" that is guaranteed to be as ideologically slanted as anything the most rabidly right-wing party in the struggle for Texas textbook purchasing would love.
So, instead of listening to the tedious whining on the blogs and in the lefty magazines, it's time for these people to put up and put the same kind of effort into a real solution to the problem that they'll put into whining about it. Make it excellent, easy to use, well supported and updated, BRILLIANTLY EDITED and FREE and you can't lose.
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